Investigations & syntheses
Long-form, documented and sourced articles connecting discoveries and telling the great transformations of humankind.
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 →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 →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 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 →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.
Read more →Between 780,000 and 130,000 years ago, Homo heidelbergensis emerged, the Schöningen spears attested sophisticated cooperative hunting, and the Sima de los Huesos at Atapuerca yielded what may be the oldest funerary gesture in human history. This dossier explores a crucial and often overlooked period during which the humanity that would give rise to both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens was forged.
Read more →Off the northern coast of Scotland, a wind-swept archipelago harbours one of the world's densest and most fascinating archaeological landscapes. Orkney concentrates, within just a few square kilometres, megalithic tombs, giant stone circles and an exceptionally well-preserved Neolithic village. This dossier traces five millennia of human presence in this extraordinary archipelago, from the first hunter-gatherers to the builders of monuments that still astonish us today.
Read more →From thé Eastern European plains to Siberia, Russia holds one of thé world's richest Upper Palaeolithic héritages. Kostenki with its 60 sites, thé Venus of Zaraysk, thé mammoth-bone dwellings of Avdeevo, and thé beaded burial of Sungir reveal a hunter-gatherer civilization of astonishing sophistication.
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 →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 →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 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 →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.
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