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 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 →From Hohle Fels to Willendorf, nearly two hundred female figurines span 30,000 years. Fertility symbols, portraits, ritual objects? The mystery endures.
Read more →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?
Read more →Discovered in 2003 in Liang Bua cave (Indonesia), Homo floresiensis stood barely a metre tall. Tiny brain, stone tools, hunting of dwarf elephant: this island cousin upends everything we thought we knew about human evolution in South-East Asia.
Read more →From Peking Man to the bronzes of Sanxingdui, from Yangshao painted pottery to Shang oracle bones: a 25-minute journey through one of the longest and most diverse regional prehistories in the world.
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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