Prehistory

Anthony Aveni explains how the people planning great monuments and cities, many millennia and thousands of miles apart, so often sought the same inspiration – alignments with the heavens.

Clive Gamble revisits the moment at which archaeologists realized that human prehistory was far longer than biblical scholars had imagined; and links this to today’s debates about the antiquity of the human mind with its capacity for self-aware thought.   

Our prehistoric ancestors survived rapid climate change and rising temperatures as extreme as those we face today, says Kate Prendergast. What can they tell us about global warming?

Nicholas James audits the societies and civilisations decimated by the arrival of Europeans - and tells how, against the odds, elements from them have survived.