Investigations & syntheses
Long-form, documented and sourced articles connecting discoveries and telling the great transformations of humankind.
9,500 years ago in Anatolia, thousands of people lived packed into rooftop-access houses, buried their dead beneath the floors and decorated their …
Read the feature →Discovered in 1999 at Lomekwi, Kenya, and described in 2001, Kenyanthropus platyops is a 3.5-million-year-old hominin with a strikingly flat face, …
Read the feature →Described in 2019 from 13 fossil specimens found in Callao Cave in the Philippines, Homo luzonensis lived on Luzon 67,000 years ago. Its multi-root…
Read the feature →Emerging in Africa 300,000 years ago, <em>Homo sapiens</em> colonised the entire planet in under 60,000 years. This dossier traces the evolution, m…
Read the feature →Between 800 BC and the dawn of the Common Era, iron replaces bronze, the Celts conquer Europe, the Scythians dominate the steppes and Rome begins its rise to power. This dossier traces the last great period of European prehistory, on the threshold of written history.
Read more →Discovered in Ethiopia in 1992, Ardipithecus ramidus is one of the oldest and most complete hominins ever found. At 4.4 million years old, "Ardi" was already walking bipedally while also climbing trees, challenging our understanding of the common ancestor shared by humans and chimpanzees.
Read more →Discovered in 2000 in Kenya's Tugen Hills, 6-million-year-old Orrorin tugenensis plunges us into the origins of human bipedalism and the oldest debate in paleoanthropology.
Read more →Before Rome, the Etruscans dominated the Italian peninsula for nearly eight centuries. Masters of the sea, exceptional craftspeople, inventors of the Latin alphabet and founders of practices transmitted to Rome, this people remains one of the most fascinating of antiquity.
Read more →From 400,000 to 40,000 years ago, Neanderthals populated Europe and the Near East. Skilled hunters, masters of the Levallois technique, they buried their dead, adorned themselves with jewellery, and left 1 to 4% of their genome in every non-African person alive today.
Read more →Between 700,000 and 200,000 years ago, <em>Homo heidelbergensis</em> dominated three continents. Large-brained, spear-hunting, maker of perfectly symmetrical handaxes: this common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans holds a key role in our evolution -- and remains at the centre of one of palaeoanthropology's great debates.
Read more →4.2 million years ago, the oldest confirmed australopith already walked the Kenyan savanna. Discover Australopithecus anamensis and the complete skull that reshapes our understanding of its origins.
Read more →In 2010, a single finger bone discovered in a Siberian cave revealed the existence of an entirely unknown human species: the Denisovans. Cousins of the Neanderthals, they populated Asia for hundreds of thousands of years before merging genetically into us.
Read more →42,000 years ago, the Earth's magnetic field fell to less than 6% of its current intensity. This "Adams Event" may have accelerated the extinction of Neanderthals, triggered the Aurignacian cultural explosion, and decimated Australian megafauna -- all within a few centuries.
Read more →From 7 to 0.78 million years ago, Africa dried out, savannas spread, and the megafauna of large mammals reached its peak. A world in upheaval that forced hominins to innovate.
Read more →Paranthropus boisei and robustus thrived in Africa for over a million years with their massive jaws and giant molars. Discover the Nutcracker Man and the fate of these specialized hominins.
Read more →For millennia, two humanities coexisted on the same continent: Neanderthals, masters of Europe for 200,000 years, and Homo sapiens, freshly arrived from Africa. Between 130,000 and 40,000 years ago, they may have exchanged goods, reproduced together, and developed the first symbolic behaviours. Then one disappeared. This dossier traces this encounter through morphology, Mousterian culture, the first burials, migration routes and the genetic revolution that revealed 2% Neanderthal DNA in our genomes.
Read more →Discovered in 2008 by a 9-year-old boy at Malapa Cave, Australopithecus sediba reshapes the human evolutionary tree with its unique mosaic anatomy, halfway between australopith and Homo.
Read more →At Dmanisi in Georgia, five skulls aged 1.8 million years revolutionize the history of human evolution. Discover the oldest hominins ever found outside Africa.
Read more →1.9 million years ago, Homo ergaster redefined human evolution: modern body proportions, enlarged brain, Acheulean handaxes. Discover the Turkana Boy and the revolution he represents.
Read more →Between 780,000 and 130,000 years ago, Homo heidelbergensis emerged, the Schöningen spears attested sophisticated cooperative hunting, and the Sima de los Huesos at Atapuerca yielded what may be the oldest funerary gesture in human history. This dossier explores a crucial and often overlooked period during which the humanity that would give rise to both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens was forged.
Read more →Off the northern coast of Scotland, a wind-swept archipelago harbours one of the world's densest and most fascinating archaeological landscapes. Orkney concentrates, within just a few square kilometres, megalithic tombs, giant stone circles and an exceptionally well-preserved Neolithic village. This dossier traces five millennia of human presence in this extraordinary archipelago, from the first hunter-gatherers to the builders of monuments that still astonish us today.
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