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A ruin gives up many secrets, but rarely the one we most want. Its age. Stand before an ancient wall, a buried city, a circle of standing stones, and the question rises instinctively. How old is this? When did human hands build it? Yet the stones themselves carry no date. The builders left no calendar. The site simply waits, silent about the single fact we most desire to know. How, then, do archaeologists put a number on the past? The answer is a story of ingenuity, detective

Almost everything that defines civilised life began in one place, between two rivers, more than five thousand years ago. Writing. The city. The wheel. The law. Organised religion on a grand scale. Mathematics. Astronomy. The very idea of living together in their thousands, ruled by kings, fed by farms, served by scribes. So much of what we take for granted as the basic furniture of human society traces back to a single, astonishing region, where humanity first gathered into t

Some of the stones are so large that the question asks itself the moment you see them. How on Earth did they move that? Across the ancient world stand structures built from blocks of staggering size, stones weighing many tonnes, sometimes hundreds of tonnes, quarried, transported, lifted and fitted together with astonishing precision. They were raised by people without modern machinery, without engines, without steel, using only what their own age provided. The results can le