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We begin the special issue with an Editorial that focuses on the origin of the workshop and our Stone Stories. Each scholar conveyed at the workshop a personal story that epitomized their relationship with stone. Each story is a unique journey demonstrating how we listened and learned from childhood experiences, elders, and Indigenous communities. Our paths demonstrate how scholars can learn to put aside their Western perceptions and reconceive the world through other ontologies. 

Human adaptation depends on the integration of slow life history, complex production skills, and extensive sociality. Refining and testing models of the evolution of human life history and cultural learning benefit from increasingly accurate measurement of knowledge, skills, and rates of production with age. We pursue this goal by inferring hunters’ increases and declines of skill from approximately 23,000 hunting records generated by more than 1800 individuals at 40 locations. The data reveal an average age of peak productivity between 30 and 35 years of age, although high skill is maintained throughout much of adulthood. In addition, there is substantial variation both among individuals and sites. Within study sites, variation among individuals depends more on heterogeneity in rates of decline than in rates of increase. This analysis sharpens questions about the coevolution of human life history and cultural adaptation.