Investigations & syntheses
Long-form, documented and sourced articles connecting discoveries and telling the great transformations of humankind.
On an island in the Rann of Kutch, the Harappan city of Dholavira thrived for fifteen centuries thanks to a genius for water: cut reservoirs, dams …
Read the feature →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 ancie…
Read the feature →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,…
Read the feature →In the heart of Madhya Pradesh, over 700 rock shelters preserve paintings from the Mesolithic to historic times: hunts, dances, animals. Proof that…
Read the feature →In March 2026, the description of <em>Crocodylus lucivenator</em> — a giant crocodile contemporary with Australopithecus afarensis — prompts a major dossier on the Afar Triangle and African Pliocene: the ecosystem where our bipedal ancestors emerged 3 to 4 million years ago.
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 →Built around −3,200 in Ireland, Newgrange is a passage mound 85 metres across whose burial chamber floods with light at the winter solstice sunrise, with a precision that required centuries of astronomical observation. Older than Stonehenge and the Pyramids, it remains one of European megalithism's greatest mysteries.
Read more →Around 1250 BCE, King Ammistamru II of Ugarit repudiated the daughter of the king of Amurru. On a clay tablet, the Hittite great king Tudhaliya IV personally arbitrated this oldest known royal divorce, turned into a diplomatic crisis between vassals.
Read more →At Jabal al-Tayr in Middle Egypt, two Early Dynastic tombs with battered walls, echoing King Den's royal tomb at Abydos, illuminate the engineering experiments that, a thousand years later, would lead to the pyramids.
Read more →From the Late Pleistocene to the 21st century -- twelve millennia of uninterrupted occupation. Paleo-Indian hunters, Ancestral Puebloan builders, Havasupai and Hopi nations: the Grand Canyon is one of North America's richest prehistoric sites. And the great mystery -- why did the Puebloans abandon everything around 1300 CE? -- continues to divide archaeologists.
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 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 →Near Armagh, Northern Ireland, a study published in Antiquity reveals that a vast planned landscape, over 200 buildings, a ritual pool, a 109-hectare enclosure, functioned from 1200 BCE as one of the most organised proto-urban centres of Bronze Age Europe.
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 →At Cerro de las Cabezas in central Spain, two men killed more than 2,200 years ago were cast against the town wall, uncremated, ringed by six large red deer antlers. The story of a 'bad death' with no parallel in Iron Age Iberia.
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 →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 →Found in 1976 in the Pas-de-Calais, two 175,000-year-old skulls make the Biache 'pre-Neanderthals' the oldest human fossils of northern France, at the hinge between Homo erectus and the Neanderthals.
Read more →In the frozen kurgans of the Altai, permafrost preserved nomadic riders, their horses, carpets and tattoos for 2,500 years. Infrared imaging now reveals the body art of the steppe Scythians.
Read more →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.
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