Investigations & syntheses
Long-form, documented and sourced articles connecting discoveries and telling the great transformations of humankind.
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 →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 →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 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.
Read more →In the southern Urals around 2000 BC, the Sintashta culture built circular fortresses and invented the spoke-wheeled war chariot. A warrior society at the heart of the Indo-European steppe world.
Read more →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 →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 →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 →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.
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