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.
In July 2026, two climatologists from Stockholm University published in Science Advances a simulation of eight thousand years of Mediterranean climate. Their model …
Read →In the Zagros Mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, renewed excavations at Shanidar Cave by the University of Cambridge have uncovered the remains of a Neanderthal woman wh…
Read →Discovered by chance in the tin mines of the Jos Plateau in Nigeria, Nok sculptures dated between the 9th century BC and the 2nd century AD constitute the oldest known sculptural tradition in sub-Saharan Africa. Their discovery, initiated by archaeologist Bernard Fagg in 1943, profoundly transformed our understanding of ancient African societies.
Mesolithic European hunter-gatherers had dark skin despite tens of thousands of years on the continent. Ancient DNA from specimens such as La Brana (Spain) and Loschbour (Luxembourg) confirms it: light skin spread through Europe with Neolithic farmers from Anatolia and steppe pastoralists, between 8,000 and 4,500 years ago.
Discovered in 2012 in the Woranso-Mille area of the Afar region, the Burtele fossil foot dates to 3.4 million years ago. With its divergent big toe and absent plantar arch, it belongs to a hominin distinct from Australopithecus afarensis yet contemporary with Lucy. Proof that in the Pliocene, multiple species with divergent locomotor strategies shared the same territory.
Off the island of Sein in Finistere, archaeologists have uncovered several alignments of submerged granite blocks dating to 5,800-5,300 BCE. These structures, without parallel in France, reveal unsuspected social organization and…
Read →Carbonised wooden beams dating to the Babylonian conquest of 586 BCE have been discovered in the City of David. Pa…
Read →A granite pebble bearing a red ochre stain and a complete fingerprint, attributed to a Neanderthal individual, has…
Read →In Ethiopia's Afar Depression, the very beds that yielded Lucy have now produced a new crocodile, Crocodylus luciv…
Read →Partially burned phytoliths recovered from the sediments of Cloggs Cave (Victoria, Australia) show that the GunaiKurnai nation has been performing magic and healing rituals there for at least 25,000 years - long before the earliest ethnographic records.
Near the village of Bidzar, in northern Cameroon, a field of marble slabs bears around five hundred engraved geometric figures, circles, spirals and cupules whose age and meaning remain unknown. Listed on the UNESCO tentative list, these engravings are impossible to date with any certainty. And while researchers puzzle over them, industrial marble quarrying is destroying the panels one by one.
At Marathousa 1 in Greece, two worked wooden objects dated to 430,000 years ago have just been identified as the oldest known handheld wooden tools. A rare window onto a forgotten craft, that of Lower Palaeolithic humans.
In 1963, a Cappadocian resident knocked down a wall in his cellar and uncovered a forgotten stairway. Behind it lay eighteen levels carved into volcanic tuff, an underground city able to shelter twenty thousand people. An investi…
Read →About 2100 years ago, beneath the walls of Perusia, the soldiers of Octavian and those of Lucius Antonius pelted o…
Read →In a field in south Belfast, archaeologists from Queen's University, working alongside volunteers and local school…
Read →Deep in a valley of Burgundy, where the Seine is born, the Gauls worshipped Sequana, a healing goddess of the wate…
Read →Between Senegal and the Gambia, more than a thousand circles of standing stones line a band of savanna some 350 kilometres long. Carved from laterite with iron tools, these protohistoric monuments cover the graves of a prosperous…
Read →Raised in 1901 from a Roman shipwreck off a small Greek island, this geared calculator, more than two thousand yea…
Read →On a hill overlooking the Oued Laou valley in northern Morocco, a recently excavated site reveals a stable farming…
Read →Beneath the cliff of Jbeil, Lebanon, a landslide in 1922 revealed the tombs of the princes of Byblos. Gold, obsidi…
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