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From 3 million years ago to the dawn of our era: archaeological discoveries, palaeogenetics, cave art and the great transformations of human societies.

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Middle Palaeolithic · 17/10/2026

Birch tar, the Neanderthals' glue and antibiotic?

Made with techniques available to Neanderthals, birch tar, humanity's oldest glue, slows the growth of Staphylococcus aureus. A lead towards Neanderthal medicine, still to be proven.

Neolithic · 14/10/2026

Stonehenge's Altar Stone Came from Scotland, Not Wales

The recumbent slab at the heart of Stonehenge, long attributed to Wales, in fact comes from northeast Scotland. A 2024 study in Nature dated the minerals in the stone and traced their signature more than 750 kilometres from Salisbury Plain. The finding reshapes our picture of Neolithic Britain.

Palaeoclimate · 10/10/2026

56 million years ago, a warming like ours devastated forests for 100,000 years

By reading the shape of cells in fossil leaves from Wyoming, palaeobotanists have reconstructed the history of forests during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. At first thriving, they lost 60% of their cover and took more than 100,000 years to recover.

Hominins

Hominins · 10/10/2026

Lake Turkana: footprints of eight Paranthropus boisei reveal a 1.8-metre cousin that lived in groups

Twenty-one footprints left 1.4 million years ago on the shore of a Kenyan lake show that Paranthropus boisei, 'Nutcracker Man', reached the size of a modern human. The eight walkers, mostly adult males, suggest a complex social l…

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Chalcolithic · 09/10/2026

6,500-year-old sprouted grains: Bulgaria's oldest beer was brewed in the salt town of Solnitsata

Under two upturned bowls, in a house burned around 4500 BCE, archaeologists found emmer grains that had sprouted before being charred. Evidence of deliberate malting, the first step in brewing, at the heart of Provadia-Solnitsata, Europe's oldest salt town.

Neolithic · 08/10/2026

Göbekli Tepe: a human statue walled up for 12,000 years, an offering from the first builders

Lying horizontally inside the wall of a room between Enclosures B and D, a human statue more than 12,000 years old has been uncovered at Göbekli Tepe. A very rare ritual deposit that sheds light on the symbolic world of Pre-Pottery Neolithic hunter-gatherers.

Rock art · 08/10/2026

Chukotka: 31 new petroglyphs discovered on the Arctic cliffs of the Pegtymel

Roped up like mountaineers, Russian archaeologists found thirty-one unknown engraved surfaces along the Pegtymel in August 2026, Asia's only rock art site beyond the Arctic Circle. Swimming reindeer hunted from boats, whales and enigmatic mushroom-headed figures.

Iron Age

Iron Age · 08/10/2026

The oldest known skyscraper? At Yeha, Ethiopia, a 2,800-year-old palace could have risen sixteen storeys

Engineers ran a thousand numerical simulations on the walls of the Grat Be'al Gibri palace, built around 800 BCE in northern Ethiopia. The verdict: even in the worst case, this timber-laced masonry could have carried sixteen stor…

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ameriques

ameriques · 15/08/2026

Lost Amazon city: 396 geoglyphs revealed by laser, 3 million inhabitants

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.

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