Investigations & syntheses
Long-form, documented and sourced articles connecting discoveries and telling the great transformations of humankind.
Gridded streets, calibrated bricks, sewers, a Great Bath: Mohenjo-daro was one of the largest cities of the Bronze Age world. Yet with no palace, no monumental temple, no clearly identified king. A different idea of civilisation.
Read more →25,000 years ago, an Upper Palaeolithic artist carved a woman's face in mammoth ivory with striking realism. The Lady of Brassempouy, just 3.6 cm tall, is the oldest realistic representation of a human face and one of the greatest masterpieces of prehistoric art.
Read more →In South Moravia, the Gravettian site of Dolní Věstonice yielded the oldest fired ceramic figurine in human history, the Venus of Věstonice, −26,000 years, a spectacular triple burial, and the remains of a 28,000-year-old kiln. Our ancestors' art and technology reached unsuspected sophistication here.
Read more →On an island in the Rann of Kutch, the Harappan city of Dholavira thrived for fifteen centuries thanks to a genius for water: cut reservoirs, dams and channels. A masterpiece of urban planning in an arid land.
Read more →In 2019, the DNA of a Harappan woman from Rakhigarhi revealed a profile with no steppe ancestry: a mix of South Asian hunter-gatherers and an ancient Iranian lineage. One genome, a thousand debates, to be handled with care.
Read more →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 →In the heart of Madhya Pradesh, over 700 rock shelters preserve paintings from the Mesolithic to historic times: hunts, dances, animals. Proof that rock art was a global phenomenon, not only a European one.
Read more →In Balochistan, long before the cities of the Indus, the site of Mehrgarh tells eight millennia of village life: the first wheat, the first herds, mud-brick houses, figurines and even 9,000-year-old dentistry.
Read more →On the Don river banks, the Kostenki complex groups twenty-six Palaeolithic sites covering 45,000 years of human presence. Mammoth bone structures, among Europe's oldest genomes, and refined portable art: Kostenki reveals how Homo sapiens conquered glacial Europe.
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 →Around 1250 BCE, King Ammistamru II of Ugarit repudiated the daughter of the king of Amurru. On a clay tablet, the Hittite great king Tudhaliya IV personally arbitrated this oldest known royal divorce, turned into a diplomatic crisis between vassals.
Read more →At Jabal al-Tayr in Middle Egypt, two Early Dynastic tombs with battered walls, echoing King Den's royal tomb at Abydos, illuminate the engineering experiments that, a thousand years later, would lead to the pyramids.
Read more →Around 3500 BC in the North Caucasus, the Maikop culture buried its elites under great kurgans laden with gold and silver, at the crossroads of the steppes and the Near East.
Read more →30,000 years ago near Vladimir in Russia, two children were interred beneath thousands of ivory beads and mammoth spears. The Sungir burials provide exceptional testimony of the social and spiritual complexity of the earliest modern human societies.
Read more →In Libya's Fezzan, the Wadi Mathendous holds one of the richest concentrations of rock engravings in the Sahara: long-necked giraffes, cattle, elephants and felines cut into stone 8,000 years ago, when the desert was a green savanna.
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 →Near Armagh, Northern Ireland, a study published in Antiquity reveals that a vast planned landscape, over 200 buildings, a ritual pool, a 109-hectare enclosure, functioned from 1200 BCE as one of the most organised proto-urban centres of Bronze Age Europe.
Read more →At Tell es-Sultan in the Jordan Valley, excavations uncovered an 11,000-year-old stone tower and dwellings dating to −10,000. Jericho is the oldest continuously inhabited city on earth, a laboratory for the transition from nomadic life to permanent settlement.
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