Investigations & syntheses
Long-form, documented and sourced articles connecting discoveries and telling the great transformations of humankind.
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 →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.
Read more →In 1895, in the Dordogne, a decorated cave proved that prehistoric people had painted and engraved underground. La Mouthe ended years of scepticism and opened the era of cave art.
Read more →45,000 years ago, the first Homo sapiens in Europe carve the lion-man, cut bone flutes and invent figurative art. The great symbolic explosion.
Read more →36,000 years of images in the dark of caves. How these masterpieces upended our view of the first modern Europeans.
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