Family treatment of child anxiety: outcomes, limitations and future directions

Anxiety of childhood is a common and serious condition. The past decade has seen an increase in treatment-focussed research, with recent trials tending to give greater attention to parents in the treatment process. This review examines the efficacy of family-based cognitive behaviour therapy and attempts to delineate some of the factors that might have an impact on its efficacy. The choice and timing of outcome measure, age and gender of the child, level of parental anxiety, severity and type of child anxiety and treatment format and content are scrutinised. The main conclusions are necessarily tentative, but it seems likely that Family Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (FCBT) is superior to no treatment, and, for some outcome measures, also superior to Child Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CCBT). Where FCBT is successful, the results are consistently maintained at follow-up. It appears that where a parent is anxious, and this is not addressed, outcomes are less good. However, for children of anxious parents, FCBT is probably more effective than CCBT. What is most clear is that large, well-designed studies, examining these factors alone and in combination, are now needed

Fires at Neumark-Nord 2, Germany: An analysis of fire proxies from a Last Interglacial Middle Palaeolithic basin site

Few sites with evidence for fire use are known from the Last Interglacial in Europe. Hearth features are rarely preserved, probably as a result of post-depositional processes. The small postglacial basins (<300 m in diameter) that dominate the sedimentary context of the Eemian record in Europe are high-resolution environmental archives often containing charcoal particles. This case study presents the macroscopic charcoal record of the Neumark-Nord 2 basin, Germany, and the correlation of this record with the distinct find levels of the basin margin that also contain thermally altered archaeological material. Increased charcoal quantities are shown to correspond to phases of hominin presence-a pattern that fits best with recurrent anthropogenic fires within the watershed. This research shows the potential of small basin localities in the reconstruction of local fire histories, where clear archaeological features like hearths are missing

Rethinking use-wear analysis and experimentation as applied to the study of past hominin tool use

In prehistoric human populations, technologies played a fundamental role in the acquisition of different resources and are represented in the main daily living activities, such as with bone, wooden, and stone-tipped spears for hunting, and chipped-stone tools for butchering. Considering that paleoanthropologists and archeologists are focused on the study of different processes involved in the evolution of human behavior, investigating how hominins acted in the past through the study of evidence on archeological artifacts is crucial. Thus, investigat ing tool use is of major importance for a comprehensive understanding of all processes that characterize human choices of raw materials, techniques, and tool types. Many functional assumptions of tool use have been based on tool design and morphology according to archeologists’ interpretations and ethnographic observations. Such assumptions are used as baselines when inferring human behavior and have driven an improvement in the methods and techniques employed in functional studies over the past few decades. Here, while arguing that use-wear analysis is a key discipline to assess past hominin tool use and to interpret the organization and variability of artifact types in the archeological record, we aim to review and discuss the current state-of-the-art methods, protocols, and their limitations. In doing so, our discussion focuses on three main topics: (1) the need for fundamental improvements by adopting established methods and techniques from similar research fields, (2) the need to implement and combine different levels of experimentation, and (3) the crucial need to establish standards and protocols in order to improve data quality, standard ization, repeatability, and reproducibility. By adopting this perspective, we believe that studies will increase the reliability and applicability of use-wear methods on tool function. The need for a holistic approach that combines not only use-wear traces but also tool technology, design, curation, durability, and efficiency is also debated and revised. Such a revision is a crucial step if archeologists want to build major inferences on human decision making behavior and biocultural evolution processes.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Subsistence strategies throughout the African Middle Pleistocene: Faunal evidence for behavioral change and continuity across the Earlier to Middle Stone Age transition

The African Middle Pleistocene (781–126 ka) is a key period for human evolution, witnessing both the origin of the modern human lineage and the lithic turnover from Earlier Stone Age (ESA) Acheulean bifacial tools to Middle Stone Age (MSA) prepared core and point technologies. This ESA/MSA transition is interpreted as representing changing landscape use with greater foraging distances and more active hunting strategies. So far, these behavioral inferences are mainly based on the extensive stone tool record, with only a minor role for site-based and regional faunal studies. To provide additional insights into these behavioral changes, this paper details a pan-African metastudy of 63 Middle Pleistocene faunal assemblages from 40 sites. A hierarchical classification system identified 26 well-contextualized assemblages with quantitative paleontological and/or zooarcheological data available for detailed comparative analyses and generalized linear mixed modeling. Modeling of ungulate body size classes structured around three dimensions (context, antiquity and technology) illustrates no one-to-one correlation between changes in lithic technology (Acheulean vs. MSA) and changes in prey representation. All assessed faunal assemblages are dominated by medium-sized bovids, and variations between smaller and larger body size classes are linked to site context (cave vs. open-air), with an increase in cave sites during the Middle Pleistocene. Current data do not signal a broadening of the hominin dietary niche during the Middle Pleistocene; no meaningful variation was visible in the exploitation of smaller-sized bovids or dangerous game, with coastal resources exploited when available. Proportions of anthropogenic bone surface modifications, and hence carcass processing intensity, do increase over time although more zooarcheological data is crucial before making behavioral inferences. Overall, this paper illustrates the potential of broad scale comparative faunal analyses to provide additional insights into processes of human behavioral evolution and the mechanisms underlying patterns of technological, chronological and contextual change

Reassessing Hominin Skills at an Early Middle Pleistocene Hippo Butchery Site: Gombore II-2 (Melka Kunture, Upper Awash valley, Ethiopia)

Single-carcass sites of Lower and Middle Pleistocene age have attracted much attention since they were first recorded. They have been the focus both of science and of museum displays, with reconstructions of “hominins-feasting-on-a-carcass” purposefully illustrating a major step in human evolution. Here we report the Acheulean site Gombore II-2 in the upper Awash Valley of Ethiopia, dating to 0.7 Myr. In the 1970s, due to the presence of hippo remains, the site was published as a single-carcass butchering site. New excavations revealed an ichnosurface displaying animal and human footprints associated with bones and lithics. Subsequent studies of lithic and faunal remains of recent and past excavations as well as archive studies show that Gombore II-2 represents one of the earliest sites with hominin-hippo interaction. The hippo remains belong to a minimum of three carcasses, at least one of them butchered by hominins and subsequently ravaged by hyenas. However, instead of single carcasses exploited on the spot, evidence suggests the existence of a living floor where butchering episodes were performed through time, possibly transporting portions from scavenging sites at a distance. Gombore II-2 thus provides unique insight into planning capacities and control over the environment probably by early representatives of Homo heidelbergensis

Identifying Heated Rocks Through Feldspar Luminescence Analysis (pIRIR (290) ) and a Critical Evaluation of Macroscopic Assessment

Throughout (pre)history, non-flint rocks have been used to structure fireplaces, to retain heat, to boil liquids, and to cook food. Thus far, the identification of heated non-flint rocks in archaeological contexts largely depends on a visual (macroscopic) assessment using criteria thought to be diagnostic for thermal alteration. However, visual identification can be subject to observer bias, and some heat-induced traces can be quite difficult to distinguish from other types of weathering or discolouration. In this paper, we present feldspar luminescence analysis as an independent, objective way to identify heated non-flint rocks and to evaluate the results against the established visual macroscopic method for the identification of such pieces. This is done by submitting manuported rocks with and without inferred macroscopic characteristics of heating, originating from the Last Interglacial, Middle Palaeolithic site Neumark-Nord 2/2 (Germany), to feldspar luminescence analysis (pIRIR (290) ). Results of the feldspar luminescence analysis are compared with the visual assessments. This proof of concept study demonstrates the potential of luminescence analyses as an independent, quantitative method for the identification of heated rocks-and their prehistoric applications like hot-stone cooking, specifically for cases where macroscopic assessment cannot provide reliable determinations