The Peking Man skeletal materials, excavated in China in the 1920s and 1930s, disappeared in December 1941. The assumption that the fossils were acquired by the U.S. military has emerged as the core idea of what we call the “Standard Scenario.” We challenge this scenario by 1) highlighting the factual and chronological inconsistencies in the accounts of the loss of the fossils; 2) critiquing the casual and uncritical acceptance of personal reports lacking independent verification; 3) emphasizing the absence in official archives of supposed documents used to support the Standard Scenario; and, 4) reanalyzing a 1972 photograph used by some investigators to associate the fossils with the U.S. Marines. Our detailed forensic analysis strongly suggests the 1972 photograph is a deception. In addition, we present 5) a previously unknown document from U.S. State Department archives that indicates it is very unlikely that the fossils were delivered to American hands. We propose that there is no evidence the U.S. ever obtained the fossils and that any future investigations must be based on research into actual documents relevant to their loss. Our approach should invite mindful consideration of alternatives to the Standard Scenario that have been thus far ignored.

Here we describe the methodology we used to digitize an excavation site of a very ancient fossil hominid in South Africa, which has been recently dated using cosmogenic techniques. We detail the practical aspects of acquiring 3D views with a laser range scanner and the post-processing computer graphics pipeline required to obtain an accurate 3D representation.

In the course of the evolution of the genus Homo, the most profound developments in life history parameters seem to have occurred in the Lower Pleistocene.Yet Acheulian industries are widely seen as having remained essentially unchanged for some 1.3 million years or more.In reality, however, although the Acheulian did not develop in a cumulative or directional manner over its long history, it nevertheless displayed considerable levels of typological and technological diversity and variability at continental, regional, and local levels.It is at the local level that this variability is at its greatest, with prepared core technologies regarded as characteristic of the succeeding Middle Paleolithic and Middle Stone Age appearing sporadically and ephemerally in the Acheulian.It is our contention that this pattern of local, short term variability combined with global long term stasis cannot be accounted for by models asserting that the hominin makers of the Acheulian lacked the cognitive capabilities of their evolutionary successors.Instead, we argue that Acheulian hominins were cognitively capable of innovative technical behavior and often displayed it; but that, despite structural life history parameters that approached those of living Homo sapiens, relatively short childhood, juvenile, and adolescence phases, combined with small local group size, constrained the social and developmental scope for innovation.Furthermore, we argue that metapopulation-level social, demographic, and ecological dynamics in the Acheulian, relating to group size, foraging ranges, and levels of individual migration, served to limit the lifespan of local groups and thereby reduced the likelihood of innovative behaviors disseminating through social networks and becoming fixed in cultural repertoires before the originator population became extinct.We explore the idea that the transition from the Acheulian to the ensuing Middle Paleolithic and Middle Stone Age was therefore driven not by evolutionary developments in hominin cognitive capacities, but by changes in life history and metapopulation factors.

New excavations at Contrebandiers Cave, Morocco, began in 2007 and continued through 2010. This site, origi- nally excavated by Roche in the 1950s, contained deposits with Aterian, Iberomaurusian, and Neolithic materials, although the latter were completely removed during Roche's excavations. This report presents an overview of the recent excavations, the stratigraphic sequence of the site, absolute dates based on OSL, TL, and ESR, and detailed data on the lithic (Iberomaurusian, Aterian, and Mousterian) and faunal assemblages, the latter of which includes large mammals, microvertebrates, and marine shells.

Numerous Paleolithic radiocarbon databases exist, but their geographic and temporal scopes are diverse and their availability variable. With this paper we make available to the scientific community a georeferenced database of radiocarbon ages for the late Middle Paleolithic, Upper Paleolithic, and initial Holocene in Europe. The PACEA radiocarbon database consists of conventional and AMS 14 C age determinations from archaeological sites in Europe that fall within Marine Isotope Stages (MIS) 3-1. In all, we have assembled 6,019 radiocarbon ages (conventional=3,820, AMS=2,176, unspecified=23) from a total of 1,208 sites, along with comprehensive contextual information on the dated samples.