A million years ago, long before mass tourism, the Mediterranean islands were home to dwarf elephants. Although tiny when compared to their ancestors, these animals may have inspired the Greek myth of the Cyclopes.
Virtual globes, 2D or 3D representations of the world produced from digital data, can fool us into thinking that we now know everything there is to know about the Earth. But a deluge of data is no guarantee of a better picture of “reality”.
The oldest private correspondence in human history is about marriages and divorces, trade and tax evasion, livestock breeding or weaving… Women’s voices stamped in clay four millennia ago offer eerily topical accounts of the affairs of the day.
The discovery of a previously unknown village in a region of Saudi Arabia that was thought to be only sparsely populated during Late Antiquity reveals the presence of sedentary Jewish communities just before the advent of Islam. The archaeologist Jérôme...
Oil isn't the only treasure hidden in the Arabian desert. French-Saudi archaeological teams are gradually unearthing a hitherto unsuspected heritage, including urban development, languages,...
Forty-four years after the earliest cases of AIDS were identified, the historian Marion Aballéa retraces the social, economic, cultural, scientific and public health history of the first pandemic...
Steven Spielberg’s "Jaws" is back in cinemas worldwide 50 years after its original release. The specialist Éric Clua talks about the negative image of sharks conveyed by the film and a new...