This volume explores new approaches to the remarkably detailed information that archaeologists have for the study of our earliest ancestors. Previous investigations of human evolution in the Paleolithic period have conventionally been from an ecological and behavioral point of view. The emphasis has been on how our early ancestors made a living, decided what to eat, adapted through their technology to the conditions of existence and reacted to changing ice age climates. The Individual Hominid in Context takes a different approach.

Rather than explaining the archaeology of stones and bones as the product of group decisions, the contributors investigate how individual action created social life. This challenge to the accepted standpoint of the Paleolithic brings new models and theories into the period; innovations that are matched by the resolution of the data that preserve individual action among the artifacts. The book brings together examples from recent excavations at Boxgrove, Schoningen and Blombos Cave, and the analyses of findings from Middle and Early Upper Pleistocene excavations in Europe, Africa and Asia. The results will revolutionize the Paleolithic as archaeologists search for the lived lives among the empty spaces that remain.