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On a hilltop in southeastern Turkey stand great pillars of carved stone, raised by human hands more than eleven thousand years ago. That date is worth pausing on. Eleven thousand years. These pillars were ancient before the first cities, before writing, before the wheel, before metal tools, before the pyramids by a span of time longer than separates us from the pyramids themselves. They were raised by people we long assumed incapable of such a thing, simple hunters and gather

On one morning each year, and one morning only, the rising midwinter sun sends a finger of light through a small stone opening, down a long dark passage, and into the heart of a tomb that has stood for more than five thousand years. For seventeen minutes the chamber glows. Then the light withdraws, the darkness returns, and the sun does not enter again for another whole year. This is Newgrange, in Ireland, built before the great pyramids of Egypt, before Stonehenge, by people

For nearly four thousand years, one of the largest civilisations the ancient world ever produced left no trace in human memory at all. It had great cities of fired brick, laid out on grids, with straight streets, public wells, and drainage systems more sophisticated than anything in Europe for thousands of years afterward. It stretched across an area larger than ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia combined. Perhaps a million people lived within it. And then it was gone, so complete