This volume seeks to promote a social and ecological narrative of early hominin evolution, one which is theoretically informed yet empirically based and which links conventional material and geographic perspectives on the early archaeological record with the more elusive, social, cognitive and symbolic landscapes. All of the volume’s contributors seek to move beyond limiting notions of early hominin culture and behaviour as imposed on, or dictated by, an external world. Instead, they present the early hominin world, and human evolution, as the outcome of a dynamic interaction between the ‘external’ landscape of habitat, physical environment and other animals and the ‘internal landscape’ of the perception and experience of the world.