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This paper looks at some of the oldest examples of visual art that show evidence of experiences of altered states of consciousness reported by the last persistence hunters. Persistence hunters relied on endurance and stamina to pursue their prey until it collapsed and was easily killed. Persistence hunting has been studied from viewpoints of paleontology and ethnography, this article offers a psychological connection between persistence hunting hypothesis and origins of symbolic culture. The article outlines the persistence hunting hypothesis describing its significance for future studies of the prehistoric cultures and their achievements. It covers persistence hunting and tracking methodology, its possible origins and how it may explain bigger brains in our species. It also describes the connection between endurance running and altered states of consciousness, and its connections with some shamanic practices. The article presents visual evidence, or fragments, that can be interpreted through persistence hunting and tracking, covering recurring topics such as hoof prints, blood trails, vulva imagery, therianthropes and nasal bleeds. Archaeologist David Lewis-Williams has proposed a shamanic explanation for rock art interpretation. This approach was based on ethnographic studies of Southern African hunter-gatherers. He suggested that African rock art often depicts trance hallucinations experienced by the shamans. This article offers an alternative and additional naturalistic explanation of prehistoric imagery based on the hunting methods used by the prehistoric hunter-gatherers. Combining the main outlines (persistence hunting hypothesis and its visual evidence in prehistoric rock art) this article offers a novel approach to rock art research which involves the history and documented experience of persistence hunting and tracking among the early hunter-gatherer societies. Peer reviewed

What connection with institutional religion ought modern political states promote? As they developed their political thinking in the early years of the Weimar Republic, Leo Strauss and Edith Stein came up with opposite answers to this question. While Strauss discerned in Carl Schmitt's maximalist concept of the theopolitical a possible remedy against the flaws of liberal democracy, Stein ascribed democracy's chance of survival to a renewed distinction between the political and religious spheres. Here, Strauss can be viewed as an heir to the ancient and medieval Jewish understanding of the ideal state, whereas Stein appears rooted in the critical legacy of the German Haskalah. At a fundamental level, the contrast between the two thinkers has to do with a difference in their respective philosophical episteme. While Strauss, walking in the footsteps of Heidegger, thinks in terms of Geschichlichkeit ("historiality"), Stein applies a phenomenological method based on the intuition of essences and very much indebted to Adolph Reinach's philosophy of law. That Stein's essentialism succeeds where the 'historial' thinking of the young Strauss fails; that is, in diagnosing the nature of the political threat that would soon engulf European Jewry, is the main conclusion of the present paper. Peer reviewed

Non peer reviewed

Although maritime landscapes afford potentials for connectivity and mobility, they are also greatly impacted by seasonality and available sailing technology. These crucial environmental and technological parameters are often considered in the reconstruction of potential maritime routes, especially for long-distance open water voyaging, but their formal incorporation into quantitative models of maritime mobility remain limited. The present paper considers seasonality, distance, temporality, and sailing technology in exploring potentials for mobility from Crete across the larger east Mediterranean during the LBA. Using GIS functionality, we create a cost-surface model that incorporates seasonal winds with archaeological and technological variables to create a more dynamic and representative seascape for modeling mobility from the site of Kommos, Crete. We also demonstrate how null models that rely only on Euclidean distance as parameters for mobility across land and sea can be improved with more dynamic, cost-surface maritime models. Peer reviewed

This article takes a comparative approach to settler colonial violence in the American Southwest and German Southwest Africa. The Anglo invasion of central Arizona in 1864 and the German conflict against the Herero in 1904 highlights the nature of frontier violence and identifies similarities and differences across two points in space and time that have seldom been compared by historians. Those writing of the US-Apache conflicts have failed to look to colonial theaters around the world, their transnational attention focusing instead on the borderlands of United States, Mexico, and independent Indians. Similarly, research on the violence in GSWA has not engaged systematically with international parallels and has instead focused on identifying possible links between GSWA and the Nazis and the Holocaust. This article seeks to address these shortcomings by analysing the comparative strands of settler colonial violence.

A new dispute about the ownership of Karelian laments emerged in Finland in 2021. The severely endangered Karelian language is the closest relative of Finnish. Karelian laments were brought into new Finnish contexts during the late twentieth century by Finnish individuals with Karelian roots, with an aim of making the Karelian lament tradition usable also for people not of Karelian descent. Recently, Karelian activists in Finland have strongly criticized the Finnish uses of laments. This relates to wider discussions about minority rights and the status of the Karelian language in Finland. Using social and traditional media material, panel discussions and interviews, we analyse this dispute and contextualize it in relation to the historical folk culture, the Karelian minority and uses of laments in contemporary Finland. The setting is complicated by the assimilation of Karelian speakers, the diversity and the closeness of Karelian and Finnish identities, and the complex intersections of national, ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic factors. Our approach is informed by the recent scholarly discussions about the ownership and appropriation of intangible culture. At the heart of the dispute, we see varying interpretations of what the laments actually are, and how they relate to languages, ethnic identities, communities, modernization and religion. Peer reviewed

Paleo-proxy data indicate that a “Green Sahara” thrived in northern Africa during the early- to mid-Holocene (MH; 11 000 to 5000 years before present), characterized by more vegetation cover and reduced dust emissions. Utilizing a state-of-the-art atmospheric chemical transport model, TM5-MP, we assessed the changes in biogenic volatile organic compound (BVOC) emissions, dust emissions and secondary organic aerosol (SOA) concentrations in northern Africa during this period relative to the pre-industrial (PI) period. Our simulations show that dust emissions reduced from 280.6 Tg a−1 in the PI to 26.8 Tg a−1 in the MH, agreeing with indications from eight marine sediment records in the Atlantic Ocean. The northward expansion in northern Africa resulted in an increase in annual emissions of isoprene and monoterpenes during the MH, around 4.3 and 3.5 times higher than that in the PI period, respectively, causing a 1.9-times increase in the SOA surface concentration. Concurrently, enhanced BVOC emissions consumed more hydroxyl radical (OH), resulting in less sulfate formation. This effect counteracted the enhanced SOA surface concentration, altogether leading to a 17 % increase in the cloud condensation nuclei at 0.2 % super saturation over northern Africa. Our simulations provide consistent emission datasets of BVOCs, dust and the SOA formation aligned with the northward shift of vegetation during the “Green Sahara” period, which could serve as a benchmark for MH aerosol input in future Earth system model simulation experiments. Peer reviewed

Earlier research has analyzed how chance influences strategic choices, yet it has largely ignored the processes that chance events generate. We address this issue by analyzing how chance events and political dynamics co-produce strategic change. We study the history of the Nokia Corporation between 1986 and 2015, focusing on the event structures that led to the divestment of core businesses on two separate occasions. Our findings show how chance events and resulting political dynamics generate periods of collective indeterminacy where multiple, competing strategic scenarios become apparent. These emerge either directly from chance events or indirectly from political dynamics as coalitions translate chance events into their preferred scenarios. The search for a new strategic direction then ensues through the emergence and elimination of alternative scenarios until an acceptable scenario is converged upon, ending the period of collective indeterminacy. Peer reviewed