Cut a mammoth tusk across and a pattern appears that nobody drew. Rings like those of a tree trunk mark how the ivory grew, and are known as Owen’s lines. Crossing them runs a web of curved lines that looks like the mesh of a net, the Schreger lines. About 18,000 years ago, in a […]

Near Parabita, a town in the province of Lecce, in the heel of Italy’s boot (the region of Apulia, also spelled Puglia), a limestone cave holds a piece of Ice Age history. Two small bone figurines found there in 1966 belong to the group known as the Palaeolithic Venus figurines. Now a new survey suggests […]

Around 400 BC, Europe was changing, though not in a single direction. Athens had just lost the Peloponnesian War (404 BC), and Roman tradition says the Gauls would sack Rome around 390 BC. Farther north, Iron Age communities reacted in almost opposite ways. In the south of the Netherlands and the southeast of Gaul, people […]