Prehistory
Irish Elk (Megaloceros): The Giant Deer of Ice Age Europe
The giant deer vanished from Ireland about 12,900 to 11,700 years ago and survived in western Siberia until about 7,700 years ago.
Region
Europe
Prehistory
Woolly Mammoth: The Ice Age Giant, Its Fossils and Its Extinction
The woolly mammoth vanished from the mainland around 10,000 years ago; the last known population, on Wrangel Island, died out about 4,000 years ago.
Prehistory
Schöningen Spears: The Oldest Complete Hunting Weapons
The spears proved that hominins in Middle Pleistocene Europe made sophisticated wooden weapons and hunted large animals such as horses, overturning the view that they were mainly scavengers.
Prehistory
Apidima Cave Skull: Homo sapiens in Greece 210,000 Years Ago?
A 2019 study proposed that the Apidima 1 skull is the oldest Homo sapiens fossil outside Africa; the claim remains contested.
Prehistory
La Chapelle-aux-Saints: The 'Old Man' and the Neanderthal Image
The skeleton became the reference Neanderthal; Boule's stooped reconstruction shaped the brutish caveman image until later studies showed Neanderthals walked fully upright.
Prehistory
Neanderthal Interbreeding: The DNA Modern Humans Still Carry
Living people outside Africa carry roughly 1 to 2 percent Neanderthal DNA, some of which still affects immunity, skin and disease risk.
Prehistory
Kostenki: Early Upper Palaeolithic Sites on the River Don
The sites showed that modern humans lived on the East European Plain by about 45,000-42,000 years ago and later built large mammoth-bone structures there.
Prehistory
Ice Age Flutes of Swabia: The Oldest Musical Instruments
The flutes show that early modern humans in Europe made carefully designed musical instruments by about 40,000 years ago.
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.
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.