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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Upper Palaeolithic / Prehistoric art

Cro-Magnon and the Origins of Cave Art: When Homo sapiens Invented the Image

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.

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Upper Palaeolithic

Dolní Věstonice: the world's oldest ceramic

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.

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Palaeogenetics

Dog domestication: the birth of the dog

Between 15,000 and 40,000 years ago, a wild wolf crossed the invisible threshold that separates fauna from companions. How do palaeogenetics and archaeology reconstruct the birth of humanity's best friend?

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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

Prehistoric Arabia: humanity's overlooked crossroads

Now a vast desert, the Arabian Peninsula was repeatedly transformed into lush savanna crossed by lakes and rivers. Footprints 120,000 years old, an Homo sapiens finger bone dating to 88,000 years, and monumental rock engravings 12,800 years old reveal one of humanity's most crucial crossroads.

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Palaeoanthropology

The first burials: when humanity began to bury its dead

At Qafzeh and Skhul, 100,000 years ago, Homo sapiens laid its dead in pits, with ochre and offerings. The origins of the funerary gesture and symbolic thought.

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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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Peopling

Sahul: the great crossing to Australia, 65,000 years ago

Reaching Australia from Asia meant crossing open sea, never seeing the far shore. 65,000 years ago, people did it, the oldest open-water voyaging in human history.

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