Investigations & syntheses
Long-form, documented and sourced articles connecting discoveries and telling the great transformations of humankind.
Thirty thousand years ago, under a glacial climate, the Gravettian hunters of the mammoth steppe carved the first Venus figurines, built mammoth-bone huts and buried their dead beneath thousands of ivory beads.
Read more →Across an emergent Beringia, along the Pacific coast or through an ice-free corridor: how and when did Homo sapiens reach the last continent? From the White Sands footprints to pre-Clovis sites, an inquiry into a story being rewritten.
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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