History of the World
from the first turning of the Earth to the present day
Unrolled before you is the whole story of our planet, some four and a half billion years of it. It begins with a ball of molten rock settling into orbit around a young Sun and ends with the year you are reading this. Each entry marks one great turning point, and the coloured line beneath it tells you what kind of event it was:
Tap a colour to hide or show that kind of event.
Between the entries you will find folds in the scroll, each marked with how much time it hides. They begin folded so you can read the whole story in one sitting. Tap one to unroll it, and the parchment will stretch out to show the time that passed, with a note on what the world was doing in the meantime.
A note on scale: unrolled folds grow with the time they hold, but compressed, so a gap ten times longer is drawn about twice as long. Otherwise the scroll could not fit in any browser.
The Hadean Eon
4.54 – 4 billion years ago
Named for Hades, the Greek underworld: a molten, meteor-battered world whose earliest rocks have almost all been destroyed.
c. 4.54 billion years ago
The Earth Takes Shape
Cosmic & Geological.Dust and rock circling the young Sun clump together into a molten planet, third from its star. The clock starts here. For its first few hundred million years the surface is an ocean of magma, battered by leftover debris.
c. 4.51 billion years ago
The Moon Is Born
Cosmic & Geological.A Mars-sized body called Theia slams into the infant Earth. The debris flung into orbit gathers into the Moon. It starts out far closer than today, raising enormous tides, and has been drifting away ever since, about 3.8 cm a year.
c. 4.4 billion years ago
The First Oceans
Cosmic & Geological.Tiny zircon crystals from Western Australia's Jack Hills, the oldest known pieces of Earth, show that liquid water was already pooling on the cooling surface. Water will make Earth the only world known to host life.
The Archean Eon
4 – 2.5 billion years ago
The first continents form and life appears, but only as single cells in seas without oxygen.
c. 3.5 billion years ago
The First Signs of Life
Life & Evolution.Microbial mats build layered mounds called stromatolites, whose fossils survive in some of the oldest rocks on Earth. Living stromatolites still grow today in the salty lagoons of Shark Bay, Australia.
The Proterozoic Eon
2.5 billion – 539 million years ago
Oxygen fills the air, cells grow complex, ice sometimes grips the whole planet, and the first animals appear.
c. 2.4 billion years ago
The Great Oxidation
Life & Evolution.Photosynthesizing cyanobacteria flood the air with oxygen, poisoning much of early life but making ours possible. Iron dissolved in the seas rusts and sinks, laying down the banded rocks we mine for steel today. The oxygen also forms an ozone layer that will one day shield life on land.
c. 1.8 billion years ago
Complex Cells
Life & Evolution.Cells with a nucleus appear, probably after one microbe swallowed another and kept it as a power plant: the mitochondrion. Every plant, animal and fungus alive today is built from cells like these.
c. 720 million years ago
Snowball Earth
Cosmic & Geological.Ice creeps nearly to the equator in one of the most severe glaciations the planet has ever known. Life hangs on in patches of open water and near volcanic vents, and the great thaw may have set the stage for animals.
c. 575 million years ago
The Ediacaran Creatures
Life & Evolution.Soft, quilted organisms, some a metre long, spread across the sea floor. They are among the first large, complex living things. Most look like nothing alive today: fronds, discs and quilts with no obvious head, mouth or legs.
The Paleozoic Era
539 – 252 million years ago
The era of 'ancient life': animals fill the seas, then plants, insects and four-legged creatures conquer the land.
c. 539 million years ago
The Cambrian Explosion
Life & Evolution.In a geological blink, most major animal body plans appear: eyes, shells, jointed legs, and the first true predators. Nearly every major animal group alive today, including our own backboned ancestors, traces its roots to this burst.
c. 470 million years ago
Plants Come Ashore
Life & Evolution.Moss-like plants creep onto the bare continents. Their roots and debris start the first soils, and by drawing carbon dioxide from the air they begin to cool the climate.
c. 445 million years ago
The Ordovician Extinction
Disasters & Plagues.A sudden ice age locks up water and drains the shallow seas where most life lived. Around 85 percent of marine species die out in the second-worst mass extinction in Earth's history.
c. 385 million years ago
The First Forests
Life & Evolution.Trees such as Archaeopteris, with true wood and deep roots, form the first forests. They pull so much carbon from the air that the climate cools, and the forests that follow will be buried to become the world's coal.
c. 375 million years ago
A Fish Takes a Step
Life & Evolution.Tiktaalik, part fish and part four-legged animal, props itself up in the shallows. It is a close cousin of the first land vertebrates. Its neck, sturdy fins and lungs show how the move from water to land happened step by step.
c. 335 million years ago
Pangaea
Cosmic & Geological.The continents grind together into a single supercontinent, ringed by one world ocean. Its heart lies so far from the sea that vast deserts form.
c. 312 million years ago
The Egg That Left the Water
Life & Evolution.Early reptiles such as Hylonomus lay eggs with a tough shell and their own private pond inside. No longer needing water to breed, animals can move into the dry interiors of continents.
c. 252 million years ago
The Great Dying
Disasters & Plagues.Vast Siberian eruptions trigger the worst mass extinction ever. Roughly nine in ten marine species vanish. Carbon dioxide from the eruptions heats the planet and strips oxygen from the oceans, and recovery takes millions of years.
The Mesozoic Era
252 – 66 million years ago
The age of reptiles. Dinosaurs rule the land while mammals, birds and flowers quietly appear.
c. 231 million years ago
The First Dinosaurs
Life & Evolution.Small, two-legged hunters appear in what is now Argentina. Their descendants will rule the land for 165 million years. For now, though, they share it with larger crocodile-like reptiles.
c. 225 million years ago
The First Mammals
Life & Evolution.Small, furry, and probably nocturnal, the earliest mammal-like creatures scurry about at the dinosaurs' feet. They will stay small for more than 150 million years.
c. 201 million years ago
The End-Triassic Extinction
Disasters & Plagues.Massive eruptions along the rift that will become the Atlantic trigger another mass extinction. Many of the dinosaurs' rivals disappear, and dinosaurs rise to dominate the land.
c. 200 million years ago
Pangaea Breaks Apart
Cosmic & Geological.The supercontinent begins to rift. A young Atlantic Ocean opens between Africa and the Americas. The continents are still drifting today, at about the speed your fingernails grow.
c. 150 million years ago
Feathers Take Flight
Life & Evolution.Archaeopteryx, a feathered dinosaur with teeth, claws and wings, flaps through the Jurassic.xf Found in 1861, two years after Darwin's Origin of Species, it became a famous link between reptiles and birds.
c. 130 million years ago
The First Flowers
Life & Evolution.Flowering plants appear, then spread across the globe alongside the insects that pollinate them. Today most plant species flower, including almost every crop we eat.
66 million years ago
The Asteroid
Disasters & Plagues.A rock about 10 km wide strikes Mexico's Yucatán. The non-bird dinosaurs, and about three-quarters of all species, are wiped out. Soot and dust darken the skies, and food chains collapse. Small, burrowing mammals survive, and their descendants inherit the Earth.
The Cenozoic Era
66 million years ago – today
The age of mammals. The climate cools, grasslands spread, and apes, eventually including us, evolve in Africa.
c. 50 million years ago
India Hits Asia
Cosmic & Geological.After drifting north across the ocean, the Indian plate collides with Asia. The crumpling crust begins to raise the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau, which are still rising today.
c. 7 million years ago
A Split in the Family
Life & Evolution.Our ancestors part ways with those of chimpanzees. Sahelanthropus, found in Chad, is one of the earliest known members of the human line. The change is slow: for millions of years our ancestors still climb trees as they learn to walk upright.
c. 3.3 million years ago
The First Stone Tools
Inventions & Science.Near Kenya's Lake Turkana, early hominins strike sharp flakes off stones. The tools are older than our own genus. Sharp edges let our ancestors butcher carcasses, adding meat and marrow to their diet.
c. 2.8 million years ago
Our Genus Appears
Life & Evolution.A jawbone from Ledi-Geraru, Ethiopia, is the oldest known fossil of the genus Homo. Its members will have ever-larger brains and ever-better tools.
The Ice Age World
2.58 million – 11,700 years ago
Ice sheets advance and retreat again and again while the human family evolves, spreads and dwindles to a single species: us.
2.58 million years ago
The Ice Ages Begin
Cosmic & Geological.Earth enters an era of repeating ice ages. Glaciers will advance and retreat dozens of times. Our genus evolves in this restless, cold-and-warm world, which we are still living in.
c. 1.8 million years ago
Out of Africa, the First Time
Migrations & Exploration.Homo erectus spreads beyond Africa, reaching the Caucasus and eventually China and Java. Tall and long-legged, built for walking and running long distances, the species will survive for well over a million years.
c. 1 million years ago
Mastering Fire
Inventions & Science.Ash and burnt bone deep in South Africa's Wonderwerk Cave hint at the earliest controlled use of fire. Cooking makes food easier to digest, which may have helped fuel the growth of larger brains.
c. 300,000 years ago
Homo sapiens
Life & Evolution.Our own species appears in Africa. The oldest known fossils, from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, are about 300,000 years old. Everyone alive today descends mainly from these early African populations.
c. 74,000 years ago
The Toba Supereruption
Disasters & Plagues.A volcano on Sumatra erupts thousands of times more violently than Mount St. Helens, blanketing South Asia in ash. Scientists still argue over how badly it hurt the humans of the time; many communities seem to have come through.
c. 65,000 years ago
Out of Africa, Again
Migrations & Exploration.Small bands of modern humans leave Africa. Over tens of thousands of years their descendants reach every continent but Antarctica.
c. 51,200 years ago
The Oldest Story
Culture & Religion.On a cave wall in Sulawesi, Indonesia, someone paints three human-like figures around a wild pig. It is the oldest known narrative art. Across the world, people are now making jewelry, figurines and paintings.
c. 50,000 years ago
Reaching Australia
Migrations & Exploration.Crossing open sea, people arrive in Sahul, the joined landmass of Australia and New Guinea. They begin the world's oldest continuous cultures. Even at low sea level, the journey needed boats and crossings of many kilometres.
c. 40,000 years ago
The Last Neanderthals
Life & Evolution.Neanderthals disappear, but not entirely: most people alive today carry a little of their DNA. They buried their dead, made tools and ornaments, and survived Ice Age Europe for hundreds of thousands of years.
c. 23,000 years ago
Wolves Become Dogs
Life & Evolution.Somewhere in the cold north, probably Siberia, wolves begin living alongside human hunters. Dogs are the first domesticated animal, tamed thousands of years before any crop.
c. 20,000 years ago
The Last Glacial Maximum
Cosmic & Geological.Ice sheets kilometres thick bury much of North America and northern Europe. Sea level sits about 120 m lower than today. Land bridges link Britain to Europe and Siberia to Alaska.
c. 16,000 years ago
Into the Americas
Migrations & Exploration.People cross from Siberia over the land bridge of Beringia and travel south along the Pacific coast. They may have arrived even earlier. Within a few thousand years people live from Alaska to the tip of South America.
c. 12,900 years ago
The Big Freeze Returns
Cosmic & Geological.Just as the ice is melting, the Northern Hemisphere plunges back into near-glacial cold for about 1,200 years, possibly after a flood of meltwater disrupted Atlantic currents. When it ends, temperatures leap upward within decades.
The Holocene
11,700 years ago – today
A warm, stable climate settles in, and people around the world begin to farm, settle and build.
c. 9500 BCE
Göbekli Tepe
Culture & Religion.Hunter-gatherers in what is now Turkey raise huge carved stone pillars in rings. It is a monumental site older than farming there. Its builders had no crops or herds, suggesting shared rituals may have drawn people together before farming did.
c. 9000 BCE
The First Farmers
Inventions & Science.In the Fertile Crescent, people begin sowing wheat and barley and herding goats. Farming feeds more people from the same land, so villages become permanent and populations grow. Early farmers, though, are often shorter and less healthy than the hunters before them.
c. 7100 BCE
Çatalhöyük
Culture & Religion.In central Turkey, thousands of people live in a town of packed mud-brick houses entered through the roof. Its walls are decorated with paintings and plastered bulls' heads.
c. 7000 BCE
Farming Everywhere
Inventions & Science.Rice is domesticated along China's Yangtze River, and maize from a wild grass in Mexico. Farming is invented independently in several places around the world, including New Guinea.
c. 3500 BCE
The Wheel
Inventions & Science.Potters' wheels and then wheeled carts appear in Mesopotamia and on the steppes north of the Black Sea. The wheel comes thousands of years after farming and pottery; the hard part is a precisely fitted axle.
The First Civilizations
c. 3300 – 800 BCE
Bronze, writing, cities and kings appear along the great rivers of Mesopotamia, Egypt, India and China.
c. 3300 BCE
The Bronze Age
Inventions & Science.Smiths in the Near East alloy copper with tin to make bronze, harder than either metal alone. Tin is rare, so the demand for it drives long-distance trade.
c. 3200 BCE
Writing
Inventions & Science.Sumerian scribes in Uruk press wedge-shaped marks into clay. History, in the written sense, begins. The first texts are mostly accounts of grain, beer and livestock, not stories. Writing will also be invented independently in China and in Mesoamerica.
c. 3100 BCE
Egypt Unites
Empires & Politics.King Narmer, by tradition, joins Upper and Lower Egypt, beginning three thousand years of pharaohs. The Nile's reliable yearly flood makes Egypt one of the richest and most stable societies of the ancient world.
c. 2600 BCE
Cities of the Indus
Empires & Politics.Harappa and Mohenjo-daro rise in what is now Pakistan, with grid streets, covered drains and standard-sized bricks. Their script has never been deciphered, and around 1900 BCE the cities are slowly abandoned.
c. 2560 BCE
The Great Pyramid
Culture & Religion.It is built at Giza for the pharaoh Khufu, and will stand as the tallest human-made structure for nearly four thousand years.
c. 2334 BCE
The First Empire
Empires & Politics.Sargon of Akkad conquers the city-states of Sumer, forging what is often called the world's first empire. It lasts about 180 years, and its collapse coincides with a severe drought.
c. 2200 BCE
Taming the Horse
Inventions & Science.On the steppes north of the Black Sea, people breed the ancestors of all today's domestic horses. Within a few centuries, horses and spoke-wheeled chariots transform travel and war across Eurasia.
c. 1754 BCE
The Code of Hammurabi
Empires & Politics.A Babylonian king carves 282 laws into stone, 'an eye for an eye' among them. It is one of the earliest written legal codes.
c. 1600 BCE
Thera Erupts
Disasters & Plagues.A colossal eruption on Santorini buries the town of Akrotiri and shakes the Minoan world of the Aegean. Its tsunamis and ash may have helped weaken the Minoan civilization of Crete.
c. 1600 BCE
The Shang Dynasty
Empires & Politics.China's first archaeologically confirmed dynasty rises on the Yellow River. Its oracle bones carry the earliest Chinese writing. Kings put questions to their ancestors by cracking heated bones and reading the cracks.
c. 1500 BCE
The Vedas
Culture & Religion.In northern India, poets compose the Rigveda, hymns passed down by memory for many centuries before being written. They are among the oldest religious texts still in use and lie at the roots of Hinduism.
c. 1300 BCE
Voyagers of the Pacific
Migrations & Exploration.Lapita seafarers, whose Austronesian ancestors came from Taiwan, sail east into the open Pacific. They settle islands as far as Tonga and Samoa. Navigating by stars, swells and birds, their Polynesian descendants will reach Hawaii, Rapa Nui and New Zealand.
c. 1200 BCE
The Olmec
Empires & Politics.In the lowlands of Mexico's Gulf Coast, the Olmec carve colossal stone heads and lay the foundations of Mesoamerican civilization. The heads, some over three metres tall, are thought to be portraits of rulers.
c. 1177 BCE
The Bronze Age Collapse
Disasters & Plagues.Within a few decades, the palace civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean fall to drought, earthquakes, raiders and broken trade. Writing vanishes from Greece for four centuries, and iron, easier to find than tin, comes into wide use.
c. 1050 BCE
The Alphabet
Inventions & Science.Phoenician merchants use a script of just 22 letters, each standing for a sound. Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic scripts all descend from it, including the letters you are reading now.
c. 1000 BCE
The Bantu Expansion
Migrations & Exploration.Bantu-speaking farmers spread out from West-Central Africa, eventually carrying their languages and iron-working across half a continent. Today hundreds of millions of people speak Bantu languages, from Swahili to Zulu.
The Classical World
c. 800 BCE – 500 CE
Iron-age empires rise, and the philosophies and faiths that still guide billions of people take shape.
776 BCE
The First Olympic Games
Culture & Religion.Athletes gather at Olympia to honor Zeus. For centuries, Greeks will count the years by these games. A sacred truce pauses wars so athletes and spectators can travel safely.
c. 750 BCE
Homer's Epics
Culture & Religion.The Iliad and the Odyssey, tales of the Trojan War and a long voyage home, take written form in Greek. They will shape Western literature for nearly three thousand years.
c. 600 BCE
The First Coins
Inventions & Science.In Lydia, in modern Turkey, kings stamp lumps of electrum, a natural gold-silver alloy, with a lion's head to guarantee their value. Coins soon spread across the Greek world and beyond.
508 BCE
Democracy in Athens
Empires & Politics.Cleisthenes' reforms give the citizens of Athens a vote on their own laws. Only free adult men count as citizens, but the idea that a people can govern itself will echo for millennia.
c. 500 BCE
The Axial Age
Culture & Religion.Within a few generations, the Buddha in India, Confucius in China and the first Greek philosophers ask new questions about how to live. Their ideas still guide billions of people today.
334 BCE
Alexander Marches East
Wars & Conflict.Alexander of Macedon invades Persia. In eleven years he builds an empire stretching from Greece to India. It splits apart at his death, but Greek language and culture spread from Egypt to Afghanistan.
c. 322 BCE
The Maurya Empire
Empires & Politics.Chandragupta Maurya unites most of the Indian subcontinent. His grandson Ashoka, sickened by a bloody conquest, renounces war and carves edicts of tolerance on pillars across India, sending Buddhism across Asia.
221 BCE
China Unified
Empires & Politics.Qin Shi Huang becomes the first emperor of a united China, standardizing its script, coins, weights and roads. He links walls into an early Great Wall and is buried with an army of thousands of life-sized terracotta soldiers.
c. 130 BCE
The Silk Road
Migrations & Exploration.The journeys of the Han envoy Zhang Qian open routes that will carry silk, spices, faiths and plagues between China and Rome. Hardly anyone travels its whole length; goods pass from trader to trader across thousands of kilometres.
27 BCE
Rome Becomes an Empire
Empires & Politics.Octavian takes the name Augustus. The Roman Republic becomes an empire that will ring the Mediterranean. The two centuries of relative peace that follow are called the Pax Romana.
c. 30 CE
The Crucifixion of Jesus
Culture & Religion.Jesus of Nazareth is executed in Roman Judea. His followers will spread a faith that becomes the world's largest religion. Within four centuries it is the official religion of the Roman Empire.
79 CE
Vesuvius Buries Pompeii
Disasters & Plagues.Ash and scalding gas entomb Pompeii and Herculaneum, freezing a moment of Roman daily life for 1,700 years. The letters of Pliny the Younger, whose uncle died in the eruption, are among the first eyewitness accounts of a volcano.
105 CE
Paper
Inventions & Science.The Chinese court official Cai Lun is credited with perfecting paper made from bark, hemp and rags. Cheaper and lighter than parchment, it reaches the Islamic world in the 700s and Europe centuries later.
c. 250 CE
The Classic Maya
Empires & Politics.Maya city-states such as Tikal flourish, with monumental temples, a full writing system and a calendar of startling precision. Many of the great southern cities are abandoned in the 800s and 900s, probably after drought and war.
476 CE
The Fall of Rome
Empires & Politics.The last western emperor is deposed. The eastern half carries on as the Byzantine Empire for another thousand years. In the west, cities shrink and trade declines as Germanic kingdoms take over the old provinces.
The Post-Classical World
c. 500 – 1500 CE
Great faiths spread along trade routes, and Islamic, Chinese and Mongol empires knit Eurasia together.
541 CE
The Plague of Justinian
Disasters & Plagues.The first recorded pandemic of bubonic plague sweeps the Mediterranean world, killing millions. It returns in waves for two centuries, weakening the Byzantine Empire just as new powers rise.
622 CE
The Rise of Islam
Culture & Religion.Muhammad and his followers leave Mecca for Medina. The Hijra marks year one of the Islamic calendar. Within a century, Muslim armies and traders carry the faith from Spain to Central Asia.
628 CE
Zero
Inventions & Science.The Indian mathematician Brahmagupta sets down rules for calculating with zero, treating it as a number in its own right. Carried west by Arab scholars, Indian numerals, 0 through 9, become the digits the whole world uses.
800 CE
Charlemagne Crowned
Empires & Politics.On Christmas Day the pope crowns the Frankish king emperor, uniting much of Western Europe under one ruler. His empire soon splits among his grandsons, roughly into the lands that became France and Germany.
c. 830 CE
The House of Wisdom
Culture & Religion.In Baghdad, scholars translate Greek, Persian and Indian works into Arabic and build on them. One of them, al-Khwarizmi, gives his name to the algorithm and his book's title to algebra.
c. 850 CE
Gunpowder
Inventions & Science.Chinese alchemists searching for an elixir of life instead find a mixture of saltpetre, sulfur and charcoal that burns explosively. It is used first in fireworks and fire-arrows; guns and cannon follow centuries later.
c. 1000 CE
Vikings in America
Migrations & Exploration.Leif Erikson's Norse crew lands in Newfoundland, nearly five hundred years before Columbus. Their settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows lasts only a few years.
c. 1008 CE
The Tale of Genji
Culture & Religion.Murasaki Shikibu, a lady of the Japanese imperial court, writes a vast story of love and court life. It is often called the world's first novel.
c. 1050 CE
Cahokia
Empires & Politics.Near modern St. Louis, Cahokia grows into the largest city north of Mexico, home to perhaps 10,000 to 20,000 people. At its heart rises Monks Mound, an earthen pyramid with a base larger than the Great Pyramid's.
1066 CE
The Norman Conquest
Wars & Conflict.William of Normandy wins at Hastings and remakes England's language, law and ruling class. Thousands of French words enter English, from 'beef' to 'justice'.
1096 CE
The First Crusade
Wars & Conflict.European armies march on Jerusalem, beginning two centuries of holy war in the eastern Mediterranean. The city falls in 1099 amid a massacre of its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants.
c. 1120 CE
Angkor Wat
Culture & Religion.The Khmer king Suryavarman II begins building Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the largest religious monument on Earth. Around it, Angkor is one of the biggest cities of the pre-industrial world.
1206 CE
Genghis Khan
Empires & Politics.Temüjin is proclaimed Genghis Khan. His Mongols will build the largest contiguous land empire in history. Their conquests kill millions, but also reopen the Silk Road, letting goods, ideas and plague move across Eurasia.
1215 CE
Magna Carta
Empires & Politics.England's barons force King John to accept that even a king is bound by the law. Most of its clauses deal with feudal disputes, but its promise of justice under law will inspire constitutions centuries later.
c. 1250 CE
Polynesians Reach Aotearoa
Migrations & Exploration.Voyaging canoes arrive in New Zealand, one of the last great landmasses settled by humans. There, Māori culture develops for centuries with no contact with the outside world.
c. 1300 CE
Great Zimbabwe
Empires & Politics.In southern Africa, Shona builders raise massive walls of fitted stone without mortar. The city is the capital of a kingdom that trades gold to the Indian Ocean world.
1324 CE
Mansa Musa's Pilgrimage
Empires & Politics.The fabulously rich king of Mali travels to Mecca. He spends so much gold in Cairo that its value falls for years. European mapmakers soon draw him on a throne, holding a golden nugget.
1325 CE
Tenochtitlan Is Founded
Empires & Politics.The Mexica build an island city in Lake Texcoco, linked to the shore by causeways. Within two centuries it is one of the largest cities on Earth and the capital of the Aztec Empire.
1347 CE
The Black Death
Disasters & Plagues.Plague reaches Europe through its Mediterranean ports. Within a few years it kills perhaps a third to a half of the population. The bacterium, carried by fleas, empties whole villages. With so few workers left, wages rise and the old feudal order begins to crack.
c. 1400 CE
The Renaissance
Culture & Religion.In Florence and other Italian cities, artists and scholars rediscover the art and learning of ancient Greece and Rome. Perspective, anatomy and a new focus on the individual transform European art.
1405 CE
The Treasure Fleets
Migrations & Exploration.Admiral Zheng He leads Ming China's vast fleets across the Indian Ocean, as far as the coast of East Africa. His largest ships may have dwarfed Columbus's, but in 1433 China abruptly ends the voyages.
1438 CE
The Inca Empire
Empires & Politics.Pachacuti begins turning the small kingdom of Cusco into an empire stretching some 4,000 km along the Andes. It is held together by roads, relay runners and knotted-string records called quipu.
c. 1440 CE
The Printing Press
Inventions & Science.Johannes Gutenberg develops movable-type printing in Mainz. Books, and ideas, suddenly become cheap. Within fifty years millions of books are printed across Europe, speeding the spread of news, science and religious dissent.
1453 CE
The Fall of Constantinople
Wars & Conflict.The Ottoman sultan Mehmed II breaches the city's ancient walls with giant cannon, ending the Byzantine Empire. As Istanbul, it will be the Ottoman capital for nearly five centuries.
The Early Modern World
c. 1500 – 1800 CE
Ships link every continent for the first time, bringing new wealth, new ideas and immense suffering.
1492 CE
Columbus Reaches the Americas
Migrations & Exploration.A landing in the Bahamas begins lasting contact between the hemispheres. In the Columbian Exchange, potatoes, maize and tomatoes travel east while horses, wheat and smallpox travel west. For the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, it is the start of a catastrophe.
1517 CE
The Reformation
Culture & Religion.Martin Luther's Ninety-five Theses challenge the Catholic Church and split Western Christianity. The printing press spreads his ideas across Europe in weeks, and more than a century of religious wars follows.
1519 CE
Around the World
Migrations & Exploration.Magellan's fleet sets sail. Three years later a single ship, under Juan Sebastián Elcano, completes the first circumnavigation. Magellan is killed in the Philippines; of about 270 men who set out, only 18 return on that ship.
1520 CE
Smallpox in the Americas
Disasters & Plagues.Old World diseases begin killing millions of Indigenous Americans, who have no immunity. Tenochtitlan falls the following year. Over the next century, epidemics may kill as many as nine in ten people across the two continents.
1526 CE
The Transatlantic Slave Trade
Empires & Politics.The first direct slaving voyage sails from Africa to the Americas, beginning one of the greatest crimes in human history. Over 350 years, some 12.5 million Africans are torn from their homes and shipped across the Atlantic in brutal conditions, and nearly two million die at sea. Their forced labour builds the wealth of colonial empires.
1526 CE
The Mughal Empire
Empires & Politics.Babur, a descendant of both Genghis Khan and Timur, wins the Battle of Panipat and founds the Mughal Empire. At its height it rules most of South Asia and builds the Taj Mahal.
1543 CE
The Sun at the Center
Inventions & Science.Copernicus publishes his model of the heavens with the Sun, not the Earth, at the middle. He publishes only as he is dying, and the idea will take more than a century to win out.
1610 CE
Galileo's Telescope
Inventions & Science.Galileo turns a telescope on the sky and sees mountains on the Moon and moons circling Jupiter, proof that not everything orbits the Earth. The Church later forces him to recant, and he dies under house arrest.
1618 CE
The Thirty Years' War
Wars & Conflict.A religious war engulfs Central Europe. Parts of Germany lose a third or more of their people. The peace that ends it in 1648 helps establish the modern idea of sovereign states.
1687 CE
Newton's Principia
Inventions & Science.Isaac Newton's laws of motion and gravity explain a falling apple and the orbiting Moon with the same mathematics. His physics will aim cannon, build bridges and, three centuries later, guide astronauts to the Moon.
The Industrial Age
c. 1760 – 1914 CE
Coal, steam and electricity remake work and cities, and European empires reach across the globe.
1769 CE
The Steam Engine
Inventions & Science.James Watt patents a far more efficient steam engine, and the Industrial Revolution gathers speed. Coal-powered factories, railways and steamships follow, and so does the long rise in carbon dioxide that is warming the planet today.
1776 CE
American Independence
Empires & Politics.Thirteen British colonies declare themselves the United States of America. Its promise that 'all men are created equal' is written largely by slaveholders, a contradiction the nation will fight a civil war over.
1789 CE
The French Revolution
Empires & Politics.Parisians storm the Bastille. The old monarchy falls, and ideas of liberty and equality spread across Europe. The revolution executes its king, descends into the Terror, and ends with Napoleon's rise.
1791 CE
The Haitian Revolution
Wars & Conflict.Enslaved people in Saint-Domingue rise up. In 1804 Haiti becomes the first nation founded by people who freed themselves from slavery. Its success terrifies slaveholders across the Americas and inspires the enslaved everywhere.
1796 CE
The First Vaccine
Inventions & Science.Edward Jenner protects a boy from smallpox by infecting him with mild cowpox. Vaccination will eventually wipe smallpox from the Earth, the only human disease ever eradicated.
1815 CE
Tambora Erupts
Disasters & Plagues.The largest eruption in recorded history, in Indonesia, cools the whole planet. 1816 becomes 'the year without a summer.' Crops fail from Europe to New England, bringing hunger far from the volcano.
1833 CE
Abolition in the British Empire
Empires & Politics.After decades of campaigning by abolitionists and uprisings by the enslaved, Britain outlaws slavery across most of its empire. Slaveholders are paid compensation; the people they enslaved receive nothing.
1845 CE
The Great Irish Famine
Disasters & Plagues.A blight destroys the potato crop most poor Irish families depend on. About a million people die and another million emigrate, even as food continues to be exported from Ireland.
1850 CE
The Taiping Rebellion
Wars & Conflict.A failed civil-service candidate who believes he is the younger brother of Jesus leads a revolt against China's Qing dynasty. The fourteen-year war kills perhaps 20 to 30 million people, one of the deadliest conflicts in history.
1859 CE
On the Origin of Species
Inventions & Science.Charles Darwin argues that all life evolved by natural selection, joining everything above this line into a single story. His idea remains the foundation of modern biology.
1861 CE
The American Civil War
Wars & Conflict.Union and Confederacy fight over slavery. The war ends slavery in the United States and leaves more than 600,000 dead.
c. 1865 CE
Germs Cause Disease
Inventions & Science.Louis Pasteur shows that microbes cause fermentation and decay, and Joseph Lister uses the idea to disinfect wounds and surgical tools. Deaths after surgery plummet, and modern medicine begins.
1868 CE
The Meiji Restoration
Empires & Politics.Japan's shogunate falls and power returns to the emperor. Within a generation Japan builds railways, factories and a modern army, becoming the first industrial nation outside the West.
1876 CE
The Telephone
Inventions & Science.Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone. A human voice can now travel along a wire. Within a few decades, cities are strung with telephone lines.
1879 CE
The Electric Light
Inventions & Science.Thomas Edison and Joseph Swan each develop practical light bulbs. Within a few years power stations are lighting city streets, and night will never be as dark again.
1884 CE
The Scramble for Africa
Empires & Politics.At the Berlin Conference, European powers agree rules for carving up Africa. No Africans are invited. By 1914 nearly the whole continent is colonized.
1893 CE
Women Win the Vote
Empires & Politics.New Zealand becomes the first self-governing country to give women the right to vote in national elections. Over the following century, women's suffrage spreads around the world.
1903 CE
The First Powered Flight
Inventions & Science.At Kitty Hawk, the Wright brothers' Flyer stays aloft for twelve seconds. Just 66 years later, humans will walk on the Moon.
1905 CE
Relativity
Inventions & Science.A 26-year-old patent clerk, Albert Einstein, shows that space and time are relative and that mass and energy are equivalent: E = mc². His ideas underpin GPS, nuclear power and our picture of the universe.
The Modern World
1914 CE – today
World wars, the atom, the end of empires, and a planet wired together.
1914 CE
The First World War
Wars & Conflict.Industrialized warfare kills around 20 million soldiers and civilians and topples four empires. The bitter peace that follows helps set the stage for another war.
1917 CE
The Russian Revolution
Empires & Politics.The tsar falls and the Bolsheviks seize power, creating the world's first communist state. The Soviet Union it builds will last until 1991.
1918 CE
The 1918 Influenza
Disasters & Plagues.A flu pandemic infects about a third of humanity and kills an estimated 50 million people, more than the First World War itself.
1928 CE
Penicillin
Inventions & Science.Alexander Fleming notices a mold killing the bacteria in a petri dish. It is the dawn of antibiotics. Mass-produced during the Second World War, they go on to save hundreds of millions of lives.
1939 CE
The Second World War
Wars & Conflict.The deadliest conflict in history. Some 70 to 85 million people die, including six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. It ends with Europe and East Asia in ruins, the United Nations founded, and two superpowers facing off.
1945 CE
The Atomic Bomb
Wars & Conflict.The United States destroys Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By the end of the year well over 100,000 people have died in the two cities. Humanity now holds the power to end itself.
1947 CE
The Partition of India
Migrations & Exploration.British India splits into India and Pakistan. Some 15 million people are uprooted, in one of the largest migrations in history, and communal violence kills hundreds of thousands, perhaps far more.
1947 CE
The Transistor
Inventions & Science.At Bell Labs, three physicists build a tiny switch from a semiconductor crystal. Billions of them, etched onto silicon chips, will power every computer and phone.
1948 CE
Universal Human Rights
Culture & Religion.The new United Nations adopts the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, stating that all people are born free and equal in dignity and rights. It becomes one of the most translated documents in the world.
1953 CE
The Double Helix
Inventions & Science.Watson and Crick, drawing on Rosalind Franklin's X-ray images, describe the structure of DNA. Its shape shows how living things copy their genes, opening the way to modern genetics.
1957 CE
Sputnik
Inventions & Science.The Soviet Union launches the first artificial satellite, and the Space Race begins. Its beeping radio signal is picked up by listeners around the world.
1958 CE
Measuring a Warming World
Cosmic & Geological.Charles David Keeling begins measuring carbon dioxide on Hawaii's Mauna Loa. His steadily rising curve becomes key evidence that burning fossil fuels is changing Earth's climate.
1959 CE
The Great Chinese Famine
Disasters & Plagues.Mao's Great Leap Forward forces peasants into communes and sets impossible grain quotas. In the famine that follows, an estimated 15 to 45 million people die.
1960 CE
The Year of Africa
Empires & Politics.Seventeen African nations win independence in a single year as the colonial empires crumble. Many inherit borders drawn by Europeans in Berlin.
1969 CE
Footprints on the Moon
Migrations & Exploration.Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin of Apollo 11 become the first humans to walk on another world. Some 600 million people watch on television.
1986 CE
Chernobyl
Disasters & Plagues.A reactor explodes in Soviet Ukraine in the worst nuclear accident in history. Radioactive fallout drifts across Europe, and the zone around the plant is still largely abandoned.
1989 CE
The Berlin Wall Falls
Empires & Politics.Crowds break open the wall dividing Berlin. Germany reunites the next year, and within two years the Soviet Union dissolves and the Cold War is over.
1991 CE
The World Wide Web
Inventions & Science.Tim Berners-Lee's web opens to the public, linking documents across the internet with a click. Within three decades, most of humanity is online.
1994 CE
The Rwandan Genocide
Wars & Conflict.In about 100 days, extremist Hutu militias and soldiers murder hundreds of thousands of people, most of them Tutsi, while the world looks away. It is one of the fastest mass killings in history.
2001 CE
September 11
Wars & Conflict.Hijacked airliners strike New York and Washington, killing nearly 3,000 people. The attacks set off two decades of war in Afghanistan and Iraq.
2004 CE
The Indian Ocean Tsunami
Disasters & Plagues.A magnitude 9.1 earthquake off Sumatra sends waves across an entire ocean, killing about 230,000 people in fourteen countries. There was no ocean-wide warning system; one exists now.
2020 CE
COVID-19
Disasters & Plagues.A new coronavirus spreads worldwide, killing millions and shutting down much of daily life. Vaccines are developed in under a year, faster than ever before.
2022 CE
Generative AI
Inventions & Science.Chatbots built on large language models are released to the public and reach hundreds of millions of people within months. They can write, translate, summarize and answer questions in plain language.
- Cosmic
- Life
- Disasters
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- Inventions
- Migrations
- Empires
- Culture