Prehistory
Cueva de El Castillo: Red Disks and Hand Stencils in Spain
Uranium-series dating in 2012 made El Castillo's red disk the oldest dated cave art in Europe and reopened debate over whether Neanderthals painted.
Era · Before c. 3000 BC
Prehistory
From the formation of Earth and the age of dinosaurs to the first cave art and monuments, before writing was invented.
Prehistory
Neanderthal 1: The 1856 Feldhofer Cave Find in Germany
The bones became the type specimen of Homo neanderthalensis, the first fossil human species to be formally named.
Prehistory
Extinction of the Neanderthals: Why Did They Disappear?
Neanderthals disappeared as a distinct population, though part of their DNA survives in most living people outside Africa.
Prehistory
Venus of Hohle Fels: The Oldest Known Human Figurine
The figurine pushed the earliest known depiction of the human body back by at least 5,000 years and linked the European Venus tradition to the first modern humans.
Prehistory
Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel: Ice Age Ivory Sculpture
Reassembled from hundreds of fragments over seven decades, the Lion Man is one of the oldest known figurative sculptures and the oldest known depiction of an imaginary being.
Prehistory
Altamira Cave Paintings: The Bison Ceiling of Cantabria
Dismissed as a forgery after 1880, Altamira was accepted as genuine Palaeolithic art in 1902 and became the founding site for the study of Ice Age cave painting.
Prehistory
Chauvet Cave Paintings: Europe's Oldest Painted Cave Art
Discovered in 1994, the cave pushed the known age of sophisticated painted cave art back to more than 30,000 years and became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2014.
Prehistory
Sungir Burials: Bead-Covered Graves of Ice Age Russia
The site produced some of the richest Palaeolithic graves known, central to debates about early social complexity and ritual.
Prehistory
Red Lady of Paviland: Britain's Oldest Ceremonial Burial
First thought to be a Roman-era woman, the skeleton is now recognised as a young man given an ochre burial about 33,000 years ago, the oldest known ceremonial burial in Britain.
Prehistory
Cosquer Cave: The Underwater Painted Cave near Marseille
The cave revealed a rich Mediterranean tradition of Ice Age art, but most of it has been lost to rising seas and the rest is under threat.
Prehistory
Venus of Dolní Věstonice: One of the Oldest Ceramic Figures
The figurine showed that Ice Age people fired clay roughly 10,000 years before the earliest known pottery vessels.
Prehistory
Bhimbetka Rock Shelters: India's Prehistoric Painted Caves
Recognised as one of the richest rock-art landscapes in the world, the shelters were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003.