Investigations & syntheses
Long-form, documented and sourced articles connecting discoveries and telling the great transformations of humankind.
On the island of Gozo, Malta, the Ġgantija temples were built between −3,600 and −2,500. They are the world's oldest freestanding stone structures, more than a millennium older than the pyramids of Giza. The civilisation that built them vanished without known descendants.
Read more →Built around −3,200 in Ireland, Newgrange is a passage mound 85 metres across whose burial chamber floods with light at the winter solstice sunrise, with a precision that required centuries of astronomical observation. Older than Stonehenge and the Pyramids, it remains one of European megalithism's greatest mysteries.
Read more →Six thousand years ago, north of the Black Sea, Cucuteni-Trypillia communities built settlements of thousands of houses, sometimes burned and rebuilt. Proto-cities, or another form of urbanism?
Read more →At Cerro de las Cabezas in central Spain, two men killed more than 2,200 years ago were cast against the town wall, uncremated, ringed by six large red deer antlers. The story of a 'bad death' with no parallel in Iron Age Iberia.
Read more →Nearly 3,000 stones erected in straight rows across 4 kilometres of Breton moorland: the Carnac alignments remain one of the most imposing and enigmatic megalithic monuments on Earth. Listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2025.
Read more →Found in 1976 in the Pas-de-Calais, two 175,000-year-old skulls make the Biache 'pre-Neanderthals' the oldest human fossils of northern France, at the hinge between Homo erectus and the Neanderthals.
Read more →Thirty thousand years ago, under a glacial climate, the Gravettian hunters of the mammoth steppe carved the first Venus figurines, built mammoth-bone huts and buried their dead beneath thousands of ivory beads.
Read more →From Hohle Fels to Willendorf, nearly two hundred female figurines span 30,000 years. Fertility symbols, portraits, ritual objects? The mystery endures.
Read more →In the Sierra de Atapuerca in Spain, a simple railway cutting opened Europe's richest prehistoric site. The Sima de los Huesos, the 'pit of bones', yielded the remains of 29 individuals aged 430,000 years, offering a unique window onto humanity before the Neanderthals.
Read more →Between 15,000 and 40,000 years ago, a wild wolf crossed the invisible threshold that separates fauna from companions. How do palaeogenetics and archaeology reconstruct the birth of humanity's best friend?
Read more →Ten thousand years ago, in the Fertile Crescent, groups of hunter-gatherers began cultivating wheat, raising sheep, and building permanent villages. This 'Neolithic Revolution' was to transform humanity from top to bottom — for better and for worse. Full dossier: origins, inventions, key sites and latest discoveries.
Read more →In 1895, in the Dordogne, a decorated cave proved that prehistoric people had painted and engraved underground. La Mouthe ended years of scepticism and opened the era of cave art.
Read more →Emerging from an Alpine glacier in 1991, the Similaun man is the oldest and most thoroughly studied natural mummy on Earth. His skin, tools, last meal and the arrowhead lodged in his back tell of a Copper Age murder.
Read more →45,000 years ago, the first Homo sapiens in Europe carve the lion-man, cut bone flutes and invent figurative art. The great symbolic explosion.
Read more →Farming reaches Europe via the Danube and the Mediterranean, then raises dolmens and alignments, from Carnac to Stonehenge. Five millennia that remade the continent.
Read more →A circle of [[megalithe|megaliths]] raised nearly 5,000 years ago on Salisbury Plain, Stonehenge keeps surprising us: in 2024 its Altar Stone was traced to Scotland, over 700 kilometres away.
Read more →From Hallstatt to La Tène, Iron Age Europe built towns, struck coins and shaped a unique art, before Greco-Roman texts brought it into history.
Read more →Far from the textbook brute: tools, art, burials, and 1 to 2% of their genome still in us. An inquiry into a humanity that vanished, yet lives on.
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