The long scientific dispute over when anatomically modern humans first arrived in Europe on their long trek out of Africa has come close to resolution – with the help of a fragment of jawbone belonging to an elderly person who lived near present-day Torquay.

When I came back to this book after finishing it, I was looking forward to further reflections, but they were dispelled by a shimmering ring that appeared floating above the pages. It seemed to be made of prisms arranged in a glassy parquet; as usual it was incomplete, and as always it was mercurial. It's a familiar kind of apparition; not just in my field of vision but in those of people suffering from migraine, people under the influence of hallucinogens and, according to David Lewis-Williams, the San people who painted on rocks in southern Africa over thousands of years until the end of the 19th century.

There is another AV: approval voting ("Here we go again, voting tactically...", 3 April). It is far simpler than the system which in most countries is called instant run-off voting but which here has been dubbed the alternative vote. True, this AV solves the dilemma that if you vote for the candidate you really want, you weaken another who has a chance of winning, and vice versa. But few know that their vote will not ultimately count at all if none of their choices include the winner or runner-up (so that it is not really true that the winner will always have been voted for by more than 50 per cent). Furthermore, few understand what difference it will make if they rank candidate A as 1 and B as 2 or the other way around. The answer is: none. Whether you give first ranking to the one you really want or the one who has a greater following, your vote will end up with the latter. So why not just put ticks against the names of all those you could approve? That is approval voting. There is no redistributing and recounting, and it clearly reports the real distribution of the voters' wishes.

Jonny is the new alliance between Teenage Fanclub's Norman Blake and Euros Childs from Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, and judging by the whimsical bonhomie of songs like "Candyfloss" and "Wich Is Wich", the lyrics are mostly Childs' play.

Neanderthal cuisine was far more sophisticated than previously thought, according to a new analysis of fossilised teeth.

This is one of those books where the cover tells all. It bears a picture of a woman who scrutinises us keenly. She is rough-hewn, dirty and unkempt but obviously intelligent. With a scrub, a hair-do and some clothes, she would not look out of place in a street market, a factory or, indeed, a newspaper office. She is a Neanderthal.

Early human ancestors were probably more sexually promiscuous than present-day societies if a study of the finger lengths of fossilised bones is to be believed.

Early humans may have begun to move away from a largely meat-eating diet 20,000 years earlier than previously thought. A study of stone-grinding tools at sites in Italy, Russia and the Czech Republic has found evidence that humans were milling flour 30,000 years ago.

The days of using the term "Neanderthal" as an insult may be on the way out as research published today shows the early humans had a deep-seated sense of compassion.

Fresh tensions at the top of the coalition erupted last night last night as a senior Liberal Democrat branded their Conservative coalition partners "Neanderthals" who had not "arrived in the 21st century".

Archaeologists have found Britain's earliest house - constructed by Stone Age tribesmen around 11,000 years ago. The discovery is likely to change the way archaeologists view that early period.