Documentary films & series
Our analyses and companions to the great documentaries on prehistory and antiquity: what science actually says, with sources.
In 2010, Eric Audinet and Patrick Glotin created a dizzying science mockumentary: what if an unknown branch of the genus Homo had survived to the present day, hidden deep in the forests?
Watch the documentary →Between January and February 2026, Jean-Jacques Hublin, professor at the Collège de France, delivered six lectures on the fundamental question: how and why did <em>Homo sapiens</em> replace all other human species? Available in full on YouTube, they are an exceptional resource for understanding our own evolutionary history.
Watch the documentary →Beneath the ruins of Byblos, one of the world's oldest cities, a royal Bronze Age necropolis reveals its secrets: Phoenician treasures, pharaonic gifts, and the birth of the alphabet. A dive into a vanished world.
Watch the documentary →35,000 years ago, humans anatomically identical to us ventured into the darkness of caves to paint masterpieces. Who were the Cro-Magnons, and what were they expressing on the walls of Font-de-Gaume, Altamira, and Lascaux?
Watch the documentary →Its entrance is 37 metres below the sea. Its paintings are 27,000 years old. Cosquer Cave, discovered by a diver in 1985 in the Marseille calanques, is the only known decorated cave in the world whose access is submerged, a masterpiece that rising seas threaten to engulf for ever.
Watch the documentary →Since 2019, dozens of international teams have returned to Mesopotamian sites around Mosul, inaccessible for half a century. This ARTE documentary follows their excavations and traces the history of the Sumerian and Assyrian dynasties.
Watch the documentary →From the Fertile Crescent to the first cities of Mari and Ebla, from Palmyra to Damascus: beneath Syria's sands lie the roots of civilization. A documentary, from the Neolithic revolution to living heritage.
Watch the documentary →Lascaux, Altamira, reindeer-antler harpoons and sculptures of extraordinary refinement: at the close of the Ice Age, Magdalenian hunters brought Palaeolithic art to its peak. A documentary on the carved face of these artists.
Watch the documentary →Around 1350 BCE, pharaoh Akhenaten overturned Egyptian religion, imposed the cult of the solar disc Aten, founded Amarna and reinvented art. An ARTE documentary on a monotheistic revolution with no future.
Watch the documentary →Grid cities, covered drains, engraved seals and an undeciphered script: a dive into the vastest and most mysterious of the Bronze Age civilizations, with the imineo documentary.
Watch the documentary →The only wonder of the ancient world still standing, the Great Pyramid of Khufu continues to defy archaeologists. An empty sarcophagus, a hidden corridor revealed in 2023, the Merer papyrus, the workers' village , 2.0 archaeology keeps pushing back the boundaries of the possible.
Watch the documentary →Between 50,000 and 35,000 years ago, Neanderthals vanished as Homo sapiens produced the first artworks and built the first social networks. Seven filmed lectures from the Collège de France dissect this pivotal turning point in human history.
Watch the documentary →From the semi-buried pit houses of the early Basketmakers to the great houses of Chaco Canyon and the cliff villages of Mesa Verde, the Ancestral Puebloan culture shaped the Four Corners landscape for nearly three millennia. A look back at a farming, sky-watching, city-building civilization whose heirs still live in the Hopi and Zuni pueblos.
Watch the documentary →At Saqqara, archaeologists unearth an Old Kingdom vizier's tomb, untouched for 4,000 years. Who was this all-powerful man? What does his tomb reveal about the secret organisation of pharaonic power?
Watch the documentary →Second part: the climatic aridification around 2200 BCE dries up the Nile floods, starves populations and precipitates civil wars. The Ipuwer Papyrus testifies to a world turned upside down.
Watch the documentary →How did the most powerful empire of the ancient world collapse in less than a century? This Arte documentary retraces the political disintegration of the Egyptian Old Kingdom.
Watch the documentary →Nota Bonus hosts Franck Monnier, associate researcher at the CNRS, for an hour-long interview on ancient Egyptian building techniques. Pyramids, ramps, quarrymen, site organisation: science has answered far more questions than most people realise.
Watch the documentary →Where the North Sea now lies, hunter-gatherers lived 10,000 years ago. Doggerland, a vast plain linking Britain to the continent, was slowly drowned, then swept by a tsunami.
Watch the documentary →