Dholavira, a great city of the Indus Valley Civilization, thrived for 1,500 years in a near-waterless salt desert by mastering the art of harvesting and storing the monsoon — one of the most brilliant feats of ancient water engineering ever found.

More than 6,000 years ago in Bulgaria, a fortified town grew rich boiling brine into salt, and may be the oldest town in Europe.

Built roughly 11,500 years ago by hunter-gatherers in southeastern Turkey, Göbekli Tepe is older than farming, writing and the pyramids — and it changed how we understand the dawn of civilization.

In 1938, a man digging a cistern in the eastern Nigerian village of Igbo-Ukwu struck a cache of strange and beautiful bronze objects. Decades later, careful excavation revealed the full

People have lived at Jericho for around 11,000 years without a break. It holds the oldest known town wall and tower on Earth, and some of humanity’s first portraits — the haunting plastered skulls of its Neolithic dead.

At a Neolithic village in China, people made flutes from crane bones that still play a musical scale nine thousand years later, brewed an ancient rice drink, and carved mysterious symbols. Meet Jiahu.

Beside a dry riverbed in Rajasthan lie the twin mounds of Kalibangan, an Indus town that gave us the world’s oldest ploughed field, a possible earliest recorded earthquake, and mysterious fire altars.

Just 30 km from Göbekli Tepe lies an 11,000-year-old site that is rewriting history in real time. With its haunting chamber of pillars and lifelike human carvings, Karahan Tepe proves a whole lost world once thrived here.

On the island of Crete stands Knossos, the labyrinthine palace of the Minoans — Europe’s first civilization. With its bull frescoes, oldest throne in Europe, and running water, it is the real place behind the legend of the Minotaur.

On the Don River, some of Europe’s first modern humans hunted mammoths, carved figurines, and built homes of bone 40,000 years ago.