Due to political pressures, prior to the 1990s little was known about the nature of human foraging adaptations in the deserts, grasslands, and mountains of north western China during the last glacial period. Even less was known about the transition to agriculture that followed. Now open to foreign visitation, there is now an increasing understanding of the foraging strategies which led both to the development of millet agriculture and to the utilization of the extreme environments of the Tibetan Plateau. This text explores the transition from the foraging societies of the Late Paleolithic to the emergence of settled farming societies and the emergent pastoralism of the middle Neolithic striving to help answer the diverse and numerous questions of this critical transitional period. * Examines the transition from foraging societies of the Late Paleolithic to the emergence of settled farming societies and the emergent pastoralism of the middle Neolithic* Explores explanatory models for the links between climate change and cultural change that may have influenced the development of millet agriculture* Reviews the relationship between climate change and population expansions and contraditions during the late Quaternary

The SAGE Handbook of Environmental Change is an extensive survey of the interdisciplinary science of environmental change, including recent debates on climate change and the full range of other natural and anthropogenic changes affecting the Earth-ocean-atmosphere system in the past, present and future. It examines the historic importance, present status and future prospects of the field over two volumes. With more than 40 chapters, the books situate the defining characteristics and key paradigms within a state-of-the-art review of the field, including its changing nature and diversity of approaches, evidence base, key theoretical arguments, resonances with other disciplines and relationships between theory, research and practice. Opening with a detailed, contextualizing essay by the editors, the work is arranged into six parts: Part One: Approaches to Understanding Environmental Change Part Two: Evidence of Environmental Change and the Geo-ecological Response Part Three: Causes, Mechanisms and Dynamics of Environmental Change Part Four: Key Issues of Human-induced Environmental Changes and Their Impacts Part Five: Patterns, Processes and Impacts of Environmental Change at the Regional Scale Part Six: Responses of People to Environmental Change and Implications for Society Global in its coverage, scientific and theoretical in its approach, the books bring together an international set of respected editors and contributors to provide an exciting, timely addition to the literature on climate change. With the subjects′ interdisciplinary framework, this book will appeal to academics, researchers, postgraduates and practitioners in a variety of disciplines including, geography, geology, ecology, environmental science, archaeology, anthropology, politics and sociology.

This volume provides a narrative of early hominin evolution, linking material aspects of the early archaeological record with social, cognitive and symbolic landscapes.

Innovation and creativity are two of the key characteristics that distinguish cultural transmission from biological transmission. This book explores a number of questions concerning the nature and timing of the origins of human creativity. What were the driving factors in the development of new technologies? What caused the stasis in stone tool technological innovation in the Early Pleistocene? Were there specific regions and episodes of enhanced technological development, or did it occur at a steady pace where ancestral humans lived? The authors are archaeologists who address these questions, armed with data from ancient artefacts such as shell beads used as jewelry, primitive musical instruments, and sophisticated techniques required to fashion certain kinds of stone into tools. Providing 'state of art' discussions that step back from the usual archaeological publications that focus mainly on individual site discoveries, this book presents the full picture on how and why creativity in Middle to Late Pleistocene archeology/anthropology evolved. Gives a full, original and multidisciplinary perspective on how and why creativity evolved in the Middle to Late Pleistocene Enhances our understanding of the big leaps forward in creativity at certain times Assesses the intellectual creativity of Homo erectus, H. neanderthalensis, and H. sapiens via their artefacts

This book provides a comprehensive interdisciplinary overview of human-plant interactions and their social consequences from the hunter-gatherers of the Palaeolithic Era to the 21st century molecular manipulation of crops. It links the latest advances in molecular genetics, climate research and archaeology to give a new perspective on the evolution of agriculture and complex human societies across the world. Even today, our technologically advanced societies still rely on plants for basic food needs, not to mention clothing, shelter, medicines and tools. This special relationship has tied together people and their chosen plants in mutual dependence for well over 50,000 years. Yet despite these millennia of intimate contact, people have only domesticated and cultivated a few dozen of the tens of thousands of potentially available edible plants. This limited domestication process led directly to the evolution of the complex urban-based societies that have dominated much of human development over the past ten millennia. Thanks to the latest genomic studies, we can now begin to explain how, when, and where some of the most important crops came to be domesticated, and the crucial roles of plant genetics, climatic change and social organisation in these processes. Indeed, it was their unique genetic organisations that ultimately determined which plants eventually became crops, rather than any conscious decisions by their human cultivators. The book is aimed at a wide audience ranging from plant specialists such as geneticists, molecular biologists and agronomists to a more general readership of archaeologists, anthropologists, historians and others who wish to explore the complex processes that have shaped the often crucial relationships between plants and human societies over the past hundred millennia.

The Ancient Human Occupation of Britain Project (AHOB) funded by the Leverhulme Trust began in 2001 and brought together researchers from a range of disciplines with the aim of investigating the record of human presence in Britain from the earliest occupation until the end of the last Ice Age, about 12,000 years ago. Study of changes in climate, landscape and biota over the last million years provides the environmental backdrop to understanding human presence and absence together with the development of new technologies. This book brings together the multidisciplinary work of the project. The chapters present the results of new fieldwork and research on old sites from museum collections using an array of new analytical techniques. Features an up-to-date treatment of the record of human presence in the British Isles during the Palaeolithic period (700,000 - 10,000 years before present) Takes multidisciplinary approach that includes archaeology, geochemistry, geochronology, stratigraphy and sedimentology Coincides with the culmination of the AHOB project in 2010, providing a benchmark statement on the record of human occupation in Britain that can be utilized and tested by future research