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Straight-tusked elephants (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) were the largest terrestrial mammals of the Pleistocene, present in Eurasian landscapes between 800,000 and 100,000 years ago. The occasional co-occurrence of their skeletal remains with stone tools has generated rich speculation about the nature of interactions between these elephants and Pleistocene humans: Did hominins scavenge on elephants that died a natural death or maybe even hunt some individuals? Our archaeozoological study of the largest P. antiquus assemblage known, excavated from 125,000-year-old lake deposits in Germany, shows that hunting of elephants weighing up to 13 metric tons was part of the cultural repertoire of Last Interglacial Neanderthals there, over >2000 years, many dozens of generations. The intensity and nutritional yields of these well-documented butchering activities, combined with previously reported data from this Neumark-Nord site complex, suggest that Neanderthals were less mobile and operated within social units substantially larger than commonly envisaged.

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Little is known about the antiquity, nature, and scale of Pleistocene hunter-gatherer impact on their ecosystems, despite the importance for studies of conservation and human evolution. Such impact is likely to be limited, mainly because of low population densities, and challenging to detect and interpret in terms of cause-effect dynamics. We present high-resolution paleoenvironmental and archaeological data from the Last Interglacial locality of Neumark-Nord (Germany). Among the factors that shaped vegetation structure and succession in this lake landscape, we identify a distinct ecological footprint of hominin activities, including fire use. We compare these data with evidence from archaeological and baseline sites from the same region. At Neumark-Nord, notably open vegetation coincides with a virtually continuous c. 2000-year-long hominin presence, and the comparative data strongly suggest that hominins were a contributing factor. With an age of c. 125,000 years, Neumark-Nord provides an early example of a hominin role in vegetation transformation.

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Control of fire is one of the most important technological innovations within the evolution of humankind. The archaeological signal of fire use becomes very visible from around 400,000 y ago onward. Interestingly, this occurs at a geologically similar time over major parts of the Old World, in Africa, as well as in western Eurasia, and in different subpopulations of the wider hominin metapopulation. We interpret this spatiotemporal pattern as the result of cultural diffusion, and as representing the earliest clear-cut case of widespread cultural change resulting from diffusion in human evolution. This fire-use pattern is followed slightly later by a similar spatiotemporal distribution of Levallois technology, at the beginning of the African Middle Stone Age and the western Eurasian Middle Paleolithic. These archaeological data, as well as studies of ancient genomes, lead us to hypothesize that at the latest by 400,000 y ago, hominin subpopulations encountered one another often enough and were sufficiently tolerant toward one another to transmit ideas and techniques over large regions within relatively short time periods. Furthermore, it is likely that the large-scale social networks necessary to transmit complicated skills were also in place. Most importantly, this suggests a form of cultural behavior significantly more similar to that of extant Homo sapiens than to our great ape relatives.

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Humans today live in a wide range of environments from the iciest to the hottest, thanks to diverse cultural solutions that buffer temperature extremes. The prehistory of this relationship between human distribution, cultural solutions and temperature conditions may help us to understand the evolution of human biological adaptations to cold temperature. Fire has long been seen as an important factor in human evolution and range expansion, particularly into temperate latitudes. Nevertheless, the earliest evidence for hominin presence in Eurasia, and middle latitudes in northern Europe, substantially predates convincing evidence for fire use in these regions. This review outlines the current state of knowledge of the chronology of hominin dispersal into temperate latitudes, from the earliest occupants to our own species, and the archeological evidence for fire use. Given continuing disagreement about this chronology and limitations to the archeological evidence, new, complementary approaches are worthwhile and would benefit from information from studies of current human temperature regulation.

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Studies of the defence capacity of ancient hominins against toxic substances may contribute importantly to the reconstruction of their niche, including their diets and use of fire. Fire usage implies frequent exposure to hazardous compounds from smoke and heated food, known to affect general health and fertility, probably resulting in genetic selection for improved detoxification. To investigate whether such genetic selection occurred, we investigated the alleles in Neanderthals, Denisovans and modern humans at gene polymorphisms well-known to be relevant from modern human epidemiological studies of habitual tobacco smoke exposure and mechanistic evidence. We compared these with the alleles in chimpanzees and gorillas. Neanderthal and Denisovan hominins predominantly possess gene variants conferring increased resistance to these toxic compounds. Surprisingly, we observed the same in chimpanzees and gorillas, implying that less efficient variants are derived and mainly evolved in modern humans. Less efficient variants are observable from the first early Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers onwards. While not clarifying the deep history of fire use, our results highlight the long-term stability of the genes under consideration despite major changes in the hominin dietary niche. Specifically for detoxification gene variants characterised as deleterious by epidemiological studies, our results confirm the predominantly recent appearance reported for deleterious human gene variants, suggesting substantial impact of recent human population history, including pre-Holocene expansions.

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We use climatic and satellite remote sensing data to characterize environmental seasonality in the geographical ranges of extant non-human primates in order to assess the effect of relative brain size on tolerance of more seasonal habitats. Demonstration of such an effect in living non-human primates could provide a comparative framework for modeling hominin dispersals and geographical range dynamics in the Pliocene and Pleistocene. Our analyses found no such effect: there are neither positive nor negative correlations between relative brain size and either geographical range size or the average and range of values for environmental seasonality, whether analysed at the level of all primates, or within parvorders (strepsirrhine, catarrhine, platyrrhine). Independent analyses by other researchers comparing feeding behaviour and ecology at individual primate study sites demonstrate that in seasonal environments, the year-round metabolic costs of maintaining a relatively large brain are met by adaptive behavioural/dietary strategies. However, consistent with our own results, those comparative studies found that there was no overall association, whether positive or negative, between 'raw' environmental seasonality and primate relative brain size. We must therefore look elsewhere for a comparative model of hominin geographical range dynamics in the Pleistocene.

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In utero exposure to environmental carcinogens, including the ubiquitous pollutant benzene, may cause DNA damage in the fetus, leading to an increased risk for the development of childhood cancer. Benzene metabolite-induced DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) may undergo erroneous repair, leading to chromosomal aberrations including chromosomal inversions and translocations. In this study, fetal murine hematopoietic cells from pZK1 transgenic mice were exposed to p-benzoquinone (BQ), a toxic metabolite of benzene, and assessed for DNA recombination, DNA damage including DNA DSBs as measured by γ-H2A.X foci and oxidative DNA damage, and reactive oxygen species (ROS) production. The pZK1 transgenic mouse model contains a DNA construct allowing for the detection of intrachromosomal recombination events. Using this model, a significant increase in recombination was observed following exposure to BQ (25 and 50µM) at various time points. Additionally, increased γ-H2A.X foci were observed following exposure to 25µM BQ for 30 min, 45 min, and 1 h, whereas this exposure did not significantly increase oxidative DNA damage. Pretreatment with 400 U/ml polyethylene glycol-conjugated-catalase attenuated increases in DNA recombination as compared with treatment with BQ alone. An increase in ROS production (30 min and 1 h), as measured by dichlorodihydrofluorescein diacetate fluorescence, was also observed following exposure to 25µM BQ. These studies indicate that BQ is able to induce DNA damage and recombination in fetal liver cells and that ROS may be important in the mechanism of toxicity.

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This paper is a cross-cultural examination of the development of hunting skills and the implications for the debate on the role of learning in the evolution of human life history patterns. While life history theory has proven to be a powerful tool for understanding the evolution of the human life course, other schools, such as cultural transmission and social learning theory, also provide theoretical insights. These disparate theories are reviewed, and alternative and exclusive predictions are identified. This study of cross-cultural regularities in how children learn hunting skills, based on the ethnographic literature on traditional hunters, complements existing empirical work and highlights future areas for investigation.