Prehistory

Journey to the Beginning of Time

Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955) is a Czechoslovak science fiction film directed by Karel Zeman, in which four teenagers row up a river that carries them backward through geological time. Using a blend of live action, stop-motion, 2-D cut-outs, and studio sets—all inspired by palaeo-artist Zdeněk Burian—it illustrates prehistoric life with scientific rigour and visual coherence. The film avoids narrative convention in favour of pedagogical sequencing, treating epochs as habitats and observation as method. Though modest in budget and scope, its integration of craft, content, and calm authority makes it a landmark of cinematic science communication.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Werner Herzog’s 2010 documentary enters France’s Chauvet Cave — home to the oldest known figurative paintings — under strict access conditions. Shot in 3D by Peter Zeitlinger, the film foregrounds the physical relationship between the Palaeolithic artists and the cave’s contours, with minimal narration and quiet interviews. It avoids archaeological exposition in favour of sensory immersion, treating deep time as atmosphere rather than epoch.

Samarkand

Samarkand at -800 BC is archaeologically verifiable, institutionally attested, and geographically explicable — but its ‘founding’ remains a scholarly estimate, not a recorded event.

Çatalhöyük

Catalhoyuk was a densely built Neolithic settlement in southern Anatolia occupied from roughly 7500 to 5600 BC, notable for honeycomb-like mudbrick houses entered through their roofs and for eighteen successive layers of rebuilding uncovered by archaeologists. James Mellaart, who discovered the site in 1958, argued its clay figurines pointed to a mother-goddess religion and an egalitarian social structure, but later excavations led by Ian Hodder, examining thousands more figurines and other evidence, found little support for a dominant female deity and some evidence of growing inequality over time.

Hiawatha

Jericho

Long before it was a byword for tumbling walls, Jericho was a spring-fed settlement in the Jordan Valley occupied, on and off, for some eleven thousand years. A century of digging has traced a Neolithic tower and wall from around 8300 BC through Bronze Age destructions to a Byzantine revival, but the excavators disagree about what some of it was for, and the famous conquest story from the Hebrew Bible sits awkwardly beside what the trenches actually show.

Apache Wars

Beginning after the 1848 US annexation of former Mexican territory, conflict between Apache bands and American forces ran through loosely connected phases for decades, hardened by episodes of betrayal such as the killing of Mangas Coloradas after he came in to negotiate. The final campaign against Geronimo's small band required over five thousand soldiers using coordinated heliograph communication before his 1886 surrender, though scattered incidents continued into the 1920s. The general narrative rests heavily on later military-history synthesis, and while it flags relatively few open disputes, real ambiguities remain around specific acts of betrayal and an Apache treaty Congress never actually ratified.

Cahokia

Beginning around 1050, a settlement across the Mississippi from present-day St Louis grew explosively into a city of thousands, its inhabitants moving millions of cubic feet of earth by hand to build over a hundred mounds. Because Cahokians left no written records, everything known about the city comes from excavation, radiocarbon dating and soil analysis rather than testimony, leaving population estimates and the causes of its abandonment by 1350 genuinely disputed among archaeologists. Long misattributed to a vanished non-Native civilisation, the site is now recognised as ancestral heritage by multiple Indigenous nations and holds UNESCO World Heritage status.

Neanderthal genome project

The Neanderthal genome project did not discover interbreeding as a hypothesis — it confirmed it with genomic data. It replaced speculation with measurement: four billion base pairs, three Croatian specimens, one decisive conclusion. Its legacy is methodological rigour and a rewritten human family tree.

Wheel

Engraving

Etching

Graffiti

Tamales

Arepa

Cumin

Mead

Olive oil

Beer

Cheese

Chocolate

Cotton

Poncho

Cambrian explosion