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Step away from every electric light, out into a true wilderness, and look up. The sky that ancient people knew comes flooding back. Thousands of stars, sharp and bright. The pale river of the Milky Way arching overhead. The moon moving through its phases, the slow wheel of the constellations across the turning seasons. For our ancestors, this was no distant abstraction. It was a vivid, constant presence, watched closely, understood deeply, woven into the rhythm of their lives

After days of travelling, the land begins to rise. The flat sand gives way to something stranger, a vast plateau of weathered stone that climbs out of the desert like the ruin of a drowned continent. Towers of rock stand in their thousands. Arches and pinnacles throw long shadows across the sand. It looks less like a place on Earth than a vision of another planet. This is Tassili n'Ajjer. Hidden among its stone lies one of the greatest treasures of the ancient world. Climb on

On a cliff in Argentina, hundreds of hands reach out of the rock. Red, black, ochre, they cluster across the stone in their multitudes, the outlines of human palms sprayed onto the surface thousands of years ago. The place is called the Cave of Hands, and to stand within it is overwhelming. A silent crowd, reaching out across nine thousand years. The same gesture appears on the far side of the world. In the caves of Indonesia. On the walls of Europe. Across Africa, Australia,