Investigations & syntheses
Long-form, documented and sourced articles connecting discoveries and telling the great transformations of humankind.
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 →In Balochistan, long before the cities of the Indus, the site of Mehrgarh tells eight millennia of village life: the first wheat, the first herds, mud-brick houses, figurines and even 9,000-year-old dentistry.
Read more →In Libya's Fezzan, the Wadi Mathendous holds one of the richest concentrations of rock engravings in the Sahara: long-necked giraffes, cattle, elephants and felines cut into stone 8,000 years ago, when the desert was a green savanna.
Read more →Six thousand years ago, north of the Black Sea, Cucuteni-Trypillia communities built settlements of thousands of houses, sometimes burned and rebuilt. Proto-cities, or another form of urbanism?
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 →Gridded streets, calibrated bricks, sewers, a Great Bath: Mohenjo-daro was one of the largest cities of the Bronze Age world. Yet with no palace, no monumental temple, no clearly identified king. A different idea of civilisation.
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 →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?
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