Prehistory news
From 3 million years ago to the dawn of our era: archaeological discoveries, palaeogenetics, cave art and the great transformations of human societies.
At Ségognole 3, in the Fontainebleau sandstones, researchers show that a sandstone floor was Palaeolithic-carved to depict the landscape and channel water: a hydrau…
Read →On the Russian plain, two Upper Palaeolithic children have rested for 30,000 years beneath more than 10,000 ivory beads, mammoth-tusk spears and hundreds of fox tee…
Read →From the valley of the Don to the shores of Lake Baikal, Upper Palaeolithic hunters left behind burials blanketed in tens of thousands of ivory beads, dwellings built from mammoth bone, and some of the oldest statuettes ever made. Ancient DNA revealed an unexpected population there, a common ancestor of both Europeans and the first Americans. A journey across a world of frozen steppe, between Kostenki, Sungir and Mal'ta.
Researchers from the Francis Crick Institute and the University of Liverpool have sequenced the oldest and most complete genome ever obtained from a pharaonic-era Egyptian. This man who died 4,500 years ago carried 20 % ancestry from the Fertile Crescent — the first genetic confirmation of Egypt–Mesopotamia links.
Before it was human, laughter belonged to the great apes. By tickling orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos, primatologist Marina Davila-Ross reconstructed the acoustic genealogy of our giggles and traced their origin to a common ancestor that lived 10 to 16 million years ago.
At Saint-Césaire, in south-western France, the 2024 excavations yielded a vanishingly rare deciduous tooth from a Neanderthal child, about 55,000 years old. Tied to the famous skeleton nicknamed Pierrette, it is a reminder that t…
Read →Austrian archaeologists announced in April 2026 the discovery of 32 gold and carnelian jewellery pieces on Kolona …
Read →On the banks of the Don, twenty-five kilometres from Voronezh, the Kostenki complex encompasses twenty-six Palaeol…
Read →A CNRS team has succeeded in directly radiocarbon-dating Palaeolithic paintings in Font-de-Gaume cave, Dordogne. A…
Read →As the last Ice Age waned, two great stone-tool traditions record the arrival of the first South Americans: the Paijanian fishers of the Peruvian desert and the fishtail-point hunters who ranged from Ecuador to Tierra del Fuego.
The first ancient genomes ever published for Colombia reveal a population of hunter-gatherers living near Bogotá around 6,000 years ago. These people left no genetic descendants, neither in later groups nor among present-day populations. It is a rare case of a lineage vanishing completely, replaced by farmers who arrived from Central America.
Near Haifa, a cave sealed for hundreds of thousands of years has yielded handaxes, scrapers and animal bones from a human group that lived just before Neanderthals and modern humans arrived.
In 1987, on the verge of being drowned beneath a reservoir, a fortified circular town surfaced in the steppes of the southern Urals. Arkaim and its neighbours revealed a Bronze Age society that, four thousand years ago, invented …
Read →Silent for a century, the script of the kingdom of Elam, in Iran, has been deciphered by François Desset thanks to…
Read →The DNA of West African populations carries up to 19% ancestry from an archaic population unknown from fossils. Th…
Read →In a Libyan shelter, the DNA of two women mummified 7,000 years ago reveals a North African human lineage that sta…
Read →In northern Kazakhstan, the Botai culture maintained a close relationship with horses as early as 3,500 BC. But ancient DNA has upended the story: these horses are not the ancestors of modern horses. Was domestication achieved tw…
Read →In Arne Qvam Cave in northern Norway, bone and ancient DNA reveal 46 species (polar bears, walruses, seabirds) pre…
Read →On the Cape south coast, a team has dated seven fossil footprint sites to between 71,000 and 153,000 years. The ol…
Read →Spy, Scladina, Goyet: since 1886, the caves of the Meuse Valley have yielded fossils that shaped our knowledge of …
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