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In recent years, the notion of landscape learning has been the object of increasing attention when discussing the neolithization of Europe. The landscape learning model stresses the necessity of gathering environmental information about a previously unfamiliar region. Therefore, it is particularly relevant in cases where the beginning of a farming economy is better explained in relation to the movements of peoples (colonization), rather than to the adoption of crops and livestock by pre-existing hunters and gatherers (acculturation). Unlike other Iberian regions, where the adoption of agriculture runs parallel to that of animal husbandry, the available data on the neolithization process of the Sierra de Gredos mountain range seem to suggest that raising livestock may have preceded plant cultivation. Based on an interdisciplinary and multi-proxy approach, this paper explores the idea that the adoption of a food-producing economy in the Amblés Valley (Ávila, Central Iberia) may have been connected with pastoralism. In this context, landscape learning provides a model for analyzing how Early Neolithic herders in their seasonal movements were capable of wayfinding by memorizing spatial features that functioned as visual landmarks.

The Late Upper Palaeolithic Hamburgian tradition reflects the earliest known human presence in northern Europe after the Last Glacial Maximum. We report here on the open-air site of Jels 3 (Denmark) and its associated stone tool assemblage, which can be unambiguously attributed to this period. Along with only a handful of other sites, Jels 3 represents the northernmost limits of human expansion in Europe at this time. We conduct a technological analysis of the lithic material from Jels 3 and other relevant sites to shed new light on the behavioral processes that likely underwrote this expansion. Given that sites dating to this initial dispersal remain few, are restricted to certain geographic regions, and represent an overall lack of a well-developed settlement hierarchy, we suggest that this dispersal process is most commensurable with the earlier stages of a leap-frogging colonization targeting specific landscape elements and that it was quite possibly very short-lived.