Fire and burns: thé sélection pressure that shaped human skin
How Homo erectus's mastery of fire created sélection pressure on human skin, favoring reduced body haïr, eccrine sweat glands, and melanin pigmentation as UV protec…
Read →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.
How Homo erectus's mastery of fire created sélection pressure on human skin, favoring reduced body haïr, eccrine sweat glands, and melanin pigmentation as UV protec…
Read →Bird bones bearing cut marks and heat traces reveal that Neanderthals hunted and cooked birds using elaborate Mousterian techniques -- and may have accorded them sy…
Read →336 m underground, two rings of 400 broken stalagmites, 2.2 tonnes, reveal unsuspected Neanderthal social organization and mastery of fire, long before Homo sapiens.
A 2026 study in <em>Science Advances</em> demonstrates that quartz microliths from Umhlatuzana (KwaZulu-Natal) contain alkaloids from <em>Boophone disticha</em>, a toxic plant still used today by San hunters to poison their arrows.
Discovered by chance in Bulgaria in 1972, the Varna chalcolithic necropolis has yielded more than 3,000 gold artifacts dating back 6,600 years, including a unique tomb that alone concentrates nearly a third of all the gold at the site.
At Cueva de los Aviones in Spain, pierced, ochre-dyed shells show Neanderthals mastered symbolic adornment, 20,000 to 40,000 years before comparable evidence for Homo sapiens.
Read →A 2023 study published in <em>Scientific Reports</em> reveals that hominins at Bilzingsleben (Germany) systematica…
Read →A study published in <em>Nature Ecology & Evolution</em> in 2022 reveals that hominins were cooking carp on th…
Read →At Milovice IV, 29 flint blades gathered in a vanished pouch form the personal kit of a Gravettian hunter. Their s…
Read →Nearly 4,000 years ago, princesses of thé Egyptian Middle Kingdom were interred with bows, arrows and daggers. Long dismissed as funerary symbols, those weapons now look more lethal in light of bone analysis published in 2026.
On the shores of Lake Turkana, 1.5-million-year-old footprints prove that Homo erectus and Paranthropus boisei frequented the same lakeshore at the same time - the first direct evidence of such cohabitation.
At Boomplaas Cave, an antelope molar yielded the oldest DNA ever recovered in sub-Saharan Africa. Heat does not necessarily destroy DNA: palaeogenomics reaches the cradle of humankind.
Born in Kenya 1.76 million years ago, the Acheulean culture produced identical bifaces across three continents with no apparent contact between populations. Why so much craft invested in tools so often never used?
Read →A study published in Science reveals that Near Oceanian inhabitants carry 2.5 times more archaic DNA than European…
Read →At Tam Pà Ling in Laos, Homo sapiens remains dated to 86,000-68,000 years push our species' presence in Southeast …
Read →Deep in Casablanca, the Hominid Cave of Thomas Quarry I has yielded skull fragments dated to 773,000 years ago, fi…
Read →In Israel, five red-ochre burials in fetal position show that Levantine Neanderthals and Homo sapiens shared tools and funerary rites. A cultural closeness far greater than assumed.
Read →At Ségognole 3, in the Fontainebleau sandstones, researchers show that a sandstone floor was Palaeolithic-carved t…
Read →On the Russian plain, two Upper Palaeolithic children have rested for 30,000 years beneath more than 10,000 ivory …
Read →Researchers from the Francis Crick Institute and the University of Liverpool have sequenced the oldest and most co…
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