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The 6 million-ton Great Pyramid of Giza is the last surviving wonder of the ancient world. How did the Egyptians engineer the mighty pharaoh Khufu’s tomb so precisely, with none of today’s surveying and power tools? And who were the thousands of laborers who raised the stones? Were they slaves or volunteers, and how were they housed, fed, and organized? "Decoding the Great Pyramid" presents the latest evidence from groundbreaking archaeological research that has transformed our understanding of the ancient world’s most ambitious engineering project, revealing a “lost city" and intimate details of the lives of the laborers and officials who toiled on the vast construction. Amazingly, French archaeologists recently found the logbook of a labor team that delivered limestone blocks to build the Great Pyramid, yielding crucial insights into the planning and logistics behind the operation. Beyond these construction secrets, "Decoding the Great Pyramid" traces how mobilizing the colossal labor and resources invested in the monument transformed ancient Egypt, uniting a nation behind the common goal of ensuring eternity for the pharaoh and continuing prosperity for everyone in this life and the next. (Premiered February 6, 2019)

New archeological evidence sheds light on the stunning engineering of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

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Explore the intimate connections between the landscape, the colonizing of the continent, and the emergence of our industrial world. Beginning with Native American ancestors who crafted hunting weapons from stone traded across hundreds of miles, the program shows how pre-Columbian civilizations developed an expert knowledge of the landscape and its resources. With the arrival of Europeans, North America’s hidden riches became to key to prosperity, from the gold rush to today’s oil and gas boom. As a result, human activity has transformed the continent on a scale that rivals the geological forces that gave birth to it billions of years before. Yet, scientists warn of sleeping giants like the Cascadia fault, and the earthquake/tsunami one-two punch it could unleash on the Pacific Northwest. Even as we re-mold the continent to suit our needs, geologic processes inexorably continue, and they raise potential risks of catastrophe to our human civilization.

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(This program is no longer available for online streaming.) Our ancient human ancestors once lived only in Africa, in tiny bands of a few thousand hunter-gatherers. Then we moved out of our African cradle, spreading rapidly to every corner of the planet. How did we acquire the skills, technology and talent to thrive in every environment on earth? How did our prehistoric forebears cross the Sahara on foot, survive frigid ice ages, and sail to remote Pacific islands? “Great Human Odyssey” is a spectacular global journey following their footsteps out of Africa along a trail of fresh scientific clues. With unique glimpses of today’s Kalahari hunters, Siberian reindeer herders, and Polynesian navigators, we discover amazing skills that hint at how our ancestors survived and prospered long ago. (Premiered October 5, 2016)

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Human fossil footprints at White Sands National Park in New Mexico. Image Credit: Courtesy of the National Park Service

Human tracks may be earliest evidence of people in North America

In southern New Mexico lies the Tularosa Basin, an oblong bowl that’s home to a natural sandbox: White Sands National Park.In 2005, David Bustos came to White Sands to work as a National Park Service biologist. The following year, he took notice of odd animal footprints that would appear only when the ground was wet. (The first of these footprints was reported in the 1930s.) The markings, which would disappear as the earth dried up, became known as ghost tracks.Then in 2009, Bustos came across tracks he thought belonged to ancient humans walking alongside mammoths. But few scientists agreed, he says, rebutting with “No, no, those are the prints of camels that were slipping in the mud,” referring to now-extinct North American camels. And the tracks would disappear with changes in the weather. Heavy rainfall drowned them; periods of drought dried them up. It would take more than a decade—and cooperative weather—for scientists to agree that the tracks belonged to humans. Then, says U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Research Geologist Kathleen Springer, “What everyone was asking is, ‘How old are these things, really?’”
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In September 2021, Bustos, Springer, and a group of other researchers published their findings in the journal Science: The team identified 61 human tracks within multiple levels of earth belowground, and between layers of these tracks were seeds from an ancient aquatic plant. Analyses of these seeds—and the footprints they were embedded within—are now challenging scientists’ understanding of when and how people arrived in the Americas.Archaeologist Joe Watkins, who was not involved in the study, believes the findings have potentially massive implications. “I think, outside the next big migration of going to the Moon or Mars, the migration to the Americas was the last great migration humanity had,” he says. Upending the timeline of this journey could have implications for both science and Native American cultures, Watkins, who is a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, believes.<h3>Visiting the tracks</h3>At first light on a cold January morning in 2020, Bustos set out with Springer and her USGS colleague Jeff Pigati on all-terrain vehicles to visit White Sands’ ancient tracks. The team wore parkas to keep warm amid a prevailing wind. Springer recalls the hour-and-a-half journey through the dunes being like a “Disney ride.” It was the “funnest thing in the world,” she says. “Just being out there is surreal.”Eventually, after passing through a large swath of national park that borders the site of the first atomic bomb test, Springer, Pigati, and Bustos fell upon thousands of tracks. They belonged to packs of dire wolves, giant sloths, 13-foot-tall mammoths, and other animals. And, Springer says, “there’s a person track right smack dab in the middle of them.”
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<img alt="White Sands National Park dunes" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/White_Sands_Dunes.width-990_kjxnoic.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Gypsum sand dunes at White Sands National Park, New Mexico. Image Credit: NOVA/GBH
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“When Dave showed us these things and we had our eyes trained on them, we were almost afraid to step down,” Pigati says. “It looks like a painting in some places.”Bustos recalls the conditions that day being perfect for identifying tracks. The trio saw human footprints going underneath the sediment in places, illustrating that there was more than a surface layer of them. “We were seeing seed layers popping out all over the place,” Bustos says. To determine how old the footprints were, Springer and Pigati’s team would collect these ancient seeds from different layers of footprints. The overwhelming evidence of ancient plant life excited Bustos.About 36,000 to 19,000 years ago, lakes filled the Tularosa Basin. The largest of these was Lake Otero, which fluctuated in size and activity based on rainfall. Plants like spiral ditchgrass (Ruppia cirrhosa), whose seeds are now embedded in layers of earth, grew along Otero’s edges. About 23,000 years ago, the southwestern U.S. became drier and the lake shrank. This exposed a large area of land that was once underwater, whose clays and silts became overtopped by gypsum sand and silt. People began walking around these surfaces, which “were kind of squishy in some areas,” Springer explains. And the people weren’t alone: The impressions from mammoths, ground sloths, and camels, sit alongside—and sometimes right on top of—human prints. “This can only happen if they are in the area at the same time,” Pigati said in an email. “Exactly how they may have interacted in the vicinity of our [research site] is unknown, but there is definitive evidence that humans were harassing or stalking a giant ground sloth on the west side of the basin.”In many other cases, interactions between humans and animals seem peaceful. “What’s interesting to me,” Bustos says, “is it’s not just a mammoth and a hunter. It’s families. You see a baby mammoth turning around and spinning. We have the juvenile and adult megafauna prints with the babies and adult [humans].”
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<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Sloth_Footprint.width-990_j4t67Wp.jpg"/>
<figcaption>A footprint from a Harlan's ground sloth at White Sands National Park. Image Credit: Courtesy of the National Parks Service
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Having about 10 hours of daylight, the team got to work “trenching” the human footprints, Springer says. With ground-penetrating radar, they were able to determine that footprints were present within layers of sediment. They then dug a trench to view the layers in cross-section. If Springer and Pigati’s cross-section was a sandwich, the footprints would be the filling and the dateable material around the footprints would be the bread. Dating tracks only at the surface would yield inaccurate results, Pigati explains. “You can look in every direction and there are trackways everywhere in every horizon,” he says. But if you calculate the age of these footprints on the surface layer of earth only, you’ll just find that they’re younger than the ground they’re upon, he says. By looking at layers of sediment below the surface, the team set out to document how many layers contained footprints and find datable material above and below each layer. Each of these layers would contain footprints from a unique time period, the team posited. “The footprints are imprinted at the top of a given layer of sediment—they don’t really pass through the layers,” Pigati wrote in an email.As the sun rose higher in the sky, the white sand reflected a near-blinding light, and the day quickly grew warm. The researchers shedded their parkas and worked in t-shirts until the January sun fizzled and it was time to ride back through the dunes, chunks of sediment layers in hand.The team later extracted 40 to 60 ditchgrass seeds from every level of footprints in every sample. In a USGS lab in Golden, Colorado, they cleaned each set of seeds with a chemical treatment and began combusting them.  The combustion process, automated by a machine in the lab, didn’t obliterate the seeds but turned them into a gas. From this gas, a machine turned the once-seeds back into solids: graphite pellets about the size of a pencil tip. This technology of making “graphite targets” dates back to the 80s, Pigati says. “Every lab does it the same way in the world.”The team then took these pellets, tapped them down into cartridges, and sent them off to a lab to measure the amount of a radioactive isotope of carbon, called carbon-14, they contained. Then they waited for results.<h3>What the tracks mean</h3>Months later, they came. The seeds revealed that the footprints they were embedded within are between 21,000 and 23,000 years old—thousands of years older than what scientists generally consider to be the earliest evidence of people in the Americas.“For forever, people thought Clovis were the first people to cross over [the Bering Strait] about 13,000 years ago,” Pigati says, referring to the commonly-held view among archaeologists. As the story goes, ice sheets in what is now Canada blocked passage between what is now Alaska and the rest of the Americas. Once these ice sheets began retreating, people came south through an ice-free corridor, Pigati explains. His team’s findings now challenge this belief. Carbon dating of the seeds within the White Sands footprints suggest that people were in the Americas while ice sheets still covered much of northern North America. “A lot earlier” than previously thought, Pigati says. “When we got the final dates back, it was very…” Springer pauses over Zoom, choosing her words carefully. “The arrows were going to start flying. We knew we needed an [evidence-supported] explanation why these findings were really robust.”
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Archaeologist Joe Watkins says that if the dating of the seeds, and therefore footprints, is correct, “it puts us at 20% older than the dates we have from the rest of America.” Therefore, ages of other important archaeological sites like Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania, where scientists have found 16,000-year-old evidence of human life, may need to be reconsidered. (In 2014, Nikhil Swaminathan <a href="https://www.archaeology.org/issues/145-1409/features/2369-peopling-the-americas-meadowcroft-rockshelter">wrote for Archaeology Magazine</a> that Meadowcroft Rockshelter is “the longest-occupied site in the Americas.”)Watkins first heard about the White Sands tracks years ago while working in Washington D.C. as the chief of the Tribal Relations and American Cultures Program of the National Park Service. But he didn’t see them until after he’d retired, visiting White Sands during a NOVA shoot for the film “<a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/ice-age-footprints/">Ice Age Footprints</a>.” Seeing human footprints intermingling with those of ground sloths was overwhelming and “tremendously exhilarating,” he says.
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<img alt="Archaeologist Joe Watkins holds a clovis point" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Joe_Watkins.width-990_4i0j7w4.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Watkins pictured with a replica Clovis point. His interest in archaeology was piqued at 10 years old when he found an archaic point on his family’s Oklahoma homestead. Watkins, who’s now 71, showed the point to his grandmother. The artifact didn’t come from modern Choctaw, but was much older, she explained in her native language. From that moment, Watkins became “more interested in looking into the unwritten past,” and, with his grandmother’s support, began pursuing a career in archaeology, a field he recognizes isn’t always “in advantage to the Native American community,” he says. Image Credit: NOVA/GBH
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But Watkins cautions that, with no other aspects of culture present but footprints, scientists like him can only speculate how ancient humans were using the land. “Were they just walking? Were they hunting? Did they have a camp nearby?” he asks. Archaeology may not hold all the answers to these questions: “I do think it’s important for American Indians to be involved so they can offer their insights so we can better understand who these people were,” Watkins says, reflecting on his own Choctaw roots.As Native American identity is tied to the land, Watkins believes, “the Native peoples will say we’ve always been here,” he says. “I usually say [the first Americans] weren’t Native Americans. They weren’t Siberians. They were whatever they called themselves.” Combining this philosophy with science is a way to integrate belief systems, he says.
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The White Sands findings, Watkins says, “forced us to reconsider the most cherished ideas of the people of North America.”
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Watkins recites his people’s story about two stiff-legged bears that meet in a black-loam prairie and have a battle. Only one survives; it becomes the last of its species. “Some Choctaw interpret ‘stiff-legged bear’ as being a mammoth,” Watkins says. If humans did once walk alongside mammoths in New Mexico’s Tularosa Basin 20,000 years ago, he adds, there’s a chance these people gave birth “to any number of tribal people across the U.S.” <h3>Racing against time</h3>Bustos, Springer, Pigati, and fellow researchers visited the ghost tracks again in January and April 2022. They extended their trench, identifying more footprints from potentially before and after the original set they excavated. To bolster their findings, Bustos explains, the team won’t rely solely on dating seeds. They’ll date pollen, too. “This work is not done,” Pigati says. “We have a window from 21,000 to 23,000 [years]. We don’t know if people were here before then.” But the clock is ticking. Erosion in White Sands is exposing and destroying the tracks, Springer says. Though the Tularosa Basin has been eroding for nearly 12,000 years, climate change is likely exacerbating erosion today, she explains. “The layers, they’re finite,” Bustos adds. “We’re losing thousands of tracks to erosion. It’s a race to document them before they’re gone.”Already, some tracks reveal clues about ancient daily life in the Tularosa Basin.“There’s something about the children,” Bustos says. “You see these toddlers running and jumping, and the story really comes alive.” Watkins agrees. “When we look at the tracks of children playing in perhaps puddled water surrounded by ground sloths,” he says, “it takes us back to childhood memories of children playing in puddles all around the world.”
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Footprints in New Mexico’s White Sands National Park challenge scientists’ timeline of when humans first came to North America.

Addressing Some Misconceptions About Ancient Maya Civilization | Ancient Maya Metropolis

Learn about some common misconceptions about the Maya and how various kinds of archaeological evidence are helping to build a more accurate story about the ancient Maya, in these videos from NOVA: Ancient Maya Metropolis.

The Mammoth Species You've Never Heard Of

These bones could have belonged to some of the last surviving steppe mammoths in Britain.
Remains—particularly teeth—reveal that two species of mammoth once lived in what is now Southern England.
The Mammoth Species You&#x27;ve Never Heard OfPublished: April 5, 2022David Attenborough: Mammoth evolution expert Steven Zhang is examining the remains found at the site. The teeth have given him a crucial clue.Steven Zhang: Looking at a mammoth tooth is like looking into a barcode for the mammoth itself. We start by counting the number of enamel ridges. So this one has about 18, which is a very typical number for a steppe mammoth. Looking at this piece of tooth, we know that it&#x27;s a last molar or a wisdom tooth, so we know this was a fully grown adult, except this is one of the smallest steppe mammoth teeth there probably is in existence. It&#x27;s like finding a German shepherd at the size of a Westie.David Attenborough: These teeth appear to be from a population of small steppe mammoths. Their reduced size could be a consequence of food becoming less abundant.We now know that early mammoths first evolved in Africa around five million years ago, and then spread into Europe and Asia. Around 1.7 million years ago, steppe mammoths evolved that grazed the grassy plains. They then moved into Europe and North America, where Columbian mammoths later appeared. The famous woolly mammoths developed around 700,000 years ago, adapted for colder climates, and they eventually spread first into Europe, and then North America.David Attenborough: If a steppe mammoth was here, now you&#x27;d see that it wasn&#x27;t particularly hairy, a sign that the climate must have been quite temporary. And as for size, well, the female was about my size, male a bit bigger, and the baby, well, I guess like that. Must have been rather enchanting.David Attenborough: There are also remains of another type of mammoth.Steven Zhang: Over here, I would say this is a typical woolly mammoth, so these two different kind of beasts were occurring at the same site. One possibility was that this site was a habitat shared by both steppe and woolly mammoths, or as woolly mammoths migrated westward from Siberia into Europe, they started to mingle with local steppe mammoths. This is interesting because not often do we see a snapshot like this. It&#x27;s exciting.

These bones could have belonged to some of the last surviving steppe mammoths in Britain.

These Artifacts and Foods Tie Modern Maya to the Past

Oral tradition talks about the importance of these foods for Maya.
“The contemporary Maya people still practice not only Maya traditions, but Mesoamerican traditions,&quot; anthropologist Iyaxel Coteji Ren told NOVA. &quot;It&#x27;s one of the traits that distinguish Maya culture.&quot;
These Artifacts and Foods Tie Modern Maya to the PastPublished: April 5, 2022Diane Chase: One has to imagine a completely different looking landscape than this. What we&#x27;d be seeing is terraces, agriculture, road systems, causeways and households, and not jungle.Narrator: The city of Caracol was a feat of urban engineering, reshaping the hillsides to bare rock. The Maya built networks of terraces for their crops.Diane Chase: So these individuals that are living out here have agricultural fields right around them. They&#x27;ve got corn, they&#x27;ve got beans, they&#x27;ve got squash. It&#x27;s a sustainable community.Narrator: In Caracol, maya homes were grouped together on the plazuela hilltops.Diane Chase: We&#x27;re inside a plazuela group. The Maya houses were built usually inside a plaza with a series of structures facing each other. So this is a Maya household, a typical Maya household. There would&#x27;ve been stairways made of stone and then foundation walls made of stone, but the rest would&#x27;ve been pole and thatch. The eastern structure is usually the mortuary structure, and that&#x27;s what&#x27;s behind me is the structure where the Maya would&#x27;ve buried their dead and conducted some of their ritual offerings. What we found in this particular building is the mortuary shrine. It has caches, things that are specially deposited, hidden, ritual caches.Maureen Carpenter: So I&#x27;m going to just put both hands around it.Narrator: The quality of the objects left in the caches show that even non -elite Maya were able to own fine goods.Maureen Carpenter: This is a heavy boy, okay? You got it?Diane Chase: Okay. You got it. You got it.Maureen Carpenter: All right.Dian Chase: All right. Looks good. It&#x27;s whole.Maureen Carpenter: It&#x27;s whole.Diane Chase: It&#x27;s whole. It&#x27;s cracked.Maureen Carpenter: Okay.Diane Chase: But it is whole.Arlen Chase: One of the things that we found that&#x27;s really interesting is a work of art in the form of a cylinder vase. And the cylinder vase is clearly carved by a master artist. You would probably think, &quot;Oh, it should come from an elite tomb.&quot; And it came out of a minor crypt in a residential group.Iyaxel Coteji Ren: Sometimes we can focus only about the function of an artifact, how it was produced. But I think we need to keep in mind that there are human beings behind those artifacts. There&#x27;s a culture that we want to know better.Narrator: Some objects are still used today. The traditional foods prepared with them tie the modern Maya to the past, like the grinding stone and tray, the mono and metate.Iyaxel Coteji Ren: The contemporary Maya people still practice not only Maya traditions, but Mesoamerican traditions. It&#x27;s one of the traits that distinguish Maya culture, the consumption specific food, and the metate is always present, the tortilla, the tamalitos.Timotea Mesh: This is what the ancient Mayas would have made before. The grinding stone is the most ancient way of grinding the corn. As long as we have the dough, from there we can prepare different types of meal with the corn dough. The corn tortillas are basically like the bread of our meals.Josefa Canto: So the grill doesn&#x27;t need oil, nothing. Just slide your tortilla there.Timotea Mesh: I grew up seeing all these kind of food, making tortillas, grinding corn, harvesting beans and squashes, preserving...Iyaxel Coteji Ren: These ingredients were present in Maya diet. You still have this Maya inscription, Maya hieroglyphic text that mentions these words, and oral tradition talks about the importance of this food for Maya. Because it&#x27;s so connected with identity, I think people continue producing these traditional dishes.

Oral tradition talks about the importance of these foods for Maya.

How Neanderthals Came to Inhabit Northwest Europe

Stone tools reveal that four species of human have occupied Britain.
Sir David Attenborough investigates with an archaeologist and paleoanthropologist how Neanderthals thrived 200,000 years ago in what is now Great Britain.
How Neanderthals Came to Inhabit Northwest EuropePublished: March 3, 2022DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Now this, which I know you haven’t seen before, was found alongside this mammoth, which we have been excavating. What does that tell you about dating or, indeed, anything else?NICK ASHTON: Well, it’s undoubtedly a hand ax and very typical of early Neanderthals, quite similar to some of these. And I gather that the site dates to roughly about 200,000 years ago. So, it would actually be contemporary with these Levallois points, but it’s very different. Here we have a traditional hand ax, so what’s going on? One idea is that you’ve got different populations coming in, from different parts of Europe, with different technologies. Another idea might be that maybe you’ve got a residual population in Britain, in Western Britain, who are still making hand axes.DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: We’re still talking about Neanderthals?NICK ASHTON: We’re still talking about Neanderthals.DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Stone tools like these, together with rare fragments of human bone, reveal that four species of human have occupied Britain. The stone tools and the dating of our site both suggest that the humans who were living here were, in fact, Neanderthals.To find out more about them, Ben is meeting anthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi.ELLA AL-SHAMAHI (Paleoanthropologist): So, our ancestors and the ancestors of Neanderthals were in Africa. And then, at some point, a group of them left. And we don’t know where, and we don’t know when, but they became Neanderthals. We have sites all the way as far as Siberia, and then we have a whole pile in Europe. It doesn’t mean that they’re a European species, it just means that a lot of the archaeologists are actually in Europe, and were digging in their own backyards. We’ve got this massive array, actually, of Neanderthals in this whole region. And if you look at that region, that’s a number of different environments, and a number of different climates, as well.BEN GARROD: And do we know what they looked like?ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Yeah. So, Neanderthals were very similar to us, but there were crucial differences. So, for example, we know that Neanderthals, on average, were, well, they were shorter. So, male Neanderthals would have come in at about five-foot-four, five-foot-five. They were also really stocky. But, you know, people have said, “Well, if you’ve got a Neanderthal and you gave him a shave, and you give him a bowler hat, and you put him on the New York subway, would anyone notice?” And then somebody obviously said, “Well, that probably says more about the New York subway than it does about Neanderthals.” But the point stands, you know, how different were they really?

Stone tools reveal that four species of human have occupied Britain.

LIDAR Technology Helps Uncover a Maya Metropolis

Light Detection and Ranging, LIDAR, sees through the jungle to reveal what lies beneath.
LIDAR technology reveals that, in 700 C.E., the ancient Maya city of Caracol was one of the largest in the world.
LIDAR Technology Helps Uncover a Maya Metropolis Published: February 8, 2022ARLEN CHASE: This was the first place in the tropics to ever use LIDAR in a broad-scale sense. They’d done little pockets of it here and there, especially in Europe, but no one had ever tried to do a broad scale, to see if you could lift the trees and see what was underneath that forest.NARRATOR: LIDAR, Light Detection and Ranging, was initially used for atmospheric measurements.NARRATOR: LIDAR sends thousands of laser beams of different wavelengths and then measures the time for the reflected beams to return. The lasers were able to penetrate the jungle canopy and create high resolution images of the ground below. The result was a revolution in tropical archeology.JAIME AWE: LIDAR is actually God’s gift to the tropical archaeologist, because you can tell the computer, “Get rid of all the forest. Get rid of all the jungle.” And what you have left is bare earth. And you see the courtyards, you see the temples, you see the palaces, the reservoirs.DIANE CHASE: What some other archaeologists did when they first had access to LIDAR is they used the LIDAR and then they did a ground check. They would be…go and look and see if they saw a feature, and they would say, “Oh, is that on the ground in the place where the LIDAR showed us?”When we did the LIDAR, we were able to double check our maps rather than the other way around.NARRATOR: The years of mapping Caracol by hand finally paid off.DIANE CHASE: We had the ground check first, and then we used the LIDAR.NARRATOR: LIDAR has opened up an incredible window on ancient structures, but also issues around access, to try and keep the data from looters.In Caracol, the LIDAR and the Chases’ maps combined to provide a blueprint for understanding a city-sized bank of LIDAR data.Archaeologist Adrian Chase has spent years modelling the city of Caracol, one hilltop, called a “plazuela,” at a time.ADRIAN CHASE: I started working on the LIDAR at the start of 2010. Using different LIDAR visualizations, I went through the dataset systematically, to try and identify and digitize as many of the plazuela household groups as I could. Each one of these little squares is an extended family household. But all the ridge tops are covered in them.NARRATOR: The computer modelling of the Caracol LIDAR allows us to see an amazing Maya city in precise detail, a city of great size and sophistication.ADRIAN CHASE: The initial map had 78 structures. And then with the LIDAR, we now have over 7,000 household structures that are raised households.NARRATOR: While Europe was in the Dark Ages, the world of the Maya was thriving.ADRIAN CHASE: The population of it estimates about 100,000 people at 700 A.D. Based on, sort of, the rough data that you can get for that time period, it would have made Caracol the seventh largest city in the world. It’s a big city.

Light Detection and Ranging, LIDAR, sees through the jungle to reveal what lies beneath.

Great Mammoth Mystery

Sir David Attenborough explores a site with traces of ancient mammoths and Neanderthals.

Topic: Ancient Worlds

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