Female Hunters of Prehistory
Ancient DNA overturns long-held assumptions: in Peru 9,000 years ago, women were buried with complete hunting toolkits. 41 percent of the studied hunter burials contained female remains.
Read more →Investigations & syntheses
Long-form, documented and sourced articles connecting discoveries and telling the great transformations of humankind.
Ancient DNA overturns long-held assumptions: in Peru 9,000 years ago, women were buried with complete hunting toolkits. 41 percent of the studied hunter burials contained female remains.
Read more →For 1.8 million years, Homo erectus colonised three continents, invented the Acheulean handaxe, tamed fire, and cared for its elderly. This dossier traces the history of the most long-lived human species: its discoveries, anatomy, migrations, and the mysteries it still poses.
Read more →Discovered in 1960 at Olduvai Gorge, Homo habilis is the first undisputed member of the genus Homo. Its Oldowan tools, expanded brain, and complex foraging strategies opened the way for all subsequent human evolution over two million years.
Read more →More than 200 feminine statuettes carved between 40,000 and 11,000 BP, spanning from the Pyrenees to Siberia: prehistoric Venus figurines form one of the most enduring and enigmatic artistic traditions in human history. A complete dossier, from Aurignacian origins to modern theories.
Read more →Between 2200 and 800 BCE, the Mycenaeans, Hittites, Minoans, and Egyptians formed the first "connected world" in history. Around 1200 BCE, this world came apart. Polycrisis, climate change, Sea Peoples: archaeology recomposes a collapse far more complex than it first appears.
Read more →From Neolithic trepanation to the 31,000-year-old surgical amputation at Borneo, prehistoric surgeons operated with surprising technical mastery and remarkable survival rates.
Read more →From Mesolithic forests to the first fields, from Göbekli Tepe to the megalithic alignments of Carnac: this dossier traces the greatest transformation in human history. In less than 7,000 years, Homo sapiens abandoned hunting and gathering to invent agriculture, animal husbandry, the permanent village, pottery and the first monumental architectures. Ancient genomics, Near Eastern archaeology, European megalithism and palaeopathology: a comprehensive and fully sourced overview of the Neolithic revolution and its lasting consequences.
Read more →Between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago, the first Homo sapiens of Europe produced an unprecedented cultural flowering: Lascaux, Altamira, Chauvet, the Venus figurines of Willendorf and Hohle Fels, the bone flutes of the Swabian Jura, the decorated burials of Sungir. This dossier traces the great cultures of the Upper Palaeolithic -- Aurignacian, Gravettian, Solutrean, Magdalenian -- their contributions to human history, their relationships with the last Neanderthals, and what ancient genomics reveals about the repeated migrations that shaped glacial Europe.
Read more →In 2004, the discovery in Liang Bua Cave on Flores (Indonesia) of an adult hominin standing 106 cm tall with a 380 cm3 brain overturned palaeoanthropology. Named Homo floresiensis, the Hobbit is neither a pathological dwarf nor a myth: it is a fully distinct species, the result of island dwarfism on an island isolated for millions of years. This dossier traces its discovery, anatomy, tools, the pathology controversy, the 2016 chronological revision, and its place in a genus Homo tree far more complex than previously imagined.
Read more →From Lucy to thé paranthropines: three million years of australopithecine history, when Africa hosted a diverse array of bipedal hominins with contrasting evolutionary fates.
Read more →From Sahelanthropus tchadensis (Toumai, 7 Ma) to Ardipithecus ramidus (Ardi, 4.4 Ma), a journey through the four species that open the book of human evolution, long before tools and the savanna.
Read more →Beyond the Pillars of Hercules, before Rome and before Carthage, a brilliant civilisation flourished for five centuries. Tartessos, rich in gold, silver and tin, dazzled the Greeks, traded with the Phoenicians, and vanished mysteriously in the 5th century BC.
Read more →In Brazil's Piaui state, hearths dated to 48,000 years ago and extraordinary rock paintings have shaken the consensus on when humans first arrived in the Americas.
Read more →From the crude pebble tools of the Oldowan to the paper-thin laurel leaves of the Solutrean, the lithic industry traces 3.3 million years of technical innovation. A journey to the heart of humanity's first technology.
Read more →Five thousand years ago, on the north-central coast of Peru, the Norte Chico civilization emerged as the oldest in the Americas. Its pyramids at Caral, sunken circular plazas, and cotton-for-fish economy reveal a unique path to social complexity.
Read more →3,500 years ago, navigators bearing distinctive geometric pottery set out from Melanesia to colonise the immensity of the Pacific. Lapita culture is the foundation of all Polynesian and Micronesian civilisations — one of the greatest human adventures ever undertaken.
Read more →For over a million years, a [[hominide|hominin]] with extraordinary jaws coexisted with the earliest members of our genus across eastern and southern Africa. Paranthropus is not our ancestor, but its fate sheds light on what made Homo a success.
Read more →Between 2600 and 1900 BCE, a sophisticated urban civilisation flourished in the Indus basin. Grid streets, advanced plumbing, an undeciphered script: Harappa and Mohenjo-daro remain among Antiquity's greatest mysteries.
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