THE QUEEN OF THE NEANDERTHALS

Centuries before the first pharaohs, when great kingdoms had not yet emerged, primitive tribes formed the first societies in the valleys of the great Nile, Euphrates, and Tigris rivers, in Anatolia and on the edges of deserts and mountains.

Sedentary villages already existed millennia before agriculture and the domestication of animals, inhabited by hunter-gatherer clans who practiced a nomadic life only when climate change affected their territory's resources.

These people organized communities that maintained intense trade well into the Stone Age, exchanging a wide variety of products, sometimes transported more than two thousand kilometers from their place of origin without the aid of any animals, sometimes sailing across rivers and seas.

Before pottery, before the widespread use of copper, before the domestication of the horse, before the plow... complex hunting societies gathered wild grains to make wheat and barley flour, drank beer, ate bread... and built sanctuaries and temples, which archaeology has only just begun to uncover.

At the dawn of time, the first chapters of human history unfolded. It was a time when only one animal had been domesticated: the dog.

However, humanity was not left to its own devices; powerful gods watched... and sometimes intervened.