Summary Around 42,000 years ago, in the vast wilderness of the European Ice Age, several waves of Homo sapiens began to appear. Whilst the indigenous Neanderthal populations gradually died out, the sapiens developed networks – routes for encounters, gatherings and alliances – across these territories. Recent archaeological discoveries suggest that these intrepid peoples brought with…
Summary In the heart of Auvergne, the Puy de Dôme overlooks the volcanoes of the Chaîne des Puys. From the city of Clermont-Ferrand, you only have to look up to admire the tall silhouette of the dormant volcano. It stands there, like a lighthouse guiding travellers, an immutable guardian of the horizon and an indispensable…
Summary Thierry Courtadon sculpts grey lava stone that is specific to the Auvergne region and its chain of volcanoes. He comes from a family of stonemasons, but he is the first in his lineage to transform Volvic stone into something artistic, malleable and luminous. This unique, charismatic sculptor combines the life of a craftsman with…
Summary Germany, 1933. Hitler seizes power and forces German Jews into exile. Between 1933 and 1939, they flee Nazi persecution. How did the young Hannah Arendt and millions of German Jews flee their country to seek refuge in France? How did France, a land of welcome, turn into hell for all the exiles? Travelling across…
Summary Our daughter Noa was born into a family with roots in several countries: France, Russia and Cameroon. To share and bring this cultural complexity to life, her father and I are putting together a little puppet show for her birthday. We want her to feel and experience the places that are absent from her…
Summary An archaeologist friend takes me to the other side of the Hauts-de-France region, a few metres below ground level. I discover that this region, which still dreams of industry, is teeming with objects and traces of long-forgotten ancestors. In the middle of this vast, amnesiac plain, I begin to see the landscape differently and,…
Summary Pascal, Gwenaël and their three daughters, Naïline, Lilwen and Olwéane, are travelling on the sailing boat Nansen for three years on a trip around the Atlantic, from Brittany to the Arctic, via Africa and the Amazon. During their stopovers, the teenage girls decide to meet indigenous communities whose lives are closely linked to natural…
Summary In 2019, a curious square shape measuring approximately 25 metres on each side appeared on geophysical surveys of the subsoil carried out at the La Peyrouse site in the Dordogne region of France. Archaeologist Eneko Hiriart, a researcher at the CNRS, led the investigation. Very quickly, the first archaeological excavations carried out on the…
Summary At the end of the third millennium BCE, with the development of metallurgy and the need for new materials, the societies that currently occupy the Eurasian peninsula organised trade networks that had not existed before. Archaeological excavations conducted in Western Europe over the past twenty years are now shedding light on the economic and…
Summary Amélie is eleven years old. She has just lost her mother. What if, like in the Cambodian tale Moronak Meada, Amélie’s mother had been reincarnated as a fish? Would this belief enable the little girl to accept the unacceptable?
