Thousands of years before the Great Wall, the Liangzhu culture built a walled water city, the world’s oldest known dams, and jade masterpieces in the Yangtze delta — a lost cradle of civilization only recognized by UNESCO in 2019.

On a bluff in Almería, Los Millares was one of western Europe’s first towns — a Copper Age settlement ringed with stone walls, home to early metalworking and a vast necropolis of sun-facing tholos tombs.

Near Lake Baikal, an Ice Age settlement left exquisite ivory figurines and a child whose DNA revealed the deep ancestry of Native Americans.

Before Mohenjo-daro or Harappa, there was Mehrgarh: a 9,000-year-old village in Pakistan where people first farmed, made pottery, worked copper, and even practiced dentistry.

Mohenjo-daro, one of the great cities of the Indus Valley Civilization, had grid streets, covered drains, and clean water more than 4,000 years ago — yet we still cannot read a single word its people wrote.

On a flooding reef off Pohnpei, Pacific islanders raised a stone city of 92 artificial islets and 750,000 tonnes of basalt. Meet Nan Madol, the astonishing “Venice of the Pacific.”

Older than the pyramids and Stonehenge, this Irish passage tomb was built so that on the winter solstice, the rising sun pours down a stone passage and lights its hidden chamber. Inside the wonder of Newgrange.

In the Louisiana lowlands, hunter-gatherers with no farming raised six giant concentric ridges and a huge bird-shaped mound over 3,000 years ago. Meet Poverty Point, a monument that rewrites the story of early civilisation.

On a river plain in Tajikistan, people were smelting copper and trading lapis lazuli across a continent six thousand years ago. Meet Sarazm, one of Central Asia’s oldest towns.

On a storm-battered Orkney coast lies a Neolithic village so well preserved you can peer into 5,000-year-old homes, complete with their stone beds and dressers. Meet Skara Brae, older than the pyramids.