In this brief introduction, we present and contextualise ‘theoretical pathways’ elaborated in this special issue, in terms of understanding humanity from a deep-time perspective. The participating authors discuss a wide range of approaches related to thinking about human endeavour during the Middle Stone Age and Middle Palaeolithic ranging from the constraints of technological niches and Material Engagement Theory to aspects of palaeo-neurology, agent-based models of self-domestication and co-evolutionary model building. Together, the contributions demonstrate that current theoretical approaches that aim to explain deep-time human endeavour require multi-disciplinary approaches, and that for some researchers, the trend is to move away from the symbolic standard or models of sudden mutation. By doing so, each contribution, in its own way, enhances our understanding of ‘being’ or ‘becoming’ human during the time slice between 300,000 and 30,000 years ago. The work represented here makes it increasingly clear that a singular or particular aspect did not ‘give birth’ to Homo sapiens in Africa during the Middle Stone Age and/or in Eurasia during the Middle Palaeolithic. Instead, humanity in all its complexity was probably shaped by a broad range of factors and processes that took place over an extended period.

在此简短的介绍中，我们从深度的角度理解人类，介绍并情境化了本期特刊中阐述的“理论途径”。与会的作者讨论了与中石器时代和旧石器时代中期人类努力相关的各种方法，从技术壁ches和物质参与理论的约束到古神经学，基于主体的自我驯化模型和共同进化模型的建立。总之，这些贡献表明，旨在解释人类长期努力的当前理论方法需要多学科的方法，并且对于某些研究人员而言，趋势是远离符号标准或突变突变模型。这样，每个贡献都以自己的方式 增强了我们对300,000到30,000年前的时间段中“存在”或“成为”人类的理解。此处代表的作品越来越清楚地表明，一个单一的或特定的方面并没有“生出”在石器时代中期的非洲智人和/或旧石器时代中期的欧亚大陆。取而代之的是，人类的复杂性可能是由长期以来发生的各种因素和过程所决定的。