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.
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 grea…
Read →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 teeth. The Sungir site near Vladimir holds one of the most spectacular burials ever discovered , and raises profound questions about social status, funerary rites and the complexity of the earliest human societies.
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.
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 Br…
Read →On the banks of the Don, twenty-five kilometres from Voronezh, the Kostenki complex encompasses twenty-six 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 Paijanian fishers of the Peruvian desert and the fishtail-point hunters who ranged from Ecuador to Tierra del Fuego.
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.
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 evidence 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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