Three hundred and thirty-six metres inside a cave in southern France — far past the last thread of daylight, in total darkness — there are rings built out of broken stalagmites. Six structures in all: two rings, the larger about 6.7 by 4.5 metres and stacked several layers high with upright pieces propping it, plus four heaps of stone. The builders used roughly 400 stalagmites, snapped off and cut to near-uniform lengths of about 30 centimetres — 112 metres of stone, weighing some 2.2 tonnes. Every structure carries traces of fire: 57 reddened pieces, 66 blackened ones, and fragments of burnt bone.

The rings were built 176,500 years ago. The only humans in Europe then were Neanderthals.

You have probably heard of Göbekli Tepe, the hill in southeastern Turkey with the great stone circles — T-shaped pillars carved with animals, raised around 9600 BCE. Its excavator, Klaus Schmidt, gave the world a headline: this was the world’s first temple, built by hunter-gatherers who gathered for ritual and feasting, with no houses, no hearths, no town. First came the temple, then the city. Religion, the story said, invented civilization.

The archaeologists who dig there now — Schmidt’s successors, led by Lee Clare — have spent the last several seasons respectfully taking that story apart.

For most of a century, the story went like this: people reached the Americas around 13,000 to 16,000 years ago, once the great ice sheets opened enough to let them through, and the Clovis culture’s stone points mark the first Americans. It was a tidy story. Then the footprints turned up.

At White Sands in New Mexico, in the gypsum flats of what was once a lake called Otero, researchers have documented thousands of human footprints, pressed into the ancient shore alongside the tracks of mammoths and giant ground sloths. A striking share of them were made by teenagers and children. The prints come from layer after layer, spanning something like 2,000 years of people coming back to the same lakeshore.

I’ve been wanting to write on this topic for a while, but of course, other topics got in the way, and because I didn’t save the relavent article I wanted to use (which includes multiple other links), I haven’t been able to write about Climate Change in any significant way. Let me say that I am terrible at Internet queries. Sometimes, I find exactly what I’m looking for on the first attempt, othertimes, I cannot seem to find the reference at all, even though I know I’ve seen and read it sometime before. Today  though, I finally discovered – on the first attempt! – the article I had read some years ago.

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