ABSTRACT
In a four-stage account, the 15,000-year archaeological sequence of earlier chapters is seen to unfold as a pivotal episode in the long term of human cultural evolution. What we witness in the archaeology of the Epipalaeolithic and Neolithic is the transformation of the mobile forager cultural niche into a new and culturally powerful form of autonomous, permanently co-resident communities that are networked within super-communities of cultural sharing and social and material exchange. Across our period, we can see how the ENT represented a marked acceleration to the scale and tempo of cultural evolution. Thus, the ENT was a pivotal moment that leads out of the long, slow Palaeolithic and sets the pace for the rest of human history.
