Maikop: gold, kurgans and the Bronze Age Caucasus
Around 3500 BC in the North Caucasus, the Maikop culture buried its elites under great kurgans laden with gold and silver, at the crossroads of the steppes and the Near East.
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Long-form, documented and sourced articles connecting discoveries and telling the great transformations of humankind.
Around 3500 BC in the North Caucasus, the Maikop culture buried its elites under great kurgans laden with gold and silver, at the crossroads of the steppes and the Near East.
Read more →Around 2650 BC, at Saqqara, the architect Imhotep stacked mastabas to raise the first mountain of cut stone in history. Six steps, sixty metres, a colossal funerary complex: the story of the monument that started it all.
Read more →In Libya's Fezzan, the Wadi Mathendous holds one of the richest concentrations of rock engravings in the Sahara: long-necked giraffes, cattle, elephants and felines cut into stone 8,000 years ago, when the desert was a green savanna.
Read more →Six thousand years ago, north of the Black Sea, Cucuteni-Trypillia communities built settlements of thousands of houses, sometimes burned and rebuilt. Proto-cities, or another form of urbanism?
Read more →At Tell es-Sultan in the Jordan Valley, excavations uncovered an 11,000-year-old stone tower and dwellings dating to −10,000. Jericho is the oldest continuously inhabited city on earth, a laboratory for the transition from nomadic life to permanent settlement.
Read more →At Cerro de las Cabezas in central Spain, two men killed more than 2,200 years ago were cast against the town wall, uncremated, ringed by six large red deer antlers. The story of a 'bad death' with no parallel in Iron Age Iberia.
Read more →In the southern Urals around 2000 BC, the Sintashta culture built circular fortresses and invented the spoke-wheeled war chariot. A warrior society at the heart of the Indo-European steppe world.
Read more →Nearly 3,000 stones erected in straight rows across 4 kilometres of Breton moorland: the Carnac alignments remain one of the most imposing and enigmatic megalithic monuments on Earth. Listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2025.
Read more →Found in 1976 in the Pas-de-Calais, two 175,000-year-old skulls make the Biache 'pre-Neanderthals' the oldest human fossils of northern France, at the hinge between Homo erectus and the Neanderthals.
Read more →In the frozen kurgans of the Altai, permafrost preserved nomadic riders, their horses, carpets and tattoos for 2,500 years. Infrared imaging now reveals the body art of the steppe Scythians.
Read more →Thirty thousand years ago, under a glacial climate, the Gravettian hunters of the mammoth steppe carved the first Venus figurines, built mammoth-bone huts and buried their dead beneath thousands of ivory beads.
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 →In the Sierra de Atapuerca in Spain, a simple railway cutting opened Europe's richest prehistoric site. The Sima de los Huesos, the 'pit of bones', yielded the remains of 29 individuals aged 430,000 years, offering a unique window onto humanity before the Neanderthals.
Read more →Across an emergent Beringia, along the Pacific coast or through an ice-free corridor: how and when did Homo sapiens reach the last continent? From the White Sands footprints to pre-Clovis sites, an inquiry into a story being rewritten.
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 →How did our ancestors discover fire? When did they learn to produce it? A deep dive into 1.8 million years of a revolution that shaped our brains, our societies, and our humanity.
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 →An Altar Stone from Scotland 700 km away, Welsh bluestones transported by humans, lunar alignments, feasting networks spanning the British Isles , a complete overview of 2024, 2026 research.
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