For want of other secure evidence, the study of art in prehistoric societies normally amounts to looking at pictures, though there must have also been sound, and surely music. The long lithic tradition of central northern Australia permits a rare insight into another kind of prehistoric art, the meaning and aesthetic order that may lie behind a lithic industry.

Later Pleistocene human evolution in East Asia remains poorly understood owing to a scarcity of well described, reliably classified and accurately dated fossils. Southwest China has been identified from genetic research as a hotspot of human diversity, containing ancient mtDNA and Y-DNA lineages, and has yielded a number of human remains thought to derive from Pleistocene deposits. We have prepared, reconstructed, described and dated a new partial skull from a consolidated sediment block collected in 1979 from the site of Longlin Cave (Guangxi Province). We also undertook new excavations at Maludong (Yunnan Province) to clarify the stratigraphy and dating of a large sample of mostly undescribed human remains from the site. We undertook a detailed comparison of cranial, including a virtual endocast for the Maludong calotte, mandibular and dental remains from these two localities. Both samples probably derive from the same population, exhibiting an unusual mixture of modern human traits, characters probably plesiomorphic for later Homo, and some unusual features. We dated charcoal with AMS radiocarbon dating and speleothem with the Uranium-series technique and the results show both samples to be from the Pleistocene-Holocene transition: ∼14.3-11.5 ka. Our analysis suggests two plausible explanations for the morphology sampled at Longlin Cave and Maludong. First, it may represent a late-surviving archaic population, perhaps paralleling the situation seen in North Africa as indicated by remains from Dar-es-Soltane and Temara, and maybe also in southern China at Zhirendong. Alternatively, East Asia may have been colonised during multiple waves during the Pleistocene, with the Longlin-Maludong morphology possibly reflecting deep population substructure in Africa prior to modern humans dispersing into Eurasia.

In the past decade, scholarship has documented the ways in which interacting with different forms of heritage impact individual and/or community well-being, as well as the harm to human well-being that occurs when heritage is damaged or destroyed. We bring the results of a review of this literature together, defining both heritage and well-being in relation to each other and exploring the relationship between heritage and well-being. New and emerging threats to heritage and, in turn, well-being are outlined, as well as new ways of preserving heritage for future generations. The future of heritage is discussed along with the importance of the concept of “living heritage”. We conclude that heritage is essential for contemporary and future well-being, and that if we do not better care for heritage then human health will be negatively impacted.

In 2008, we began two related research projects that focus on recent Australian rock art, made after the arrival of Asians and Europeans, in part of northwest Arnhem Land’s Wellington Range. This area has extensive and diverse rock art, including many examples of paintings that reflect contact between local Aboriginal people and visitors to their shores. At some sites figures made of beeswax are found superimposed under and over paintings, thus providing a means of obtaining minimum and maximum ages for pigment art. We report on the results of an initial radiocarbon beeswax dating programme at the Djulirri site complex. Results include the earliest age for a depiction of a Southeast Asian watercraft in Australian rock art, which is also Australia’s earliest contact period rock art depiction discovered so far. Based on the probability distribution of the calibrated ages, it is 99.7% probable this image dates to before AD 1664 and likely is much older. The significance of this result is discussed in relation to early contact history, as revealed by historic documents and archaeological excavation. Other important results suggest a close encounter between local Aboriginal people and Europeans occurred in the 1700s, before British exploration and settlement in the Arnhem Land region.

In this paper we focus on contact rock paintings from three sites in northwestern Arnhem Land, Australia. In doing so we highlight that such sites provide some of the only contemporary Indigenous accounts of cross-cultural encounters that took place across northern Australia through the last 500 years. Importantly, they have the potential to inform us about the ongoing relationships that existed between different parties. The lack of research on contact rock art is emphasised and the development of a large-scale project (of which this fieldwork is part) aimed at addressing this problem is outlined. Important new findings for contact rock art are presented, including evidence for ‘traditional’ protocols relating to rock art continuing long after first contact, evidence for particular contact period subject matter dominating in art of this region, and the oldest date yet recorded for contact art in Australia.