For decades the various chronological entities, the Late Palaeolithic, the Mesolithic and the Neolithic have been understood and treated as separate entities, with the academic communities having operated separately, often with differing methodological and theoretical toolboxes.

This has, however, changed gradually in more recent years and nowadays many studies focus particularly on overlaps and continuities. The entire field has been enriched by archaeogenetics, and the previous largely typological studies may now be complemented and broadened by studies of demographic events and genetic admixture.

What evolves is a scenario of complex interactions between various Eurasian hunter-gatherer populations and incoming farmer populations from Anatolia. Regional patterns vary greatly from almost no contact to rapid and sometimes important admixture, but also long-term cultural contacts with few biological exchanges. With data increasing the general picture is becoming more and more nuanced.

We invite communications from both archaeology and archaeogenetics on the entire range of the topic and from any region across western Eurasia. We will specifically focus on definition criteria of what is to be understood as "Mesolithic" or "Neolithic", on mosaics of land use and resource exploitation, patterns of coexistence between hunters-gatherers and hunter-gatherers and farmers, exchange within and across landscapes, qualitative and quantitative criteria in material culture, biomolecular approaches to humans and their subsistence, food storage and transformation practices.