The Stone Age
From the first toolmakers to the dawn of farming: hunter-gatherer life, cave art, megalith builders, and the Neolithic Revolution that changed everything.
Articles on The Stone Age (12)
San Juan ante Portam Latinam and the Arrowhead Problem
A Basque rock shelter holds 338 Neolithic dead and a few dozen flint arrowheads. How many of them were killed...
Ofnet: Two Pits of Skulls and the Question of Massacre or Rite
In 1908 two pits of skulls turned up in a Bavarian cave. Archaeologists still disagree whether they record a...
The Linear Pottery Culture in Five Mass Graves: What Went Wrong at the End of a Culture
Five mass deposits from Europe's first farming culture, c. 5000 BC, show massacre, execution and a disputed...
Perimortem: The Hardest Word in Osteology, and What It Cannot Prove
Perimortem means 'around the time of death', yet bone keeps no clock. Why the word is hard to apply, and how...
Herxheim: Cannibalism or Death Ritual, and Why the Dig Team Still Disagrees
At Herxheim in Germany, hundreds of Neolithic farmers' bones were smashed and cut around 5000 BC, and the...
Asparn/Schletz: The Enclosure Whose Dead Were Never Buried
At Asparn/Schletz in Austria at least 67 Linearbandkeramik farmers were killed and left unburied in a ditch...
Jebel Sahaba: What a Restudy Did to the Oldest Massacre
For fifty years Jebel Sahaba in Sudan was the oldest known massacre. A 2021 re-examination of the same bones...
Talheim, 5000 BC: The Pit That Changed the Neolithic Argument
Thirty-four people were killed with axes and adzes and thrown into a pit in Neolithic Germany. What Talheim...
Göbekli Tepe: The Monuments Hunter-Gatherers Raised Before Farming
Göbekli Tepe's carved stone enclosures in southeastern Turkey show hunter-gatherers building monuments...
Lascaux and Altamira: How Two Caves Rewrote the Story of the First Artists
Discovered a century apart, the painted caves of Lascaux and Altamira forced scholars to accept that Ice Age...
Doggerland: Europe's Lost Mesolithic Homeland Beneath the North Sea
Doggerland was a thriving Mesolithic landscape beneath today's North Sea, drowned by rising seas and a...
Ötzi the Iceman: Solving a 5,300-Year-Old Murder in the Alps
In 1991 hikers found a 5,300-year-old body frozen in the Alps: Ötzi the Iceman, whose murder and genome...
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