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Medical imaging applied to archaeological human remains represents a powerful tool for the study of specimens of exceptionally fragile nature. Here, the authors report a tomographic computerized investigation on the naturally mummified human remains from the Takarkori rock shelter (Libyan Sahara), dated to the Middle Pastoral Neolithic (ca. 6100-5600 uncal BP). The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Medical radiological techniques allowed us to discriminate and isolate the tissues preserved thanks to their different electron density, driving us to detailed examinations of features of interest.

With a focus on anatomy and taphonomy, the authors infer on post-depositional phenomena in a way that could not be achieved through traditional approaches.

The investigation of digital data allows to acquire new sets of information with no risk for the original object. This case study is especially important considering that the human remains from Takarkori are currently not available to the scientific community due to political instability in Lybia.

Possible reasons for using kites to kill gazelles are comprehensively reviewed in this article. Even though they are now well inventoried and documented, desert kites are still not well understood, as exemplified by the recurrent controversies about their function and dating. According to the dominant view, kites were hunting structures used to drive and to mass kill large herds of wild ungulates, particularly gazelles. Although kites were intensively used during the Early Bronze Age, some of them could have been built and used before that. Beyond these issues, the cultural and socioeconomic aspects of the kites phenomenon are even less understood, and therefore, we focus on changing reasons for the long-lasting use of kites as hunting devices. We contend that the reasons why they were used during the period of utilization for hunting gazelles changed, in most cases, in response to socioeconomic development. It is hypothesized, for example, that, as a result of urban development, kites may have been increasingly (but not exclusively) used to kill gazelles to trade their products with urban communities and farmers, even though they had other uses as well which are also considered. The main hypothesis presented in this article enables diverse opinions about the types of uses and reasons for utilizing desert kites to be reconciled, including in particular varied reasons given in the literature about why they were used for killing gazelles.

This chapter is about the theories explaining the transition from foraging to farming. It aims to establish which links exist between the traditional theories – based on push/pull models – and the micro-founded approaches developed since the 1980s. More precisely, it asks how the latter may contribute, as the former did, to defining a macro-narrative of the transition to farming.

While they were providing a global narrative of the Neolithic revolution, the push and pull models have been progressively dismissed. Recent research is diverse, but it is all based upon human behaviour or micro-founded. We critically examine three of these approaches which focus either on foraging behaviour, or on the initial domestication of plants and animals, or on the evolution of social institutions related to ownership.

We demonstrate that these recent micro-founded approaches only provide a partial vision of the transition to farming. Despite this limit, they conciliate push and pull explanations in a single framework. Moreover, they confirm a conclusion held by tenants of pull models: the transition to farming is more likely to have occurred in a resource-rich environment such as the one associated with complex hunter-gatherers. Some archaeological evidence from the Levant is provided to support our claim.

This research chapter provides a useful overview of the differing approaches to the behavioural, environmental and economic factors that led to the shift to farming from foraging. Its value lies in the way it presents and evaluates differing positions derived from differing scales of analysis and types of evidence.

We must begin, of course, by understanding the strengths and limitations of our own approach. If we are to make progress, it is necessary to examine carefully the institutionalist position, to view it not just as a battering ram with which to inflict damage on currently prevailing orthodoxies, but to identify the strengths and weaknesses in its current incarnations. In so doing, we must be critical as well as constructive.

A sociology of human rights is a modern challenge, and this study draws on the universalizing codification in the history of human rights documents from ancient societies to the present challenges of modern society. Power contradictions and conflicts are analyzed in the case study of historic inequalities and the modern deprivation of human rights of the People of Indian Origin in their diaspora in the modern world. Insider perspectives are posed to increase awareness and knowledge to the forming of community identity and to challenge others to study these complex social conditions. A public sociology is assumed in this chapter, derived from the author's public speech to further the development of a sociology of human rights, one that will reflect the complexity, universality, and inclusiveness protected by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Established methods and theories may be augmented by challenging their bases and working collaboratively to research contemporary human rights.

This essay provides evidence that the invention of agriculture was not a dramatic technological advance in the history of humankind and that agriculture was quite consistent with nomadic hunting and gathering. The available clues also suggest that exact origins of agriculture do not seem important. Rather, the crucial question is why certain societies dramatically increased their dependency on agriculture for subsistence two to ten millennia ago. Unfortunately, most of the major theories purporting to explain the neolithic revolution – either the origins or the spread of agriculture – are either untestable or inconsistent with the available evidence. What is at stake for economic historians is to rethink the process of the adoption of agriculture using a multi-causal approach.

The paper asks a basic question: Is there any room for more growth on the globalising world that takes into account the budget constraints of ecosystems and the planet's scarce resources? Economists tend to be very complacent about sustainability issues on the planet because they have been a problem throughout human history. Yet technological change has always solved these problems. There is an element of truth to that, but there is probably a greater element of falsehood to it now. The element of truth is that, with sufficient science, we are able to make lots of progress in many areas; but the element of falsehood is that solving the problems of sustainability will become increasingly difficult.