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Comments on a paper by Sue Colledge and colleagues which reviewed archaeobotanical assemblages from aceramic sites in southwestern Asia and southeastern Europe in close connection with C dates and reintroduced archaeobotanical information into the debate about the cultural and demographic processes underlying the spread of agriculture. Results and discussion on weeds; Reduction of weed taxon diversity with the transport of crop packages; Usefulness of multivariate analysis for investigating the temporal and spatial patterning of archaeological data.

The author comments on the study conducted by an anthropologist which evaluates the Middle and Upper Paleolithic archaeological records in Europe. He stresses that though he agrees with the researcher's interpretation of the Middle-to-Upper-Paleolithic transition in Europe, he argues that there are more kinds or levels of symbolic behavior than what was mentioned in the paper and emphasizes that the origins of language are as important to understand as the origins of symbolic culture. Furthermore, he acknowledges the researchers interest in studying the evolution of human culture and have encouraged archaeologists to perform studies in this field to benefit archaeology.

The article presents the author's comment on the impact of the Dorset and Thule cultures of the Canadian Arctic in the Middle and Upper Paleolithic culture transition in Europe. Several factors including rise of population, geographic dispersal, technological innovation, to name a few play a significant role in the Middle and Upper Paleolithic transition. The author also includes information on the social and demographic characteristics of the two cultures.

Theory and empirical data from a variety of disciplines strongly imply that recent human history involves extensive gene-culture coevolution, much of it as a direct result of human agricultural practices. Here we draw on nicheconstruction theory (NCT) and gene-culture coevolutionary theory (GCT) to propose a broad theoretical framework (NCT-GCT) with which archaeologists and anthropologists can explore coevolutionary dynamics. Humans are enormously potent niche constructors, and understanding how niche construction regulates ecosystem dynamics is central to understanding the impact of human populations on their ecological and developmental environments. We use as primary examples the evolution of dairying by Neolithic groups in Europe and Africa and the rise of the "sickle-cell allele" among certain agricultural groups in West Africa and suggest that these examples are broadly representative of much of human recent history. Although the core aspects of these case studies are familiar, we lay out the examples with a specific NCT-GCT focus, which allows us to highlight how archaeology, when coupled with genetic research, can play an important role in better understanding human history. Finally, we suggest that the NCT-GCT perspective is likely to be of widespread general utility because it inherently promotes consideratiwon of the active agency of humans, and other organisms, in modifying their ecological and developmental niches and naturally draws attention to the various forms of feedback that flow from human activities at multiple levels, in multiple populations, and across multiple species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Eurocentric (or rather Western European) outlook on cultural evolution envisioned a sharp demarcation between the phenomena grouped under the title Middle Paleolithic (i.e., archaic) and the phenomena recognized as Upper Paleolithic (i.e., modern). This view became the framework for testing cognitive, social, and economic hypotheses explaining the emergence of modern behavior. After nearly a century of research, it seems that this categorization is not applicable in the Levant despite some broad similarities between the two regions. The Levantine archaeological record provides us with the option to think outside the "European box" with regard to this important phase in human cultural evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the contemporary debate concerning European integration and the ‘problem’ of Third World immigration no less than in developments in anthropology in the past decade, the boundedness of cultures and cultural difference have gained new prominence. Anthropology needs not only to explore how globalization affects the discipline's classical subjects but also to pay more attention to the new ways in which cultural differences and cleavages are conceptualized at its source. In effect, the political right in Europe has in the past decade developed a political rhetoric of exclusion in which Third World immigrants, who proceed in part from its ex-colonies, are construed as posing a threat to the national unity of the ‘host’ countries because they are culturally different. This rhetoric of exclusion has generally been identified as a new form of racism, I argue, instead, that, rather than asserting different endowments of human races, it postulates a propensity in human nature to reject strangers. This assumption underlies a radical opposition between nationals and immigrants as foreigners informed by a reified notion of bounded and distinct, localized national-cultural identity and heritage that is employed to rationalize the call for restrictive immigration policies. Following a systematic comparison of the contrasting conceptual structures of the two doctrines, I conclude that the contemporary cultural fundamentalism of the political right is, with respect to traditional racism, both old and new. It is old in that it draws for its argumentative force on the unresolved contradiction in the modem conception of the nation-state between an organicist and a voluntarist idea of belonging. It is new in that, because racism has become discredited politically, it attributes the alleged incompatibility between different cultures to an incapacity of different cultures to communicate that is inherent in human nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]