Investigations & syntheses
Long-form, documented and sourced articles connecting discoveries and telling the great transformations of humankind.
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 them of fraud for twenty years. The story of Altamira is also the story of prehistory's greatest collective mistake.
Read more →In the Mayo-Louti department, some 500 abstract geometric engravings were carved into calcite marble slabs -- between 300 and 3,000 years ago. The Bidzar site, reported in 1933 and a UNESCO heritage candidate, is a unique prehistoric treasure in Central Africa.
Read more →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 →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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