The Palaeolithic of Europe: A Demographic and Social Prehistory was funded by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship (ECF-2016-128) (2016-2019) and a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship scheme from the Wenner-Gren Foundation (2019-2020) both held at the UCL Institute of Archaeology.

The project monograph Palaeolithic Europe: A Demographic and Social Prehistory is now published with Cambridge University Press as part of their World Archaeology Series.

This book presents a new synthesis of the archaeological, palaeoanthropological, and palaeogenetic records of the European Palaeolithic, adopting a unique demographic perspective on these first two-million years of European prehistory. Unlike prevailing narratives of demographic stasis, it emphasises the dynamism of Palaeolithic populations of both our evolutionary ancestors and members of our own species across four demographic stages, within a context of substantial Pleistocene climatic changes. Integrating evolutionary theory with a socially oriented approach to the Palaeolithic, this volume bridges biological and cultural factors, with a focus on women and children as the drivers of population change. This volume shows how, within the physiological constraints on fertility and mortality, social relationships provide the key to enduring demographic success. Through its demographic focus, this book combines a ‘big picture’ perspective on human evolution with careful analysis of the day-to-day realities of European Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer communities—their families, their children, and how they lived and died.