Long description:

Updating Neanderthals: Understanding Behavioral Complexity in the Late Middle Paleolithic provides comprehensive knowledge on Neanderthals who lived throughout the European and Asian continents. The book synthesizes historical information about the study of Middle Paleolithic populations and presents current debates about their genetics, subsistence, technology, social and cognitive behaviors. It focuses on the last phase of Neanderthal settlements and presents the main patterns of modern humans across Europe. Written by international experts on the Middle Paleolithic who have conducted innovative studies in the last three decades, this book explores the implications of interactions between different human species, including Neanderthals, Denisovans and Sapiens.

In addition, the book discusses the diversity and variability of human adaptations and behaviors in the changing climate and environment of the Late Pleistocene, and the relationship between these behaviors, demography and cognitive capabilities.

Table of Contents:

1. Updating Neanderthals: taking stock of more than 160 years of studies
2. The climatic and environmental context of the Late Pleistocene
3. Biotic interactions in the Middle and Late Palaeolithic
4. Different species on the horizon: Denisovan hominins
5. Neanderthal: anatomy, genes, and evolution
6. Neanderthal brain
7. Neanderthal subsistence: selective or opportunistic hunters?
8. Small animal use by Neanderthals
9. The use of plants by Neanderthals
10. Neanderthal technological variability: a wide-range geographical perspective in the Final Middle Palaeolithic
11. The organisation of living spaces in Neanderthal campsites
12. Fire among Neanderthals
13. "Art": Neanderthal symbolic graphic behaviour
14. Spiritual and symbolic activities of Neanderthals
15. Beyond European boundaries: Neanderthals in the Armenian Highlands and the Caucasus
16. Methodological advances in ancient Paleolithic studies
17. The arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe