The White Sands footprints in New Mexico just got a sharper date. Pollen dating with fivefold less uncertainty puts 152 measured tracks at 23,500 to 21,700 years old, deep in the Ice Age. Critics point to old lake carbon. Convinced?

18,000 years ago at Mizyn in northern Ukraine, carvers made small female figurines from the centre of mammoth tusks, then engraved the tusk’s own hidden pattern back onto them. Did they see human shapes in the ivory, or use the grain as a template?

Human bone has been coming out of Göbeklitepe in scattered pieces since 1995, 928 fragments across three thousand square meters. The first two intact burials have now been excavated, and they suggest the scatter was made by landslides rather than ritual.

Tutankhamun had a folding chair of ebony and ivory with gold fittings. A man buried in a Danish barrow in 1389 BC had one made of ash, carved and inlaid with black pitch. The chair did not travel. The design did.

The Natufians Ate Lizards and Snakes for Three Thousand Years

A clay tablet from Babylon, written in the 2nd or 1st century BC, carries a lament sung in the voice of the goddess Inanna. It is written in Sumerian with an Akkadian translation. Nobody had spoken either language natively for a very long time.

A clay tablet the size of a hand holds a plan of the Mesopotamian city of Nippur, drawn more than three thousand years ago. Walls, seven gates, canals, moats, the temple precinct. For seventy years scholars had it turned the wrong way round.

The Huashan cliff paintings in southern China are up to 2,500 years old. At one site, the paint layer was 97 to 99% human blood, with proteins linked to women in late pregnancy or breastfeeding, possibly connecting to the fertility imagery above.