Francesco d’Errico is a Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) director of research at the Institut de Préhistorie et de Géologie du Quaternaire at the University of Bordeaux and honorary professor at the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of the Witwatersrand. He has focused his scientific investigations upon the evolution of human cognitive abilities. Between 2003 and 2008, he directed a EUROCORE project in the archaeology of the origin of language and its early diversification and a French Ministry of Research project on the linguistics, genetics, and environments of the European Upper Paleolithic population. He formerly served as co-director of projects involving burial processes of early humans in Moldova, Upper Paleolithic mobiliary art in Spain, and the creation of a virtual environment for the study of Upper Paleolithic art. A graduate of the University of Turin, Dr. d’Errico studied at the University of Paris VI and the University of Pisa before taking his Ph.D. in prehistory and quaternary geology in 1989 at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. He earned an advanced research degree in 2003 at the University of Bordeaux. He has taught at the Museum of Natural History in Paris and worked as a research associate at the Roman-Germanic Central Museum of Mainz, Germany, the Museum for Ice Age Archaeology in Neuwied, Germany, and the McDoanld Institute for Archaeological Research at Cambridge University. He has been a CNRS-Royal Society visiting fellow at Cambridge and a visiting professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, George Washington University, and Princeton University. Dr. d’Errico has held fellowships awarded by the Fyssen Foundation, the NATO Science Program, the Spanish Council of Scientific Investigation, and the University of Turin. His work has been supported by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the European Science Foundation, and numerous private and governmental European and American institutions. A film he produced on archaeological methods has won several international prizes. The author of some 160 scientific papers, he is the co-editor of two books, the co-author (with Gerhard Bosinski and Petra Schiller) of Die gravierten Frauendarstellungen von Gönnersdorf (2001), and the author of L’Art Gravé Azilien: de la Technique à la Signification (1995). His latest book (with Lucinda Backwell), From Tools to Symbols: From Early Hominids to Modern Humans, was published by Wits University Press in 2005. He is now editing (with Jean-Marie Hombert) a multidisciplinary volume on the origin and diversification of languages to be published by Cambridge’s McDoanld Institute for Archaeological Research.