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.

A Sumerian tablet in the Penn Museum carries fifteen medical prescriptions, ground into beer or wine, including washing wounds with alkali and oil. What it contains no trace of is magic. No incantations, no gods, no spirits blamed for illness.

Fifteen Neolithic stone masks, carved in the Judean Hills around 9,000 years ago, are among the oldest human portraits known. Only two were archaeologically excavated. The origins of the other thirteen remain unknown.

A Neo-Assyrian tablet from Nineveh prescribes cures for roaring in the ears, a sound Assyrian medicine blamed on the hand of a ghost.

What archaeology and ancient wisdom literature reveal about the question that arrives after retirement, and the 12,000 years of people who asked it first.