From four teeth about two million years old, found in the Swartkrans cave in South Africa, a University of Copenhagen team has managed to sequence …
Read the article →On a small Chesapeake island crumbling into the bay, a geologist claims to have found stone tools 22,000 years old, far earlier than the accepted d…
Read the article →A study from Aarhus and Johannesburg re-reads the geometry of Late Pleistocene points and raises an unsettling question: were our ancestors already…
Read the article →Found in 1924, the Taung Child skull, the type specimen of Australopithecus africanus, may be older than long assumed. Francis Thackeray and Sue Dy…
Read the article →In a cave in Puglia, the exceptionally preserved remains of an infant who died around 17,000 years ago have yielded the oldest known genome from Italy. His teeth and his DNA tell of a brief childhood, closely related parents and a strangely immobile mother. Through this one tiny body one reads the full fragility of the first communities repopulating Europe at the end of the last Ice Age.
For decades, dense tropical rainforests were seen as impassable barriers for early humans. A 2025 study in Nature overturns that view: at the Bété I site, some twenty kilometres north of Abidjan, Homo sapiens was already living in a humid West African forest around 150,000 years ago. It is the oldest firm evidence of a human presence in a tropical forest, pushed back by more than 130,000 years.
Re-examined by CT scan, the skull of a child buried around 140,000 years ago in Skhūl Cave, on Mount Carmel, reveals a puzzling anatomy: a modern-looking braincase set over an archaic-looking jaw. For some researchers, this mosaic points to early interbreeding with Neanderthals. Others caution that a mere assemblage of traits proves nothing, and that the DNA needed to settle the matter is missing.
Found in 1990 in Hubei, crushed and long filed by default among Homo erectus, the Yunxian 2 skull has now been digitally reconstructed. Despite its great age it shows advanced features that tie it to the Homo longi group and, in turn, to the enigmatic Denisovans. An international team draws from it a radically earlier timeline for the human lineages, at once praised and contested.
For years, the human bones scattered through the great enclosures of Göbekli Tepe fed the idea of a macabre skull cult. The discovery of the site's first two intact graves, described in a PLOS One study published in September 2026, overturns that story. The bodies had indeed been buried in the ground, and it was erosion of the slopes, not ritual, that spread the bones through the sanctuaries.
Some 2500 years ago, the trainee scribes of Babylon had to master hundreds of deities, with no religion class and no holy book. By studying the surviving school tablets, the assyriologist Shana Zaia reconstructs a curriculum in which faith was transmitted through writing itself.
A Purdue University anthropologist has reopened a century-old case by re-examining 46 skulls from Abydos held at Cambridge. On eighteen of them, lesions long dismissed as natural turn out to be trauma inflicted around the time of death. These wounds offer the first solid material evidence that Egypt's earliest kings had their servants killed to accompany them into the afterlife.
In September 2026, a University of Haifa team led by Hannah Farrell published in Quaternary Science Reviews the analysis of a 700,000-year-old elephant molar unearthed at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov amid basalt handaxes. The tooth belongs to Palaeoloxodon antiquus, the straight-tusked elephant, the largest land mammal of the Middle Pleistocene. Read as a biological archive, it brings back a whole landscape of oak woodland, marshes and rivers, shared by these giants and by the region's earliest stone toolmakers.
At the bottom of Lake Arendsee, in Saxony-Anhalt, divers have recovered pieces of wood worked 10,500 years ago by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. A post marked by felling and split planks that could, cautiously, point to built structures. Enough to reopen the question of these groups' dwellings, three millennia before the first farmers of central Europe.
About thirty metres down off the Turkish island of Kekova, divers have identified the wreck of a small cargo ship that sank some 4,400 to 4,700 years ago, when the Great Pyramid of Giza was being built. With no timber preserved, it was the shape of its jars that allowed it to be dated. Several of them still hold an intact residue, a chemical capsule of Bronze Age maritime trade.
In October 2026, the National Museum of the Eastern Carpathians announced the discovery of a female clay figurine roughly 6,500 years old, unearthed on the very first day of excavation at the Dâmbul Cetății site in Transylvania. Shaped from two separate masses of clay joined before firing, it cracked over the millennia along that very join, revealing its manufacturing method to the naked eye. A precious clue to the Cucuteni-Ariușd-Trypillia culture, one of Europe's first great civilisations.
In September 2026, a team led by Brazilian designer Cícero Moraes published in the journal Heritage a facial approximation of the oldest known Homo sapiens, some 300,000 years old, based on the Moroccan fossils from Jebel Irhoud. The result confirms a paradox first brought to light in 2017: a brain already close to modern size housed in a skull, and above all a face, with still very archaic proportions. The authors stress one point above all: this is a plausible approximation, never a faithful portrait.
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.
Read more →Some 336 metres from the entrance of a cave in southwestern France, in total darkness, Neanderthals broke and stacked nearly four hundred pieces of stalagmite to raise two large rings and four smaller piles, punctuated by fires. Calcite sealed the scene, and uranium-thorium dating gives it a staggering age: 176,500 years, about one hundred and thirty thousand years before Homo sapiens reached Europe. This is the story of the oldest known human architecture in the deep underground world.
Read more →A small skull fragment, left for nearly three decades in the stores of a South African museum, has just been assigned to Homo erectus. Dated to about two million years, it becomes the oldest known adult fossil of the species, some 200,000 years before Dmanisi. The discovery, published in Annals of Human Biology in 2026, reopens the debate on the cradle of humankind.
Read more →As the last Ice Age waned, small mobile bands pushed into an unknown continent with no pack animals to carry their gear. A study of nearly 500 stone points from the Tennessee Valley shows how the first hunters resharpened their weapons almost to exhaustion, and how their successors learned to discard without fear. Two ways of managing risk, written in stone.
Watch the documentary →At the foot of Teti's pyramid, Zahi Hawass's team uncovers 52 shafts and more than fifty New Kingdom coffins, the temple of an unknown queen and a four-metre Book of the Dead. A SLICE Histoire documentary, and what you need to know.
Watch the documentary →In the Dampier Archipelago of Western Australia, close to one million petroglyphs engraved over 50,000 years form the world's largest ensemble of engraved rock art. This SLICE HISTOIRE documentary explores this unique Aboriginal heritage and the threat posed by adjacent industrial installations.
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