Introduction

The time is ripe to address the issue of ecological novelty in the archaeological record from a multispecies perspective. Pivotal research topics in archaeology have long simplified ecological novelty—or at least centered it on the human—by framing that novelty as one of many “major transitions” emphasizing the uniqueness of our species rather than viewing novelty as a collective shift shared amongst multiple species and their habitats. For example, a focus on the origins of art, language, and culture, spread out over tens of thousands of years, are often bundled together as the “human revolution”, a phrase still popular in paleoanthropology today. Childe’s (1936) “Neolithic Revolution” and “Urban Revolution” in Old World archaeology still loom large, implicitly if not explicitly, as major research foci, as if there is something essential to understanding ourselves emergent in what are regarded as major periods of transition.