Nearly 9,000 years ago, farmers on a hill in central Greece built what may be the oldest town in Europe.

For almost the whole of human history, the vast majority of people lived much as their great-grandparents had. They worked the land or worked with their hands, they travelled no

On a lake in northern Greece, waterlogged mud preserved a Neolithic village, and a wooden tablet that may bear some of the world’s oldest signs.

Joya de Ceren, El Salvador’s Pompeii of the Americas, preserves an ordinary Maya farming village buried by volcanic ash around 600 CE.

On two small Mediterranean islands stand the oldest free-standing stone monuments on Earth. Malta’s megalithic temples were built around 3600 BC — a thousand years before the pyramids — by farmers, not giants.

The Nazca people carved hundreds of massive desert drawings meant to be seen from above, centuries before anyone could have flown over them.

Nearly 6,000 years ago in Thessaly, a community built its home as a series of nested stone rings converging on a central hall.

On the floodplain of the Niger River in Mali stand the mounds of a city that rewrote the history of Africa, the oldest known urban center south of the Sahara,

Before La Venta, before the Maya, before every great civilization of ancient Mexico, there was a capital on the Gulf coast where the first colossal stone heads of the Americas

For seventy-two extraordinary days in the spring of 1871, the city of Paris governed itself. The national government had fled, the regular army had withdrawn, and into the vacuum stepped