Investigations & syntheses
Long-form, documented and sourced articles connecting discoveries and telling the great transformations of humankind.
About 74,000 years ago, the Toba volcano in Sumatra produced one of the most violent eruptions of the Quaternary and scattered its ash as far as In…
Read the feature →Some 336 metres from the entrance of a cave in southwestern France, in total darkness, Neanderthals broke and stacked nearly four hundred pieces of…
Read the feature →A small skull fragment, left for nearly three decades in the stores of a South African museum, has just been assigned to Homo erectus. Dated to abo…
Read the feature →The Schöningen spears, the joined logs of Kalambo Falls, the Pesse canoe, the Holmegaard bows, Ötzi's equipment: an investigation into the most use…
Read the feature →Inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List in 1982, the Tassili n'Ajjer preserves more than 15,000 rock paintings and engravings: a unique visual archive of 10,000 years of Saharan human history.
Read more →Ancient DNA overturns long-held assumptions: in Peru 9,000 years ago, women were buried with complete hunting toolkits. 41 percent of the studied hunter burials contained female remains.
Read more →For 1.8 million years, Homo erectus colonised three continents, invented the Acheulean handaxe, tamed fire, and cared for its elderly. This dossier traces the history of the most long-lived human species: its discoveries, anatomy, migrations, and the mysteries it still poses.
Read more →From Neolithic trepanation to the 31,000-year-old surgical amputation at Borneo, prehistoric surgeons operated with surprising technical mastery and remarkable survival rates.
Read more →Unearthed at Les Eyzies in 1868, the Cro-Magnon people were the first Homo sapiens in Europe. Within a few millennia, these hunter-gatherers of the Aurignacian through Magdalenian cultures covered the walls of Chauvet, Lascaux, Altamira and Pech Merle with horses, bison and hand stencils, giving birth to one of humanity's oldest symbolic languages.
Read more →Beyond the Pillars of Hercules, before Rome and before Carthage, a brilliant civilisation flourished for five centuries. Tartessos, rich in gold, silver and tin, dazzled the Greeks, traded with the Phoenicians, and vanished mysteriously in the 5th century BC.
Read more →In Brazil's Piaui state, hearths dated to 48,000 years ago and extraordinary rock paintings have shaken the consensus on when humans first arrived in the Americas.
Read more →For over a million years, a [[hominide|hominin]] with extraordinary jaws coexisted with the earliest members of our genus across eastern and southern Africa. Paranthropus is not our ancestor, but its fate sheds light on what made Homo a success.
Read more →Gridded streets, calibrated bricks, sewers, a Great Bath: Mohenjo-daro was one of the largest cities of the Bronze Age world. Yet with no palace, no monumental temple, no clearly identified king. A different idea of civilisation.
Read more →In South Moravia, the Gravettian site of Dolní Věstonice yielded the oldest fired ceramic figurine in human history, the Venus of Věstonice, −26,000 years, a spectacular triple burial, and the remains of a 28,000-year-old kiln. Our ancestors' art and technology reached unsuspected sophistication here.
Read more →On an island in the Rann of Kutch, the Harappan city of Dholavira thrived for fifteen centuries thanks to a genius for water: cut reservoirs, dams and channels. A masterpiece of urban planning in an arid land.
Read more →In 2019, the DNA of a Harappan woman from Rakhigarhi revealed a profile with no steppe ancestry: a mix of South Asian hunter-gatherers and an ancient Iranian lineage. One genome, a thousand debates, to be handled with care.
Read more →On the island of Gozo, Malta, the Ġgantija temples were built between −3,600 and −2,500. They are the world's oldest freestanding stone structures, more than a millennium older than the pyramids of Giza. The civilisation that built them vanished without known descendants.
Read more →In the heart of Madhya Pradesh, over 700 rock shelters preserve paintings from the Mesolithic to historic times: hunts, dances, animals. Proof that rock art was a global phenomenon, not only a European one.
Read more →In Balochistan, long before the cities of the Indus, the site of Mehrgarh tells eight millennia of village life: the first wheat, the first herds, mud-brick houses, figurines and even 9,000-year-old dentistry.
Read more →Built around −3,200 in Ireland, Newgrange is a passage mound 85 metres across whose burial chamber floods with light at the winter solstice sunrise, with a precision that required centuries of astronomical observation. Older than Stonehenge and the Pyramids, it remains one of European megalithism's greatest mysteries.
Read more →Around 1250 BCE, King Ammistamru II of Ugarit repudiated the daughter of the king of Amurru. On a clay tablet, the Hittite great king Tudhaliya IV personally arbitrated this oldest known royal divorce, turned into a diplomatic crisis between vassals.
Read more →At Jabal al-Tayr in Middle Egypt, two Early Dynastic tombs with battered walls, echoing King Den's royal tomb at Abydos, illuminate the engineering experiments that, a thousand years later, would lead to the pyramids.
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