A recent study from Central Europe has changed our perception of the cat's domestication history. The authors discuss how this has led to the development of an interdisciplinary project combining palaeogenetics, zooarchaeology and radiocarbon dating, with the aim of providing insight into the domestic cat's expansion beyond the Mediterranean.

The discovery of previously unknown chocolate flint outcrops in the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland (only the second known area after that in the Holy Cross Mountains) has undermined our seemingly solid knowledge of the prehistoric economy, which is based on the distribution pattern of this important raw material. The authors present new interdisciplinary research focused on the prehistoric mining of chocolate flint in the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland, the distribution of chocolate flint artefacts within the Upland and beyond, and methods to distinguish this material from the Holy Cross Mountains chocolate flint.

This project aims to reconstruct the settlement patterns and palaeoenvironment of the Sąspów Valley in the Polish Jura by combining unpublished archaeological fieldwork with results of recent excavations at 13 cave sites.

Intensive research on the Mesolithic of western Central Asia began in the mid twentieth century, when the discovery of key sites allowed for the formulation of the main regional cultural-chronological schemes (Figure 1).