Scotland: human bones turned into tools in an Iron Age tomb
In a cairn in northern Scotland, a woman's bones were shaped into points and edges, used, then carefully returned to their anatomical position. A rare and baffling …
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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.
In a cairn in northern Scotland, a woman's bones were shaped into points and edges, used, then carefully returned to their anatomical position. A rare and baffling …
Read →At Vitry-sur-Seine, an Inrap excavation uncovers a rare Mesolithic camp preserved by the Seine's floods. A first window onto the last hunter-gatherers of the Val-de…
Read →One hundred and twenty-four radiocarbon dates prove it: far from empty, the high Pyrenees have been visited without interruption since the early Holocene. A shelter perched at 2,320 metres holds the oldest traces.
In Burgundy, the Grande Grotte of Arcy holds France's oldest still-visible paintings, 28,000 years old. Neanderthals then Cro-Magnons succeeded one another there. A long-mistreated treasure, now protected.
Deep in a South African cave lie some twenty individuals of an extinct, tiny-brained humanity. Analysis of their proteins has just delivered a baffling result: they may all be female. A sign of chosen burial?
Fired nearly 2,800 years ago, jars stamped by the Kingdom of Judah froze the state of Earth's magnetic field into their clay. They reveal a spectacular anomaly, and give archaeologists a clock of unprecedented precision.
Read →What if the Neanderthals' demise was due not only to climate or competition from Sapiens, but to a hidden flaw in …
Read →Neanderthal dental tartar betrays an unexpected menu: insect larvae and eggs, eaten regularly. Their digestion cou…
Read →The deformed skull of a prehistoric girl, unearthed in Spain, bears the mark of a rare malformation. That she live…
Read →At Jabal al-Tayr in Middle Egypt, a vast necropolis five millennia old reveals the evolution of funerary architecture, from the tombs of earliest pharaonic Egypt to the first pyramids.
A First Art team, with the Max Planck Institute, has recovered ancient human DNA straight from the walls of eleven caves in Spain and Portugal. The walls could become genuine "biological archives".
A re-examination of a 120,000-year-old fossil child reveals a mosaic of sapiens and Neanderthal traits, one more piece in the case for ancient, complex interbreeding.
Some sixty footprints fossilised in gypsum push back human arrival in North America by several millennia.
Read →At this twin site of Göbekli Tepe, a monolith nearly 12,000 years old bears a sharply defined human face. Never se…
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