James Blinkhorn

Rethinking the dispersal of Homo sapiens out of Africa.

Current fossil, genetic, and archeological data indicate that Homo sapiens originated in Africa in the late Middle Pleistocene. By the end of the Late Pleistocene, our species was distributed across every continent except Antarctica, setting the foundations for the subsequent demographic and cultural changes of the Holocene. The intervening processes remain intensely debated and a key theme in hominin evolutionary studies. We review archeological, fossil, environmental, and genetic data to evaluate the current state of knowledge on the dispersal of Homo sapiens out of Africa. The emerging picture of the dispersal process suggests dynamic behavioral variability, complex interactions between populations, and an intricate genetic and cultural legacy. This evolutionary and historical complexity challenges simple narratives and suggests that hybrid models and the testing of explicit hypotheses are required to understand the expansion of Homo sapiens into Eurasia.

New rock art discoveries in the Kurnool District, Andhra Pradesh, India

The authors have surveyed the little known paintings of the Kurnool area in central south India, bringing to light the varied work of artists active from the Palaeolithic to the present day. By classifying the images and observing their local superposition and global parallels, they present us with an evolving trend - from the realistic drawings of large deer by hunter-gatherers, through the symbolic humans of the Iron Age to the hand-prints of more recent pilgrims and garish life-size modern scarecrows. Here are the foundations for one of the worlds longest sequences of rock art.

78,000-year-old record of Middle and Later stone age innovation in an East African tropical forest

The Middle to Later Stone Age transition in Africa has been debated as a significant shift in human technological, cultural, and cognitive evolution. However, the majority of research on this transition is currently focused on southern Africa due to a lack of long-term, stratified sites across much of the African continent. Here, we report a 78,000-year-long archeological record from Panga ya Saidi, a cave in the humid coastal forest of Kenya. Following a shift in toolkits ~67,000 years ago, novel symbolic and technological behaviors assemble in a non-unilinear manner. Against a backdrop of a persistent tropical forest-grassland ecotone, localized innovations better characterize the Late Pleistocene of this part of East Africa than alternative emphases on dramatic revolutions or migrations.Most of the archaeological record of the Middle to Later Stone Age transition comes from southern Africa. Here, Shipton et al. describe the new site Panga ya Saidi on the coast of Kenya that covers the last 78,000 years and shows gradual cultural and technological change in the Late Pleistocene.

Correction: Acheulean technology and landscape use at Dawadmi, central Arabia

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0200497.].

Publisher Correction: 78,000-year-old record of Middle and Later Stone Age innovation in an East African tropical forest

The originally published version of this Article contained an error in Fig. 3, whereby an additional unrelated graph was overlaid on top of the magnetic susceptibility plot. Furthermore, the Article title contained an error in the capitalisation of ‘Stone Age’. Both of these errors have now been corrected in both the PDF and HTML versions of the Article.