Sungir: the children buried with thousands of beads 30,000 years ago
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…
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From 3 million years ago to the dawn of our era: archaeological discoveries, palaeogenetics, cave art and the great transformations of human societies.
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 →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 E…
Read →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.
Austrian archaeologists announced in April 2026 the discovery of 32 gold and carnelian jewellery pieces on Kolona hill, Aegina. These 3,500-year-old objects bear a striking resemblance to the famous Aegina Treasure held at the British Museum.
On the banks of the Don, twenty-five kilometres from Voronezh, the Kostenki complex encompasses twenty-six Palaeolithic sites spanning 45,000 years of human presence. Circular mammoth-bone structures, some of the oldest European genomes ever sequenced, sophisticated tools and portable art: Kostenki reveals how Homo sapiens conquered and inhabited glacial Europe long before the Last Glacial Maximum.
17,000 years ago in Calabria, a severely disabled young man survived for several years thanks to the care of his hunter-gatherer group. Romito 2 is one of the oldest and most moving proofs of human solidarity in the Upper Palaeol…
Read →A 2026 study published in Science demonstrates that interbreeding between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens mainly inv…
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 Pa…
Read →Researchers from the University of Iowa identified in March 2026 a new species of prehistoric crocodile in the Hadar Formation in Ethiopia -- the same site as Lucy. Named Crocodylus lucivenator ("Lucy's hunter"), this 4 to 5-metre animal shared the habitat of Australopithecines 3 to 3.4 million years ago.
In 2007, archaeologists near Mantua discovered two Neolithic skeletons embracing, forehead to forehead, for 6,000 years. The Lovers of Valdaro have become the symbol of the complex and poignant funerary practices of the European Neolithic.
A study conducted by researchers from Inrap on nitrogen isotopes in prehistoric bones shows that women consumed less meat than men from the earliest studied hunter-gatherers through to the modern era, a cultural rather than physiological inequality.
Excavations at Casas del Turunuelo in Guareña (Badajoz) unearthed in June 2026 the first Tartessian bronze chariot ever discovered on the Iberian Peninsula, dating to the 5th century BCE and with no known equivalent outside Etrur…
Read →A cave sealed for 300,000 years near Fureidis, at the foot of Mount Carmel, reveals a hominin clan from the myster…
Read →A study published in PLOS ONE in 2026 provides new évidence that hominins -- most likely Homo erectus -- were intr…
Read →Discovered in 2004 in Yakutia and reconstructed in 3D by NEFU University in Yakutsk, a 4,200-year-old Ymyyakhtakh …
Read →Analyses of milk teeth from Neanderthal specimens, including those from Saint-Cesaire in France, show that Neanderthal babies were weaned around 14 months -- like modern children -- but that their milk teeth erupted significantly…
Read →At Kurd Qaburstan in Iraqi Kurdistan, a University of Central Florida team has unearthed cuneiform tablets, fortif…
Read →In Upper Egypt, two tombs dated to the Early Dynastic period (c. 3100-2686 BCE) show an unusual geometry, walls th…
Read →A fire that destroyed a Spanish Bronze Age village 3,500 years ago paradoxically preserved an almost complete loom…
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