The end of the last Ice Age in Britain (c. 11500 BP) created major disruption to the biosphere. Open habitats were succeeded by more wooded landscapes, and changes occurred to the fauna following the abrupt disappearance of typical glacial herd species, such as reindeer and horse (Conneller & Higham 2015). Understanding the impact of these changes on humans and how quickly they were able to adapt may soon become clearer, due to recent discoveries in the Colne Valley on the western edge of Greater London, north of the River Thames. An exceptionally well-preserved open-air site was discovered in 2014 as part of a wider project of archaeological investigation and excavation carried out by Wessex Archaeology (2015), on behalf of CEMEX UK. The site, at Kingsmead Quarry in Horton, is unusual because it has good organic preservation and, in addition to worked flint artefacts, it has yielded groups of articulated horse bone. The extreme rarity of such sites of this period in Britain makes this discovery especially significant and re-emphasises the potential importance of the Colne Valley (Lacaille 1963; Lewis 2011; Morgi et al. 2011).

Burkart et al. conflate the domain-specificity of cognitive processes with the statistical pattern of variance in behavioural measures that partly reflect those processes. General intelligence is a statistical abstraction, not a cognitive trait, and we argue that the former does not warrant inferences about the nature or evolution of the latter.

In the current manuscript, we provide an overview of a research program at the University of Georgia's Center for Family Research designed to expand upon rapid and ongoing developments in the fields of genetics and epigenetics. By placing those developments in the context of translational research on family and community determinants of health and well-being among rural African Americans, we hope to identify novel, modifiable environments and biological processes. In the first section of the article, we review our earlier work on genotypic variation effects on the association between family context and mental and physical health outcomes as well as differential responses to family-based intervention. We then transition to discuss our more recent research on the association of family and community environments with epigenetic processes. In this second section of the article, we begin by briefly reviewing terminology and basic considerations before describing evidence that early environments may influence epigenetic motifs that potentially serve as mediators of long-term effects of early family and community environments on longer term health outcomes. We also provide evidence that genotype may sometimes influence epigenetic outcomes. Finally, we describe our recent efforts to use genome-wide characterization of epigenetic patterns to better understand the biological impact of protective parenting on long-term shifts in inflammatory processes and its potential implications for young adult health. As will be clear, research on epigenetics as a mediator of the connections between family/community processes and a range of health outcomes is still in its infancy, but the potential to develop important insights regarding mechanisms linking modifiable environments to biological processes and long-term health outcomes already is coming into view.

A review of recently published temporal data from Shuidonggou Locality 1 indicates that a 40–43 cal ka date for the inception of Initial Upper Paleolithic (IUP) blade-oriented technologies in East Asia is warranted. Comparison of the dates from Shuidonggou to other Asian IUP dates in Korea, Siberia, and Mongolia supports this assertion, indicating that the initial appearance of the IUP in East Asia generally corresponds in time to the fluorescence of the IUP in eastern Europe and western Asia. This conclusion preliminarily suggests that either a version of the IUP originated independently in East Asia just prior to 40 cal ka, or more likely, that an early, initial diffusion of the IUP into East Asia occurred ∼41 cal ka, a hypothesis consistent with current estimates for the evolution or arrival of modern humans in the region.