In a quiet French valley stand the tumuli of Bougon, burial mounds raised around 4800 BC. Older than Stonehenge and the pyramids, they reveal how the first farmers honoured their dead in stone.

Most people, asked to name a battle that created a nation, would reach for something dramatic and well known. Almost nobody would say Bouvines. And yet on a hot Sunday

In the far south of Albania, on a wooded peninsula between a shining lagoon and the channel that separates the mainland from the Greek island of Corfu, lie the ruins

Cahokia was the largest pre-Columbian city in North America, a Mississippian settlement in Illinois built around a massive earthen pyramid called Monks Mound.

On a windswept ridge in the Outer Hebrides, thirteen ancient stones ring a towering monolith — a 5,000-year-old monument tied to the moon and the far horizon.

Rising in Peru’s Supe Valley around 2600 BCE, Caral is the oldest known city in the Americas, built with pyramids, sunken plazas, and no evidence of writing, pottery, or war.

Caral, in the Supe Valley of Peru, is the oldest known city in the Americas — built with pyramids, sunken plazas, and clever earthquake-proof foundations at the very same time as the Great Pyramid of Egypt, yet with almost no sign of war.

In a Peruvian desert, a lost civilization built pyramids at the same time as the Egyptians, with no contact between them. Inside Caral, the oldest known city in the Americas.

In southern Brittany, more than 3,000 standing stones march in vast rows across the fields — older than Stonehenge, older than the pyramids, and still unexplained.

In central Turkey, thousands of people once lived in a honeycomb town with no streets, entering their homes through the roof and burying their dead beneath the floor. Meet Çatalhöyük, one of humanity’s first great experiments in living together.