Steven Mithen is Professor of Early Prehistory at the University of Reading, UK. He is a field archaeologist, with long term projects in Western Scotland and Southern Jordan, focusing on prehistoric hunter-gatherers and the transition to farming societies. Mithen is also a pioneer of cognitive archaeology, seeking to use evidence from the fossil and archaeological records to understand how the human mind evolved, with a particular interest in language and music. His books include The Prehistory of the Mind (1996), After The Ice: A Global Human History (2003), and The Singing Neanderthals (2005). He was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2004.