Investigations & syntheses
Long-form, documented and sourced articles connecting discoveries and telling the great transformations of humankind.
Emerging in Africa 300,000 years ago, <em>Homo sapiens</em> colonised the entire planet in under 60,000 years. This dossier traces the evolution, migrations, encounters with Neanderthals and Denisovans, and cultural revolution of our species.
Read more →For millennia, two humanities coexisted on the same continent: Neanderthals, masters of Europe for 200,000 years, and Homo sapiens, freshly arrived from Africa. Between 130,000 and 40,000 years ago, they may have exchanged goods, reproduced together, and developed the first symbolic behaviours. Then one disappeared. This dossier traces this encounter through morphology, Mousterian culture, the first burials, migration routes and the genetic revolution that revealed 2% Neanderthal DNA in our genomes.
Read more →From the Eastern European plains to Siberia, Russia holds one of the world's richest Upper Palaeolithic heritages. Kostenki with its 60 sites, the Venus of Zaraysk, the mammoth-bone dwellings of Avdeevo, and the beaded burial of Sungir reveal a hunter-gatherer civilization of astonishing sophistication.
Read more →Ancient DNA overturns long-held assumptions: in Peru 9,000 years ago, women were buried with complete hunting toolkits. 41 percent of the studied hunter burials contained female remains.
Read more →From Neolithic trepanation to the 31,000-year-old surgical amputation at Borneo, prehistoric surgeons operated with surprising technical mastery and remarkable survival rates.
Read more →Between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago, the first Homo sapiens of Europe produced an unprecedented cultural flowering: Lascaux, Altamira, Chauvet, the Venus figurines of Willendorf and Hohle Fels, the bone flutes of the Swabian Jura, the decorated burials of Sungir. This dossier traces the great cultures of the Upper Palaeolithic -- Aurignacian, Gravettian, Solutrean, Magdalenian -- their contributions to human history, their relationships with the last Neanderthals, and what ancient genomics reveals about the repeated migrations that shaped glacial Europe.
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 →Between 15,000 and 40,000 years ago, a wild wolf crossed the invisible threshold that separates fauna from companions. How do palaeogenetics and archaeology reconstruct the birth of humanity's best friend?
Read more →In a cave overlooking the Indian Ocean, researchers found a 73,000-year-old ochre cross-hatch, the oldest known drawing by Homo sapiens. Blombos Cave reveals behavioural modernity far older than Europe's painted caves.
Read more →Now a vast desert, the Arabian Peninsula was repeatedly transformed into lush savanna crossed by lakes and rivers. Footprints 120,000 years old, an Homo sapiens finger bone dating to 88,000 years, and monumental rock engravings 12,800 years old reveal one of humanity's most crucial crossroads.
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 →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 →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.
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