Investigations & syntheses
Long-form, documented and sourced articles connecting discoveries and telling the great transformations of humankind.
In 2019, the DNA of a Harappan woman from Rakhigarhi revealed a profile with no steppe ancestry: a mix of South Asian hunter-gatherers and an ancient Iranian lineage. One genome, a thousand debates, to be handled with care.
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 →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 →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 →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 →From Sahelanthropus tchadensis (−7 Ma) to Homo sapiens, the human lineage is not a straight march but a dense bush populated by australopithecines, paranthropus and a dozen Homo species that coexisted, migrated and sometimes interbred. A complete tour of every known species.
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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