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Hominin Cultural and Biological Extinctions


Hominin Cultural and Biological Extinctions

The topic of extinction in human evolution research has often been overlooked. From both a cultural and biological perspective, there are relatively few extinction topics with extended debate or hypotheses that have been subjected to formal analysis. This is a theoretically broad Special Issue, encompassing both new research and review articles covering hominin biological and cultural extinctions during the Plio-Pleistocene. It aims to cast this net widely, such that we would welcome contributions addressing extinction, extirpation, anagenesis, and compositional turnover events, where one or more distinct taxa and/or cultural phenomena are evidenced to end at a given spatiotemporal scale or markedly change into a later recognized phenotype/genotype/form/type. This Special Issue provides a ‘gear-shift’ moment for human evolution research, bringing questions concerning the extinctions of hominin taxa and the end of well-known cultural periods to the fore.

Guest Editors: Alastair Key and John Rowan (Dept. of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, UK)

Submission deadline: 31st March 2026