This article examines endangered language protection through domestic legislation, questioning reliance on international linguistic human rights frameworks. While international courts frequently decline to enforce language rights independently, national legislation proves more effective in safeguarding linguistic diversity.

Through a comparative case study of Qatar, Lebanon, and Morocco, this research identifies effective domestic approaches to protecting linguistic diversity. Qatar’s Law No. 7 of 2019 balances Arabic promotion with minority protections. Lebanon’s multilingual educational framework and Morocco’s constitutional recognition of Tamazight demonstrate how domestic mechanisms provide substantive linguistic safeguards. These cases reveal that successful preservation requires enforceable domestic legislation rather than theoretical international frameworks lacking implementation mechanisms.

The article exposes critical gaps between idealistic international instruments and enforceable protections, advocating state-centered approaches that treat language as both cultural heritage and living practice. Effective preservation emerges from coordinated national legislation combined with community initiatives within existing human rights frameworks. This shift from international idealism to domestic pragmatism offers viable pathways for protecting global linguistic diversity – particularly urgent given that approximately 3,000 languages face extinction within the coming decades. The study presents implementable alternatives to failed international strategies, demonstrating how context-specific domestic policies achieve meaningful preservation outcomes.

Multiple terrorist attacks on cultural heritage since 2001 have drawn heritage into international security politics, reframing it from a Law of Armed Conflict issue to one of hybrid warfare. This exploratory study uses semi-structured interviews with 51 practitioners from two community groups to examine perspectives on terrorism and heritage, testing assumptions in the literature against protection practices. Findings reveal that credible, dynamic threat data is scarce, leading to reliance on historic event data to extrapolate future risks. The article proposes a new multi-layered cultural intelligence framework for more critical threat assessments and argues that concerns over religiously motivated terrorist attacks may be overstated, suggesting a shift toward considering political and ideological drivers within unconventional warfare.

The Chalbi Desert, located in eastern Africa, is a significant but overlooked archive of the Pleistocene and Holocene periods that could add insight into investigations on human evolution. We revisited southeastern Chalbi Desert landforms between the towns of Kargi and Maikona to improve the chronostratigraphy and provide paleoenvironmental context. Direct U-series and electron spin resonance dating of various fossil teeth recovered from a deflated dune (Qzs) landform at the Farre locality return a mean age of ∼545 ka, which is compatible with biostratigraphic inferences. While this numerical age result should probably be regarded as mostly indicative given the existing uncertainty on the environmental dose rate evaluation, the data set available nevertheless strongly suggests a Middle Pleistocene age for at least some of the fauna. Sedimentology, luminescence, and 14C dating further suggest that this Qzs landform and its contents were modified by alluvial fan development and weathering during denudation in a proximal fan setting through the late Pleistocene into the Holocene. The Qzs landform currently experiences aeolian additions, erosion, and salt-affected soil development in an arid climate. Pedogenic carbonate isotope geochemistry suggests that deflated sand dunes were covered by woody grasslands during Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 4 and 3 pluvials, consistent with nearby fan progradation constrained at >35 ka. The desert experienced increased hydrologic activity during late Pleistocene and African humid period pluvials, as evidenced by additional optically stimulated luminescence and 14C dating from fan, dune, and playa contexts. The last significant pluvial episode ended after 4.4 ± 0.3 cal ka BP, which coincides with the final regression of nearby Lake Turkana. This study extends the chronology of Quaternary sediments in the Chalbi Desert to the Middle Pleistocene and offers paleoenvironmental insights into the conditions experienced by Middle Stone Age tool users in the region.

Podcasting, with its focus on voices, remains a compelling topic for African studies research, which has historically put orality at the center of the field. Recognizing sparse audience inclusion in existing research on African podcasting, the authors conducted focus groups with listeners in urban Ghana to document consumption practices and attitudes toward this form of new orality. Using the concept “deep listening” drawn from participant comments, the researchers theorize that listeners and producers experience a form of sound-mediated, affective resonance from podcasts that utilize audience collaboration and local sonic aesthetics, linking the affordances of openness and freedom to the medium.

The Bohai coast loess deposits hold significant value for understanding climate and sea-level changes. This review analyzes stratigraphic and chronological data and arrives at three main conclusions. (1) Liaodong Peninsula loess is 10–25 m thick, primarily distributed in nearshore bay areas with NW slope aspect. In the Shandong Peninsula coastal zone, thickness measures 5–15 m, showing NW aspect in Penglai but southward in Yantai. Thickness variations correlate with sedimentation rates and underlying terrain gradient, while slope aspects indicate sediment sources and topographic controls. (2) Loess along the Bohai coast rapidly accumulated during 22–31 ka and 61–68 ka, lasting longer (18–70 ka) in the Shandong Peninsula coastal area and the Miaodao Archipelago due to Yellow River input. Around 150 ka, regional differences emerged (e.g., loess in the Shandong Peninsula coastal area and the Miaodao Archipelago experienced rapid deposition at 148–175 ka). Liaodong Peninsula ages before 125 ka are underestimated, likely due to inaccurate quartz dating. (3) The paleosols mainly developed during 4–15 ka, 75–85 ka, 90–100 ka, and 125–130 ka. The Shandong Peninsula coastal area and Miaodao Archipelago show more layers and greater thickness of paleosols compared with the Liaodong Peninsula, which is related to the differences in hydroclimate conditions and loess grain size.

This article is a case study of the Kasarani Stadium in Kenya as a heuristic through which to understand President Daniel Arap Moi’s political style and priorities during the first decade of his regime. Drawing primarily from national and international newspapers, the archives of national and international sporting organizations and associations, records of the Kenyan government and biographies of Moi, I explore how Moi gave political meaning to sport to advance his populist politics at home and project Kenya on(to) the international stage. At home, he used sports to define himself as a leader of the ordinary mwananchi (citizen), in touch with the experiences, challenges, and visions of the common Kenyan. Internationally, he used sports to chart Kenya’s foreign policy and fashion himself as an international political personality. The article concludes that the study of sports and sporting infrastructure offers a productive way to write social, political, and cultural histories of postcolonial Africa.

Understanding the spatiotemporal variability of global summer monsoons and the factors controlling them is essential for testing and predicting their future changes under the anticipated global warming. Here, we reconstructed a series of East Asian summer monsoon (EASM) patterns over South Korea. Based on radiocarbon dates, grain size, carbon/sulfur (C/S) ratios, and high-resolution X-ray fluorescence core scanning (XRF-CS) data (e.g., Ti/Al and Zr/Al ratios) from a paleo-bay site in Hadong area, southern Korea, we investigated the multi-decadal- to centennial-scale variation in the terrestrial element inputs as a proxy for the EASM rainfall during the period from 8600 to 7800 cal yr BP and compared previous results from the Buan area, western coast of Korea, to test possible synchronous local-scale hydroclimate change. We also explored global teleconnections among EASM over Korea, the Indian summer monsoon (ISM), and the movement of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). We found that the EASM variability was positively correlated with that of the ISM through latitudinal shifts of the ITCZ. High-latitude cooling climates, including the 8.2 ka cooling event, were also directly connected to the weakened EASM via the intensified winter monsoon and southward shift of the westerly jet position over the Tibetan Plateau. To predict future changes in summer rainfall, synchronized changes in the global summer precipitation should be considered in terms of ITCZ and high-latitude climate change, including westerly jet shifts over Asian regions.

Cognitive archaeology focuses on the mental processes behind human material culture, exploring the human mind for patterns of behavioural strategies and their corresponding material expression in artefacts. Sharing some of the aims and perspectives of cultural anthropology, cognitive archaeology has also been called ‘Evolutionary Cognitive Archaeology’ (ECA) when it refers to hominin evolution. However, despite the abundance of publications and research projects that focus on ECA, this is a relatively new discipline, in which the earliest analyses were principally oriented to the appearance and evolution of language and symbolism. As there is no standardized method for investigating cognitive evolution, ECA researchers use multidisciplinary and wider theoretical models and methodological approaches. In this sense, partially because it is not unique to the genus Homo, stone toolmaking has been, and still is, an essential criterion for inferring hominids’ cognitive capacities. Aiming to contribute to ongoing discussions, this paper addresses and reviews some of the more relevant evolutionary cognitive approaches related to stone-tool manufacture in general and Acheulean technology in particular, aimed at building a synthesized chronological review of the discipline.