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The article reflects on I.O. Shchedrina's book Historical Memory and Nar­rative: Ecological Contexts. This monograph falls within the current trend of turning ecology into a universal interdisciplinary methodological principle. Significant for a modern person environment, its Umwelt, is understood by the author as a complex configuration of symbolic worlds and narratives. One of the most important tasks of ecology today, without solving which it is impossible to overcome the ecological crisis, is the formation of ecological consciousness. I.O. Shchedrina justifies the importance of nature saving not with the help of the usual rational natural-scientific approach, but through the emotional, personal, humanitarian sphere – through human memory, self-awareness, narrative, psychological context. In her analysis I.O. Shchedrina re­lies on a wide range of concepts and authors: from psychological interpreta­tions of self-consciousness (L.S. Vygotsky, R. Burns, St. Klein, J. Kihlstrom, V.V. Stolin and others) to the problem of historical and autobiographical narra­tive studies (D. Dennett, G. Genette, F. Lejeune). In I.O. Shchedrina's concep­tion one can see development and reinterpretation of the ideas of N.F. Reymers and D.S. Likhachev about the ecology of the spirit and the ecology of culture, although these authors are not directly mentioned. By including the concepts of narrative and historical memory into the ecological discourse, I.O. Shched­rina makes a significant contribution to the development of the most important trend of post-non-classical science – the humanitarization of natural-scientific knowledge.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the impact of digital technologies on the brain, consciousness and human nature as a whole. According to the author, this kind of impact is one of the most serious civilizational challenges of the dig­ital age. In her analysis, the author relies on the ecological approach as a holistic interdisciplinary methodological principle. The most important part of this ap­proach is the ecology of the digital environment. The digital environment in the article is considered as a new environment for a person, a new Umvelt, that is, the immediate environment that affects his inner world. Therefore, signs and stimuli that arise in the process of digital communication have such a signif­icant impact on cognitive processes. The communication situation of modern man is paradoxical in a certain sense: despite the ever-increasing complexity of technology, the communication process itself is impoverished and standard­ized. This negatively affects the evolution of the brain, as the emergence of new neural connections is not stimulated. The way out of this situation can be a pur­poseful stimulation of the development of critical thinking. Within the frame­work of an integrated ecological approach, the author relies on an ecological ap­proach to the visual perception of J. Gibson and the concept of Umwelt J. von Uexküll, substantiating a much broader theoretical applicability of environmental science than it is accepted in classical biological ecology. The author comes to the conclusion that the ecology of the digital environment contributes to find­ing answers to the civilizational challenges of the digital era and becomes the main weapon in the fight against the information and environmental crisis.

The authors of the article have studied the causes of the American Civil War with due regard to the history of constitutional law. This research is based on several political, economic, legal and cultural factors. The authors used the method of analyzing historical documents. After analyzing judicial precedents and global historical trends, they have concluded that America's constitutional institutes lost their effectiveness and became a weapon in the hands of struggling parties during the constitutional crisis. As a result, the compromise system of the early nineteenth century became a new state and legal structure.

During its existence, the idea of an information society has undergone significant changes, many concepts of the information society have appeared, as well as re­lated concepts of a network, communicative, digital society. The purpose of this article is to trace the transformation of the "image" of the information society in culture from the stage of expectations of the embodiment of its main parame­ters to the peculiarities of vision and assessment of its characteristics, which have become everyday reality today. In the definitions and assessments of the in­formation society, proposed by philosophers and sociologists at the end of the last century, its technological characteristics, which are quite optimistic for society, were emphasized. Three decades later, negative assessments of the mod­ern "information landscape", such as Internet addiction, information pollution, information stress, began to prevail in discussions about the impact of these characteristics on everyday life. "Technological optimism" is replaced by "hu­manitarian pessimism", that is, the emphasis from technological advances is shifted to the impact of information technology on a person, his psycho-emo­tional state, consciousness, worldview, and cognitive abilities. The objectives of the article include the analysis of real changes in consciousness, psyche and hu­man brain, caused by the introduction of information technology in the daily life of people. All these processes lead to the formation of a negative image of the "digital society", to the rejection of the realities associated with it. But the fact that the information society in its ideal embodiment did not take place does not negate the growing role of information technologies in modern life. And against this background, the author believes, a purposeful, including a philo­sophical analysis of relevant problems is needed in order to understand how to balance the image of the "person – information environment" system. Informa­tion ecology can play a significant role in such analysis.

The Late Upper Palaeolithic of Kostёnki and adjacent territories (~21—12 ka uncal BP/~27—14 ka cal BP) remains the period least well-documented with absolute dating evidence. During this study, 19 samples were collected from the cultural layers of ten sites and submitted to the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit (ORAU) for radiocarbon dating. The results obtained significantly advance our knowledge of these sites' ages and of the development of the Palaeolithic in and around Kostёnki. The new data suggest a unique refugium in Kostёnki during the peak of Late Glacial Maximum (~21—18 ka uncal BP/~27—22 ka cal BP), represented by sites of the Zamyatninskaya culture, which has a specific lithic industry. Sites for that period are extremely rare outside Kostёnki. Similar refugia during the LGM have been recorded in Central Europe in Moravia and the Carpathian Basin. At the time of deglaciation, in the period of ~15—16 ka uncal BP (~20—18 ka cal BP), Late/Typical Epigravettian sites appear on the Middle Don, which seems to be relatively synchronous across wide areas of Central and Eastern Europe. Also worthy of note are sites with a cultural attribution different from the Late Epigravettian (Byki 7, Samotoevka) in the period of ~18—16 ka uncal BP (~22—19 ka cal BP) in the Center of the Russian Plain.

This paper describes the results of 2017—2020 fieldwork at the Upper Palaeolithic site of Kostenki 17 (Spitsynskaya). This work established the presence of five new horizons of finds, in addition to the two cultural layers known since the 1950s. Given the thickness of the Upper Humic Bed, it is clear that the horizons of finds are separated by sterile layers, and correspond to the existence of different sites on this part of the promontory. Despite the small number of finds, the contents of each horizon differ in both the composition of faunal remains and lithic artefacts, as well as raw materials, state of preservation and degree of weathering. The investigated area of the lower (second) cultural layer demonstrates a complex nature of the post-deposition processes that influenced its preservation. A sharp slope of the Lower Humic Bed and a significant difference in the depth of the finds indicate a partial displacement along the slope of some sections of the cultural layer, which was not recorded in previous excavations. The present publication includes a stratigraphic characterization of deposits, a description of the occurrence of the cultural layers and horizons of finds, preliminary results of a technical and typological study of new collections of stone tools and ornaments from cultural layer II, and the results of radiocarbon dating.

Domestication of horses fundamentally transformed long-range mobility and warfare. However, modern domesticated breeds do not descend from the earliest domestic horse lineage associated with archaeological evidence of bridling, milking and corralling at Botai, Central Asia around 3500 bc3. Other longstanding candidate regions for horse domestication, such as Iberia and Anatolia, have also recently been challenged. Thus, the genetic, geographic and temporal origins of modern domestic horses have remained unknown. Here we pinpoint the Western Eurasian steppes, especially the lower Volga-Don region, as the homeland of modern domestic horses. Furthermore, we map the population changes accompanying domestication from 273 ancient horse genomes. This reveals that modern domestic horses ultimately replaced almost all other local populations as they expanded rapidly across Eurasia from about 2000 bc, synchronously with equestrian material culture, including Sintashta spoke-wheeled chariots. We find that equestrianism involved strong selection for critical locomotor and behavioural adaptations at the GSDMC and ZFPM1 genes. Our results reject the commonly held association between horseback riding and the massive expansion of Yamnaya steppe pastoralists into Europe around 3000 bc driving the spread of Indo-European languages. This contrasts with the scenario in Asia where Indo-Iranian languages, chariots and horses spread together, following the early second millennium bc Sintashta culture. ; The work by G. Boeskorov is done on state assignment of DPMGI SB RAS. This project was supported by the University Paul Sabatier IDEX Chaire d'Excellence (OURASI); Villum Funden miGENEPI research programme; the CNRS 'Programme de Recherche Conjoint' (PRC); the CNRS International Research Project (IRP AMADEUS); the France Génomique Appel à Grand Projet (ANR-10-INBS-09-08, BUCEPHALE project); IB10131 and IB18060, both funded by Junta de Extremadura (Spain) and European Regional Development Fund; Czech Academy of Sciences (RVO:67985912); the Zoological Institute ZIN RAS (АААА-А19-119032590102-7); and King Saud University Researchers Supporting Project (NSRSP–2020/2). The research was carried out with the financial support of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (19-59-15001 and 20-04-00213), the Russian Science Foundation (16-18-10265, 20-78-10151, and 21-18-00457), the Government of the Russian Federation (FENU-2020-0021), the Estonian Research Council (PRG29), the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research (PRG1209), the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (Project NF 104792), the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Momentum Mobility Research Project of the Institute of Archaeology, Research Centre for the Humanities); and the Polish National Science Centre (2013/11/B/HS3/03822). This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie (grant agreement 797449). This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreements 681605, 716732 and 834616). ; Peer reviewed