Investigations & syntheses
Long-form, documented and sourced articles connecting discoveries and telling the great transformations of humankind.
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 →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 →At Cerro de las Cabezas in central Spain, two men killed more than 2,200 years ago were cast against the town wall, uncremated, ringed by six large red deer antlers. The story of a 'bad death' with no parallel in Iron Age Iberia.
Read more →In the frozen kurgans of the Altai, permafrost preserved nomadic riders, their horses, carpets and tattoos for 2,500 years. Infrared imaging now reveals the body art of the steppe Scythians.
Read more →In the Sierra de Atapuerca in Spain, a simple railway cutting opened Europe's richest prehistoric site. The Sima de los Huesos, the 'pit of bones', yielded the remains of 29 individuals aged 430,000 years, offering a unique window onto humanity before the Neanderthals.
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.
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