Investigations & syntheses
Long-form, documented and sourced articles connecting discoveries and telling the great transformations of humankind.
From Peking Man to the bronzes of Sanxingdui, from Yangshao painted pottery to Shang oracle bones: a 25-minute journey through one of the longest and most diverse regional prehistories in the world.
Read more →About 74,000 years ago, on the island of Sumatra, the Toba volcano produced the largest eruption of the past two million years, nearly 2,800 km³ of magma, a 100-km-long caldera, an ash cloud reaching India. Did this catastrophe nearly wipe out humanity? The story of a spectacular theory, and of its undoing.
Read more →On 24 November 1974, in Ethiopia's Afar, Donald Johanson unearthed a 3.2-million-year-old australopithecine. Lucy forced an unsettling truth: walking upright came long before the big brain.
Read more →Between 2686 and 2160 BCE, Egypt built the pyramids, invented centralised government and reached a peak of power. Then everything collapsed. A complete multi-part feature.
Read more →From Sahelanthropus tchadensis (−7 Ma) to Homo sapiens, the human lineage is not a straight march but a dense bush populated by australopithecines, paranthropus and a dozen Homo species that coexisted, migrated and sometimes interbred. A complete tour of every known species.
Read more →From stooped ape to upright human, in single file: it is the most famous image of human evolution. It is also one of the most misleading. Decoding a stubborn visual myth.
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 →From a single finger bone dug up in Siberia, genetics conjured an unknown humanity. Denisovans still live on in the DNA of Asian and Oceanian peoples, and one of their genes now helps Tibetans breathe at altitude.
Read more →At Qafzeh and Skhul, 100,000 years ago, Homo sapiens laid its dead in pits, with ochre and offerings. The origins of the funerary gesture and symbolic thought.
Read more →From an African cradle to every continent: routes, population genetics, bottleneck and interbreeding. The odyssey that peopled the world.
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 →Around 3300 BC, at Uruk, accounts pressed into clay gave birth to cuneiform. How writing tipped humanity into history.
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 →Reaching Australia from Asia meant crossing open sea, never seeing the far shore. 65,000 years ago, people did it, the oldest open-water voyaging in human 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.
Read more →