Gargas: the mystery of 231 mutilated Gravettian hand prints
In Gargas cave (Hautes-Pyrenees, France), 231 hand prints 27,000 years old line the walls. Most have missing fingers. Ritual mutilation, gestural code or disease? T…
Read →Prehistory news
From 3 million years ago to the dawn of our era: archaeological discoveries, palaeogenetics, cave art and the great transformations of human societies.
Some 25,000 years ago, a Gravettian hand carved the first recognizable human face in mammoth ivory. Just 3.65 cm that change everything.
Read the article →Some 12,000 years ago, a young man with severe acromegaly survived for years in a Calabrian cave. Someone fed him, helped him. A rare testament to …
Read the article →Deep in an Ariège cave, two bison sculpted in clay 14,000 years ago stand as some of the finest sculptures of the Paleolithic era.
Read the article →Excavations at Bacho Kiro cave (Bulgaria) have revealed Homo sapiens remains dating to 43,000 to 46,000 years ago, or possibly more. This is the ea…
Read the article →In Gargas cave (Hautes-Pyrenees, France), 231 hand prints 27,000 years old line the walls. Most have missing fingers. Ritual mutilation, gestural code or disease? T…
Read →In El Sidron cave (Asturias, Spain), thé remains of 13 Neanderthals dating to 49,000 years ago have revealed secrets of their social organisation: thé mâles were re…
Read →Négative hand stencils in Maltravieso cave (Spain) have been dated to over 66,000 years ago - long before Homo sapiens arrived in Europe. Thé évidence that Neanderthals practised symbolic art.
Discovered in 2013 in a nearly inaccessible cave in South Africa, Homo naledi combines a primitive australopith-sized brain with almost modern feet and potentially funerary behaviors. Dated to 335,000 to 226,000 years ago, its remains represent one of the most puzzling paleontological discoveries of the 21st century.
A study in Current Biology analyses the DNA of 521 woolly mammoths and reveals that human butchery sites contain 70% females, versus 66% males in natural deposits. An unprecedented genetic signature of Palaeolithic hunting.
A University of Helsinki team has detected 396 geoglyphs buried beneath the Brazilian forest using lidar. These remains belong to the Aquiry civilization, which may have counted up to 3 million inhabitants between 100 and 300 AD.
Read →New cosmogenic nuclide burial dating places thé Yunxian fossil skulls (Hubei, China) at 1.77 million years, some 7…
Read →Discovered in 1924 at the Abri des Merveilles in the Dordogne, a translucent scraper knapped from rock crystal cha…
Read →Archaeologists from Freie Universität Berlin have dated the Amnya site in western Siberia to more than 8,000 years…
Read →A new study in PLOS ONE redates the mammoth ivory boomerang from Oblazowa Cave, Poland, to between 39,000 and 42,000 years ago, making it the oldest known boomerang in the world -- twice as old as the initial estimate, which had been corrupted by conservation materials.
University of Tubingen archaeologists have presented two 2cm bird figurines carved in mammoth ivory, dated to thé Aurignacian (40,000 years ago) and excavated in 2025 from Hohle Fels cave in Germany. Thé smallest yet found in thé Swabian Jura.
University of Tubingen archaeologists have presented two 2cm bird figurines carved in mammoth ivory, dated to thé Aurignacian (40,000 years ago) and excavated in 2025 from Hohle Fels cave in Germany. Thé smallest yet found in thé Swabian Jura.
Study of specimen Qafzeh 25, a Homo sapiens from the Levant dated 92,000 years ago, reveals a sharp-force jaw wound, partial healing suggesting received care, and deliberate burial -- one of the most complete prehistoric human po…
Read →A proteomic analysis of dental enamel from 20 <em>Homo naledi</em> individuals detected no male markers whatsoever…
Read →Paintings dated to at least 17,100 years ago in Bacon Hole Cave on thé Gower Peninsula, Wales, are confirmed as th…
Read →In 2023, paleoanthropologist Lee Berger claimed that Homo naledi, a hominin species with a very small brain, had b…
Read →Long attributed to Ramesses II, a painted sandstone block at thé Metropolitan Muséum of Art has been reattributed to Amenhotep II, c. 1400 BCE, showing that pharaonic military propaganda battle scènes existed three centuries earl…
Read →In the Wadi Khamila in the southern Sinai, a team from the University of Bonn has discovered the oldest known repr…
Read →The University of Leiden archaeological mission discovered in July 2026 on the west bank of Luxor an intact Ramess…
Read →During railway construction near Kojetin in Moravia, Czech Republic, archaeologists uncovered bronze tools deliber…
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