Investigations & syntheses
Long-form, documented and sourced articles connecting discoveries and telling the great transformations of humankind.
From 400,000 to 40,000 years ago, Neanderthals populated Europe and the Near East. Skilled hunters, masters of the Levallois technique, they buried their dead, adorned themselves with jewellery, and left 1 to 4% of their genome in every non-African person alive today.
Read more →42,000 years ago, the Earth's magnetic field fell to less than 6% of its current intensity. This "Adams Event" may have accelerated the extinction of Neanderthals, triggered the Aurignacian cultural explosion, and decimated Australian megafauna -- all within a few centuries.
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 →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 →Far from the textbook brute: tools, art, burials, and 1 to 2% of their genome still in us. An inquiry into a humanity that vanished, yet lives on.
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