Investigations & syntheses
Long-form, documented and sourced articles connecting discoveries and telling the great transformations of humankind.
In the Mayo-Louti department, some 500 abstract geometric engravings were carved into calcite marble slabs -- between 300 and 3,000 years ago. The Bidzar site, reported in 1933 and a UNESCO heritage candidate, is a unique prehistoric treasure in Central Africa.
Read more →In the east, a quartz-knapping workshop 9,000 years old in the Faleme hills. In the west, over 1,000 laterite stone circles raised along the Gambia River -- the largest megalithic concentration in the world, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2006.
Read more →Inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List in 1982, the Tassili n'Ajjer preserves more than 15,000 rock paintings and engravings: a unique visual archive of 10,000 years of Saharan human history.
Read more →From the Mask of Agamemnon to the Uluburun shipwreck, from the Nebra sky disk to the cuneiform tablets of Sumer: this dossier traces the revolution of metals and writing that gave birth to the first great civilisations. In less than 2,500 years, humanity invented bronze, writing, the city, the state, law and international trade -- before a catastrophic systemic collapse around 1,200 BCE reduced this complex world to ashes. Ancient genomics, Mediterranean archaeology, cuneiform and archaeometallurgy: a comprehensive and fully sourced overview.
Read more →In 1987, the chance discovery of a circular Bronze Age city buried in the southern Ural steppe shook our understanding of Eurasian protohistory. Arkaim and the Sintashta culture, its builders, are now at the heart of debates about the origins of Indo-European peoples, the invention of the war chariot, and the rise of the first warrior societies of the steppe.
Read more →From the Eastern European plains to Siberia, Russia holds one of the world's richest Upper Palaeolithic heritages. Kostenki with its 60 sites, the Venus of Zaraysk, the mammoth-bone dwellings of Avdeevo, and the beaded burial of Sungir reveal a hunter-gatherer civilization of astonishing sophistication.
Read more →Ancient DNA overturns long-held assumptions: in Peru 9,000 years ago, women were buried with complete hunting toolkits. 41 percent of the studied hunter burials contained female remains.
Read more →For 1.8 million years, Homo erectus colonised three continents, invented the Acheulean handaxe, tamed fire, and cared for its elderly. This dossier traces the history of the most long-lived human species: its discoveries, anatomy, migrations, and the mysteries it still poses.
Read more →Discovered in 1960 at Olduvai Gorge, Homo habilis is the first undisputed member of the genus Homo. Its Oldowan tools, expanded brain, and complex foraging strategies opened the way for all subsequent human evolution over two million years.
Read more →More than 200 feminine statuettes carved between 40,000 and 11,000 BP, spanning from the Pyrenees to Siberia: prehistoric Venus figurines form one of the most enduring and enigmatic artistic traditions in human history. A complete dossier, from Aurignacian origins to modern theories.
Read more →Between 2200 and 800 BCE, the Mycenaeans, Hittites, Minoans, and Egyptians formed the first "connected world" in history. Around 1200 BCE, this world came apart. Polycrisis, climate change, Sea Peoples: archaeology recomposes a collapse far more complex than it first appears.
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 →Between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago, the first Homo sapiens of Europe produced an unprecedented cultural flowering: Lascaux, Altamira, Chauvet, the Venus figurines of Willendorf and Hohle Fels, the bone flutes of the Swabian Jura, the decorated burials of Sungir. This dossier traces the great cultures of the Upper Palaeolithic -- Aurignacian, Gravettian, Solutrean, Magdalenian -- their contributions to human history, their relationships with the last Neanderthals, and what ancient genomics reveals about the repeated migrations that shaped glacial Europe.
Read more →In 2004, the discovery in Liang Bua Cave on Flores (Indonesia) of an adult hominin standing 106 cm tall with a 380 cm3 brain overturned palaeoanthropology. Named Homo floresiensis, the Hobbit is neither a pathological dwarf nor a myth: it is a fully distinct species, the result of island dwarfism on an island isolated for millions of years. This dossier traces its discovery, anatomy, tools, the pathology controversy, the 2016 chronological revision, and its place in a genus Homo tree far more complex than previously imagined.
Read more →From Lucy to the paranthropines: three million years of australopithecine history, when Africa hosted a diverse array of bipedal hominins with contrasting evolutionary fates.
Read more →From Sahelanthropus tchadensis (Toumai, 7 Ma) to Ardipithecus ramidus (Ardi, 4.4 Ma), a journey through the four species that open the book of human evolution, long before tools and the savanna.
Read more →Beyond the Pillars of Hercules, before Rome and before Carthage, a brilliant civilisation flourished for five centuries. Tartessos, rich in gold, silver and tin, dazzled the Greeks, traded with the Phoenicians, and vanished mysteriously in the 5th century BC.
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