Prehistory Features: in-depth documented articles, Mondes Préhistoriques

Middle Palaeolithic / Peopling of Asia

Toba, the Super-Eruption That Did Not Erase Humanity: What the Site of Dhaba Reveals

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 India and East Africa. For a long time it was thought to have nearly wiped our species off the map. In the Son Valley of India, the site of Dhaba tells a very different story: that of populations who came through the catastrophe without breaking the thread of their craft.

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Palaeoanthropology

Drimolen: a bone forgotten for thirty years in a drawer pushes Homo erectus back to two million years

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 about two million years, it becomes the oldest known adult fossil of the species, some 200,000 years before Dmanisi. The discovery, published in Annals of Human Biology in 2026, reopens the debate on the cradle of humankind.

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Palaeoanthropology

Paranthropus: the robust cousin that almost ruled Africa

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.

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Prehistoric art

Blombos: the oldest symbolic drawings of Homo sapiens

In a cave overlooking the Indian Ocean, researchers found a 73,000-year-old ochre cross-hatch, the oldest known drawing by Homo sapiens. Blombos Cave reveals behavioural modernity far older than Europe's painted caves.

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Palaeoanthropology

Lucy: the skeleton that redrew the human family tree

On 24 November 1974, in Ethiopia's Afar, Donald Johanson unearthed a 3.2-million-year-old australopithecine. Lucy forced an unsettling truth: walking upright came long before the big brain.

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Palaeoanthropology

Human evolution: eight million years, a bush of species

From Sahelanthropus tchadensis (−7 Ma) to Homo sapiens, the human lineage is not a straight march but a dense bush populated by australopithecines, paranthropus and a dozen Homo species that coexisted, migrated and sometimes interbred. A complete tour of every known species.

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Peopling

Out of Africa: how Homo sapiens conquered the planet

From an African cradle to every continent: routes, population genetics, bottleneck and interbreeding. The odyssey that peopled the world.

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