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 yea…
Read the article →In October 2026, the National Museum of the Eastern Carpathians announced the discovery of a female clay figurine roughly 6,500 years old, unearthe…
Read the article →In September 2026, a team led by Brazilian designer Cícero Moraes published in the journal Heritage a facial approximation of the oldest known Homo…
Read the article →For the first time, a hip bone, a femur and a tibia still joined together from a single Paranthropus robustus have been freed from the Swartkrans c…
Read the article →On a small island in the Limfjord, north of Aalborg, Danish archaeologists have uncovered an 8,400-year-old deer antler axe preserved with its wooden handle. It is an object of extreme rarity in Scandinavia, because the wooden part almost always rots away. Here is the story of an exceptional find, and a journey into the world of the hunter-gatherers of Mesolithic northern Europe.
For fifteen years, the Denisovans were a people of ghosts, known from DNA but almost faceless. In October 2026, a team led by Qiaomei Fu, in Beijing, reassigned roughly twenty fossils from the Chinese site of Xujiayao, at least 130,000 years old, to these vanished humans. Thanks to ancient proteins preserved in the bones, researchers can finally describe a low, sloping forehead, a massive brow ridge, rectangular eye sockets and flat cheeks. The story of a face slowly emerging from the shadows.
In a rock shelter in Catalonia, near Capellades, the Neanderthals left behind nearly six hundred wooden remains and imprints, trapped by travertine the way the bodies of Pompeii were trapped by ash. Spears, bark trays, a pole over five metres long and a strange club with no known parallel: the study by Palmira Saladié and her team, published in Science Advances, brings back to life a whole invisible side of these vanished humans' domestic world.
In Shanidar Cave, in Iraqi Kurdistan, the shoulder blade of a 75,000-year-old Neanderthal bears a near circular hole. For the Cambridge archaeologists who found it, that perforation marks a wooden spear driven toward the heart, possibly the earliest known case of a human struck down by a thrown weapon. The story of a fossil that holds both violence and compassion.
In a small cave in the Loire Valley, sealed by river floods for tens of thousands of years, researchers have identified more than four hundred finger-made marks across eight panels. Dated to over 57,000 years ago and attributed to Neanderthals, these engravings rank among the oldest in Europe and overturn the idea that art belonged to Homo sapiens alone.
In south-eastern Türkiye, a small paved workshop sheltered by a canopy has yielded 42 fragments of malachite and copper beads. Around 6900 BC, specialised craftspeople were already working humanity's first metal there.
For seventeen millennia, the paintings of Lascaux crossed time in darkness and silence. Opened to the public in 1948, the Perigord cave saw its walls colonised by green algae and then by a veil of calcite in barely fifteen years, under the breath of more than a million visitors. On 17 April 1963, Andre Malraux closed it to save it, opening one of the greatest conservation projects in the history of art.
In six Chinese teeth around 400,000 years old, an ameloblastin variant previously known only in Denisovans. Interbreeding with Homo erectus, or Denisovan teeth? Palaeoanthropologists are divided.
A 2024 study in Nature Communications places the Persian Plateau at the heart of our prehistory. Between the main out of Africa dispersal and the lasting settlement of Eurasia, our ancestors are thought to have lingered there for nearly twenty thousand years. Genetics and climate modelling converge on this region, east of the Zagros, as the cradle of all non Africans.
Made with techniques available to Neanderthals, birch tar, humanity's oldest glue, slows the growth of Staphylococcus aureus. A lead towards Neanderthal medicine, still to be proven.
The recumbent slab at the heart of Stonehenge, long attributed to Wales, in fact comes from northeast Scotland. A 2024 study in Nature dated the minerals in the stone and traced their signature more than 750 kilometres from Salisbury Plain. The finding reshapes our picture of Neolithic Britain.
By reading the shape of cells in fossil leaves from Wyoming, palaeobotanists have reconstructed the history of forests during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. At first thriving, they lost 60% of their cover and took more than 100,000 years to recover.
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 →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.
Watch the documentary →In Brazil, within 25,000-year-old layers at Serra da Capivara, archaeologist Eric Boeda examines strange quartzite pebbles. Dating, microscopic analysis and experimental archaeology reveal tools that challenge the chronology of the peopling of the Americas.
Watch the documentary →