Archaeological discoveries are shattering scholars’ long-held beliefs about how the earliest humans organized their societies—and hint at possibilities for our own,

Reconstructing an ancient African civilization heretofore mostly ignored.

In 1939, acting on a tip and clues from The Iliad, archaeologists unearthed King Nestor’s palace on Pylos. Recently, another discovery in Pylos, the grave of an even earlier soldier, could change our entire understanding of how western civilization developed.