Archaeologica.org

H-G's typically deplete an area of its easily accessible resources fairly quickly. Once it becomes too much effort to find more fruit/nuts/roots/edible stuff they move on. Archeologists in the sixties & seventies did extensive caloric studies -- calories spent gathering versus caloric return -- ...

Exactly the prevailing wisdom -- HG's aren't supposed to use pottery b/c it's heavy & fragile. But it keeps turning up pre-agriculture in China with really early dates. Weird.

Paleos are thought to be your classic hunter gatherers -- mobile lifestyle. With Neolithic you get farming and sedentism. With sedentism you get parasites and other diseases in much higher numbers -- larger groups can keep a virus going, and you have problems with sanitation, water-borne diseases, e...

I posted both articles because they are quite different. Fired clay appears to have been used to create symbolic objects, such as figurines, long before it was used to create utilitarian objects such as pots or bowls. That doesn't necessarily mean people weren't using other materials for storing or ...

Lascaux, Altamira and....Denmark Street? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/enviro ... e-art.html

Availability of concentrated aquatic resources has been linked to increased sedentism in various parts of the world -- Pacific Northwest, African lake cultures, Japan and the Amazon. Very frequently, increased sedentism is linked with hierarchical social structure and greater societal complexity -- ...