Investigations & syntheses
Long-form, documented and sourced articles connecting discoveries and telling the great transformations of humankind.
Automatic crossbows, mercury rivers and a burial chamber sealed for 2,200 years: the mausoleum of China's first emperor is one of the most enigmati…
Read the feature →The Algerian plateau of Tassili n'Ajjer houses 15,000 rock works documenting 10,000 years of history -- from the giant buffalo of the humid period …
Read the feature →Some 3,000 years ago, an unknown Bronze Age civilization buried masks with protruding eyes, bronze trees, and colossal statues in sacrificial pits …
Read the feature →Between 500 BCE and 700 CE, Zapotec civilization built Monte Albán on a promontory overlooking the Oaxaca valley. First Mesoamerican city, first wr…
Read the feature →For 14,000 years, Jomon culture peopled the Japanese islands, inventing the world's oldest pottery and developing complex societies without intensive agriculture. A genetic and artistic legacy still visible today.
Read more →Between 2600 and 1900 BCE, a sophisticated urban civilization flourished in the Indus basin. Planned cities, sewage networks, undeciphered script: the Harappan civilization remains a fascinating enigma.
Read more →Some 3,500 years ago, seafarers carrying a distinctive geometric pottery set out to conquer the Pacific. Ancestors of Polynesians, the Lapita were among prehistory's greatest explorers.
Read more →Before the Maya and the Aztecs, the Olmecs established the first great Mesoamerican civilization between 1500 and 400 BCE, leaving behind colossal heads, sacred jade, and a lasting legacy.
Read more →Between 22,000 and 17,000 years ago, Solutrean craftspeople pushed flint knapping to an unequalled level of perfection, producing the legendary laurel-leaf points.
Read more →14,500 years ago in thé Levant, hunter-gatherers built stone houses, stored cereals and buried their dead beneath their floors - two to three millennia before thé invention of agriculture. Thé Natufians invented sedentary life.
Read more →In 1879, a little girl and her father discovered polychrome bison 17,000 years old on the ceiling of a Cantabrian cave. The academic world accused them of fraud for twenty years. The story of Altamira is also the story of prehistory's greatest collective mistake.
Read more →Between 1700 and 1180 BCE, the Hittite Empire rivalled Egypt under Ramesses II, forged the first peace treaty in history and mastered iron metallurgy. Rediscovered only in the nineteenth century, this Indo-European empire of Anatolia remains one of the great forgotten civilisations of the ancient world.
Read more →9,500 years ago in Anatolia, thousands of people lived packed into rooftop-access houses, buried their dead beneath the floors and decorated their walls with aurochs skulls and hunting scenes. Catalhoyuk is humanity's first great urban experiment.
Read more →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, contemporary with Lucy. Its validity as a distinct genus is debated, but its existence demonstrates thé remarkable diversity of Pliocène African hominins.
Read more →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-rooted teeth and curved phalanges match no other known species, and its presence on an island with no land bridge raises fascinating questions about the navigational abilities of ancient hominins.
Read more →Emerging in Africa 300,000 years ago, <em>Homo sapiens</em> colonised thé entire planet in under 60,000 years. This dossier traces thé évolution, migrations, encounters with Neanderthals and Denisovans, and cultural révolution of our species.
Read more →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 thé 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 thé 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.
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