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 →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.
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 →Now a vast desert, the Arabian Peninsula was repeatedly transformed into lush savanna crossed by lakes and rivers. Footprints 120,000 years old, an Homo sapiens finger bone dating to 88,000 years, and monumental rock engravings 12,800 years old reveal one of humanity's most crucial crossroads.
Read more →Around 3300 BC, at Uruk, accounts pressed into clay gave birth to cuneiform. How writing tipped humanity into history.
Read more →Monumental sanctuaries raised before agriculture. What if the sacred, more than wheat, settled humankind?
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