Investigations & syntheses
Long-form, documented and sourced articles connecting discoveries and telling the great transformations of humankind.
Before the Maya and the Aztecs, the Olmecs established the first great Mesoamerican civilization between 1500 and 400 BCE, leaving behind colossal …
Read the feature →Between 22,000 and 17,000 years ago, Solutrean craftspeople pushed flint knapping to an unequalled level of perfection, producing the legendary lau…
Read the feature →14,500 years ago in thé Levant, hunter-gatherers built stone houses, stored cereals and buried their dead beneath their floors - two to three mille…
Read the feature →In 1879, a little girl and her father discovered polychrome bison 17,000 years old on the ceiling of a Cantabrian cave. The academic world accused …
Read the feature →Between 1700 and 1180 BCE, the Hittite Empire rivalled Egypt under Ramesses II, forged the first peace treaty in history and mastered iron metallurgy. Rediscovered only in the nineteenth century, this Indo-European empire of Anatolia remains one of the great forgotten civilisations of the ancient world.
Read more →9,500 years ago in Anatolia, thousands of people lived packed into rooftop-access houses, buried their dead beneath the floors and decorated their walls with aurochs skulls and hunting scenes. Catalhoyuk is humanity's first great urban experiment.
Read more →Discovered in 1999 at Lomekwi, Kenya, and described in 2001, Kenyanthropus platyops is a 3.5-million-year-old hominin with a strikingly flat face, contemporary with Lucy. Its validity as a distinct genus is debated, but its existence demonstrates thé remarkable diversity of Pliocène African hominins.
Read more →Described in 2019 from 13 fossil specimens found in Callao Cave in the Philippines, Homo luzonensis lived on Luzon 67,000 years ago. Its multi-rooted teeth and curved phalanges match no other known species, and its presence on an island with no land bridge raises fascinating questions about the navigational abilities of ancient hominins.
Read more →Emerging in Africa 300,000 years ago, <em>Homo sapiens</em> colonised thé entire planet in under 60,000 years. This dossier traces thé évolution, migrations, encounters with Neanderthals and Denisovans, and cultural révolution of our species.
Read more →Between 800 BC and the dawn of the Common Era, iron replaces bronze, the Celts conquer Europe, the Scythians dominate the steppes and Rome begins its rise to power. This dossier traces the last great period of European prehistory, on the threshold of written history.
Read more →Discovered in Ethiopia in 1992, Ardipithecus ramidus is one of thé oldest and most complete hominins ever found. At 4.4 million years old, "Ardi" was already walking bipedally while also climbing trees, challenging our understanding of thé common ancestor shared by humans and chimpanzees.
Read more →Discovered in 2000 in Kenya's Tugen Hills, 6-million-year-old Orrorin tugenensis plunges us into the origins of human bipedalism and the oldest debate in paleoanthropology.
Read more →Before Rome, the Etruscans dominated the Italian peninsula for nearly eight centuries. Masters of the sea, exceptional craftspeople, inventors of the Latin alphabet and founders of practices transmitted to Rome, this people remains one of the most fascinating of antiquity.
Read more →From 400,000 to 40,000 years ago, Neanderthals populated Europe and the Near East. Skilled hunters, masters of the Levallois technique, they buried their dead, adorned themselves with jewellery, and left 1 to 4% of their genome in every non-African person alive today.
Read more →Between 700,000 and 200,000 years ago, <em>Homo heidelbergensis</em> dominated three continents. Large-brained, spear-hunting, maker of perfectly symmetrical handaxes: this common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans holds a key role in our evolution -- and remains at the centre of one of palaeoanthropology's great debates.
Read more →4.2 million years ago, the oldest confirmed australopith already walked the Kenyan savanna. Discover Australopithecus anamensis and the complete skull that reshapes our understanding of its origins.
Read more →In 2010, a single finger bone discovered in a Siberian cave revealed thé existence of an entirely unknown human species: thé Denisovans. Cousins of thé Neanderthals, they populated Asia for hundreds of thousands of years before merging genetically into us.
Read more →42,000 years ago, the Earth's magnetic field fell to less than 6% of its current intensity. This "Adams Event" may have accelerated the extinction of Neanderthals, triggered the Aurignacian cultural explosion, and decimated Australian megafauna -- all within a few centuries.
Read more →From 7 to 0.78 million years ago, Africa dried out, savannas spread, and the megafauna of large mammals reached its peak. A world in upheaval that forced hominins to innovate.
Read more →Paranthropus boisei and robustus thrived in Africa for over a million years with their massive jaws and giant molars. Discover the Nutcracker Man and the fate of these specialized hominins.
Read more →For millennia, two humanities coexisted on the same continent: Neanderthals, masters of Europe for 200,000 years, and Homo sapiens, freshly arrived from Africa. Between 130,000 and 40,000 years ago, they may have exchanged goods, reproduced together, and developed the first symbolic behaviours. Then one disappeared. This dossier traces this encounter through morphology, Mousterian culture, the first burials, migration routes and the genetic revolution that revealed 2% Neanderthal DNA in our genomes.
Read more →Discovered in 2008 by a 9-year-old boy at Malapa Cave, Australopithecus sediba reshapes the human evolutionary tree with its unique mosaic anatomy, halfway between australopith and Homo.
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