Stratum Plus is a relatively new periodical dedicated to the archaeology and cultural anthropology of the post-Soviet and Eastern European states. The Publisher is the High Anthropological School University in Kishinev (Republic of Moldova), and the Editor-in-Chief is Dr Mark E Tkachuk. Since its inception in 1999, this journal has published 1196 articles and 50 book-long papers in 60 issues. In total, 780 authors from 155 cities in 39 countries (including 489 from Russia, 415 from Ukraine, 244 from Moldova, 26 from Romania, 22 from Bulgaria, 17 from Germany, and 13 from USA, and some more from Belorussia, Poland, France, Italy, and other countries) participated in this journal. It publishes 6 issues a year, divided by time periods: Paleolithic–Mesolithic, Neolithic–Bronze Age, Iron Age, Roman Time and Migration Period, Middle Ages, and Numismatic and Epigraphic.

The Stratum Plus issue 1 for 2013 is devoted mainly to the hotly debated problem of Late Pleistocene extinctions. In the review article “Human activity as a possible factor in the extinction of large mammals in Late Pleistocene North Eurasia,” R V Croitor presents the current view on the problems related to extinction. The main conclusions are (1) the major factor of extinction was the gradual decrease of Late Pleistocene ecosystems in terms of productivity; (2) the overkill hypothesis sensu P S Martin (e.g. Martin Reference Martin1973) is not supported by the current evidence because modern humans in the southern part of North America did not represent an unfamiliar type of predator for the megafauna; and (3) the American megafauna with its several large-size predators was not “naïve.”

P A Nikolsky and V V Pitulko in their paper “Correlation between climate fluctuations and mammoth populations in connection with the problem of their extinction (with special reference to the mass radiocarbon dating of mammoth bones from Arctic Siberia)” present a meticulous analysis of the primary evidence: mammoth remains in the Siberian Arctic. They use frequency distributions of the ¹⁴C dates run on bones and tusks of woolly mammoth for three key regions in the Siberian Arctic, the Taimyr Peninsula, the New Siberian Islands, and the Lena River mouth and around it, in order to determine the degree of correspondence between the size of mammoth populations and climatic changes in the last 40,000–50,000 yr. The main conclusions are (1) the mammoth populations followed a cyclical pattern (with a period of ~5000 yr), which is closely related to major environmental fluctuations; and (2) the number of mammoths decreased slowly toward the Holocene. The main cause of their extinction, according to Nikolsky and Pitulko, was a particular combination of environmental changes that was very unfavorable for the existence of megafauna. The presence of humans in the High Arctic since ~29,000 BP at the Yana RHS site (e.g. Pitulko et al. Reference Pitulko, Nikolsky, Girya, Basilyan, Tumskoy, Koulakov, Astakhov, Pavlova and Anisimov2004) did not affect mammoth populations greatly, although the role of humans in the disappearance of mammoths was increasing immediately before the final extinction of the latter in mainland Siberia in the Early Holocene, at ~9500 BP.

A M Burovsky and P V Puchkov in their lengthy (100-page) review “Pleistocene megafauna extinctions and their consequences: human driven or a “purely natural” process?” (see also Puchkov Reference Puchkov2003) represent the facts and suggestions that convinced them that humans were the main cause of the large mammals’ extinction at the end of the Pleistocene. One of their main arguments is that the giant Pleistocene herbivores (proboscideans, rhinos, giant sloths, diprodontids, and the like) were able to create rich pasture ecosystems. Furthermore, human overkill (sensu Martin Reference Martin1973) was responsible not only for the extinction of these species but also the disappearance of biomes suitable for all mammals, and the replacement of highly productive savannas by low productive evergreen forests in the tropical regions, and cold grass steppes with forest and bush formations (“cryophilic savannas”; see Verkhovskaya Reference Verkhovskaya1988) by treeless tundra in the higher latitudes. This caused a “domino effect” with an acceleration of the disappearance of mammals that existed in these highly productive landscapes. The role of climate in the Pleistocene extinctions, according to Burovsky and Puchkov, was minor compared to the devastating human impact.

V V Pitulko in his review, “Ex ungue leonem cognoscimus … (comment on A. M. Burovsky and P.V. Putchkov “Pleistocene megafauna extinctions and their consequences: human driven or ‘purely natural’ process?”),” critically evaluates the main conclusions made by Burovsky and Puchkov. The very rough estimate of the size of the Upper Paleolithic population in Eurasia of ~400,000 people, based on the early 17th century AD census of native tribes in Siberia (Dolgikh Reference Dolgikh1960) as about 200,000 individuals, supplemented by data on the size of today’s annual hunting prey of hoofed animals in the USA without causing the population decline below a sustainable threshold (Danilkin Reference Danilkin2009), shows that the amount of meat from middle-size herbivores procured by hunters was enough to sustain about 500,000–600,000 people. By accepting the very preliminary nature of the sizes of human populations and the amount of hunted animals, it is still obvious that the overkill hypothesis is unable to explain the disappearance of large-size herbivores like woolly mammoth and rhinoceros, and Pleistocene horse and bison. The estimate of the number of prey mammoths at the Yana RHS site and the “mammoth cemetery” of Berelekh shows that perhaps only one mammoth was killed by people every year, if not fewer. Therefore, the overkill according to Pitulko was not the cause of megafaunal extinction in Siberia (e.g. Nikolskiy et al. Reference Nikolskiy, Sulerzhitsky and Pitulko2011).

Besides the block of papers related to Pleistocene extinctions, the volume contains also a lengthy report by V N Stepanchuk “Mira: Early Upper Paleolithic site in the Dnieper Valley”; a discussion by M V Anikovich “Once again on the problem of the origin of the Upper Paleolithic or ‘critique of critical criticism’”; and paper by M G Zhilin “Traditions and innovations in the development of bone industry of the Butovo culture,” with an overview of the bone tools from the Mesolithic of the central Russian Plain.