The recent development of continuous paleoclimatic reconstructions covering hundreds of thousands of years paved the way for a large number of studies from disciplines ranging from paleoecology to archaeology, conservation to population genetics, macroevolution to anthropology and human evolution to linguistics. Unfortunately, (paleo)climatic data can be challenging to extract and analyze for scholars unfamiliar with such specific file formats.Here we present pastclim, an R package facilitating the access and use of paleoclimatic reconstructions. It currently includes two of such datasets, covering respectively the last 120 000 and 800 000 years, and a vignette provides instructions on how to include additional datasets.The package contains a set of functions to quickly and easily recover the climate for time periods of interest either for the whole world or specific areas, extract data from locations scattered in space and/or time, retrieve time series from individual sites, and manage the ice or land coverage, offering a handy platform to include the climate of the past into existing or new analyses and pipelines.

Summary The emergence of Homo sapiens in Pleistocene Africa is associated with a profound reconfiguration of technology. Symbolic expression and personal ornamentation, new tool forms, and regional technological traditions are widely recognized as the earliest indicators of complex culture and cognition in humans. Here we describe a bone tool tradition from Contrebandiers Cave on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, dated between 120,000–90,000 years ago. The bone tools were produced for different activities, including likely leather and fur working, and were found in association with carnivore remains that were possibly skinned for fur. A cetacean tooth tip bears what is likely a combination of anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic modification and shows the use of a marine mammal tooth by early humans. The evidence from Contrebandiers Cave demonstrates that the pan-African emergence of complex culture included the use of multiple and diverse materials for specialized tool manufacture.

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