The Middle and Upper Paleolithic Archeology of the Levant and Beyond

Yoshihiro Nishiaki, who received his Ph.D. from University College London, is a professor of prehistory at the University Museum, The University of Tokyo. His research involves the archaeology of West and Central Asia mainly through technological analyses of flaked stone artifacts. He has directed numerous field investigations in West and Central Asia since 1984, including Paleolithic and Neolithic excavations in Syria, Azerbaijan, Iran, and Uzbekistan. He is currently the director of a large-scale research project, PaleoAsia, to investigate the formation processes of modern human cultures in Asia, a project supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan. He has served on the editorial board or scientific committee of a number of international associations, such as the International Union for Quaternary Research, the International Union of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences, and Association Paléorient. Takeru Akazawa taught prehistoric anthropology as a professor at The University of Tokyo, the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, and Kochi University of Technology and is currently a professor emeritus at the latter two. His major research contributions cover a wide range of subjects in prehistoric anthropology, such as the hunter-gatherers' adaptation in the Japanese archipelago and the Paleolithic human ecology in West Asia. Of the latter, the most notable were the multidisciplinary studies of the behavioral and cognitive characteristics of the Neanderthals. The outcomes of the research, which was based on a series of Neanderthal fossils discovered from his own excavations of the Dederiyeh Cave, Syria, have been published in numerous books and journals in the field of human evolution and prehistory, including the Replacement of Neanderthals and Modern Humans volumes, Springer, of which Prof. Akazawa is a series editor.