Yoshihiro Nishiaki, who received his Ph.D. from University College London, is a professor of prehistory at the University Museum, The University of Tokyo. His research involves the archaeology of West and Central Asia mainly through technological analyses of flaked stone artifacts. He has directed numerous field investigations in West and Central Asia since 1984, including Paleolithic and Neolithic excavations in Syria, Azerbaijan, Iran, and Uzbekistan. He is currently the director of PaleoAsia, a large-scale research project investigating the formation processes of modern human cultures in Asia, supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan. He has served on the editorial board or scientific committee of a number of international associations, such as the International Union for Quaternary Research, the International Union of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences, and Association Paléorient.
Olaf Jöris received his Ph.D. from the University of Cologne, Germany. He is senior scientist at and deputy head of the MONREPOS Archaeological Research Centre and Museum for Human Behavioural Evolution in Neuwied, Germany – a department of the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum Mainz, Leibniz Research Institute for Archaeology. His research focuses on the archaeological evidence for understanding the evolution of human behaviour from a diachronic perspective. He has directed fieldwork in Germany, Georgia, and China. He has been involved in numerous inter- and transdisciplinary projects, regularly serves as reviewer or editor in international journals, and is member of several international research organizations. He teaches prehistoric archaeology at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany, and, since 2014, has been a visiting professor at Lanzhou University, Gansu Province, China.