Investigations & syntheses
Long-form, documented and sourced articles connecting discoveries and telling the great transformations of humankind.
9,500 years ago in Anatolia, thousands of people lived packed into rooftop-access houses, buried their dead beneath the floors and decorated their walls with aurochs skulls and hunting scenes. Catalhoyuk is humanity's first great urban experiment.
Read more →Off the northern coast of Scotland, a wind-swept archipelago harbours one of the world's densest and most fascinating archaeological landscapes. Orkney concentrates, within just a few square kilometres, megalithic tombs, giant stone circles and an exceptionally well-preserved Neolithic village. This dossier traces five millennia of human presence in this extraordinary archipelago, from the first hunter-gatherers to the builders of monuments that still astonish us today.
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 →From Mesolithic forests to the first fields, from Göbekli Tepe to the megalithic alignments of Carnac: this dossier traces the greatest transformation in human history. In less than 7,000 years, Homo sapiens abandoned hunting and gathering to invent agriculture, animal husbandry, the permanent village, pottery and the first monumental architectures. Ancient genomics, Near Eastern archaeology, European megalithism and palaeopathology: a comprehensive and fully sourced overview of the Neolithic revolution and its lasting consequences.
Read more →From the crude pebble tools of the Oldowan to the paper-thin laurel leaves of the Solutrean, the lithic industry traces 3.3 million years of technical innovation. A journey to the heart of humanity's first technology.
Read more →On the island of Gozo, Malta, the Ġgantija temples were built between −3,600 and −2,500. They are the world's oldest freestanding stone structures, more than a millennium older than the pyramids of Giza. The civilisation that built them vanished without known descendants.
Read more →At Tell es-Sultan in the Jordan Valley, excavations uncovered an 11,000-year-old stone tower and dwellings dating to −10,000. Jericho is the oldest continuously inhabited city on earth, a laboratory for the transition from nomadic life to permanent settlement.
Read more →Nearly 3,000 stones erected in straight rows across 4 kilometres of Breton moorland: the Carnac alignments remain one of the most imposing and enigmatic megalithic monuments on Earth. Listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2025.
Read more →Ten thousand years ago, in the Fertile Crescent, groups of hunter-gatherers began cultivating wheat, raising sheep, and building permanent villages. This 'Neolithic Revolution' was to transform humanity from top to bottom — for better and for worse. Full dossier: origins, inventions, key sites and latest discoveries.
Read more →Ten thousand years ago, in the Fertile Crescent, groups of hunter-gatherers began cultivating wheat, raising sheep, and building permanent villages. This 'Neolithic Revolution' was to transform humanity from top to bottom — for better and for worse. Full dossier: origins, inventions, key sites and latest discoveries.
Read more →Emerging from an Alpine glacier in 1991, the Similaun man is the oldest and most thoroughly studied natural mummy on Earth. His skin, tools, last meal and the arrowhead lodged in his back tell of a Copper Age murder.
Read more →Farming reaches Europe via the Danube and the Mediterranean, then raises dolmens and alignments, from Carnac to Stonehenge. Five millennia that remade the continent.
Read more →Around 3300 BC, at Uruk, accounts pressed into clay gave birth to cuneiform. How writing tipped humanity into history.
Read more →From Hallstatt to La Tène, Iron Age Europe built towns, struck coins and shaped a unique art, before Greco-Roman texts brought it into history.
Read more →Farming, herding, villages: in the Fertile Crescent, around 10,000 BC, everything changes. The greatest fork in our history, up to Anatolia's first towns.
Read more →Monumental sanctuaries raised before agriculture. What if the sacred, more than wheat, settled humankind?
Read more →