The chronology of Homo sapiens
Thirty-four milestones, and that is all this page keeps of the hundred and fifty-one entries. They are the ones the corpus rates a milestone of the species, always visible on the timeline whatever the space. The threshold is not the one used on the other edition: here the first two ranks would make a hundred and thirty-six entries out of a hundred and fifty-one, which is to say the contents. They are grouped by age, and the distribution is the first fact the page shows: eight milestones for the three hundred millennia of the Palaeolithic, twenty-four for the last five.
34 milestones out of 151, in 3 chapters
Palaeolithic315 ka → 11.7 ka
Three hundred thousand years in which stone was shaped only by breaking it, and in which nothing that a modern reader would call an institution existed. It is by far the longest band on this timeline, and the one that makes all the others legible: everything since farming fits in the thin strip at its right.
- The First Faces of Homo sapiens~315,000 years ago
- Mitochondrial Eve~200,000 years ago
- The Expansion That Peopled the World~70,000–50,000 years ago
- Crossing to Australia~65,000 years ago (disputed)
- The Oldest Story Ever Paintedat least ~51,200 years ago
- When Our Ancestors Met Neanderthals~50,500 to 43,500 years ago
- The Last Neanderthals~40,000 years ago
- Footprints Across America~23,000 to 21,000 years ago
Neolithic11.7 ka → 3,275 BCE
People stop following their food and start growing it. Within six millennia the species becomes sedentary, far more numerous, and dependent on a handful of plants it has reshaped. Almost everyone alive still lives under that arrangement.
See it on the timelineHistory3,275 BCE → 2026
The band in which the past begins to speak in its own voice. Not because more was happening, but because someone started writing things down, and because some of what they wrote survived.
- Accounting Becomes Writing~5,200 years ago
- Herders Reshape a Continent~5,000 years ago
- The Bantu Expansion~4,400 years ago
- The Source of the Black Death1346 CE
- A Press in Every City~1450 CE
- Two Worlds Collide1492 CE
- Clean Water1854 CE
- On the Origin of Species1859 CE
- Germs Get the Blame1882 CE
- The Current That Stayed On1882 CE
- Bread From the Air1908 CE
- The Mould in the Dish1928 CE
- The Nuclear Age1945 CE
- The Transistor1947 CE
- The Shape of Heredity1953 CE
- The Rising Curve1958 CE
- The Green Revolution~1965 CE
- A Disease Driven Extinct1980 CE
- The Slow Pandemic1981 CE
- The World Wide Web1991 CE
- Reading Our Own Recipe2003 CE
- A Vanished Cousin Speaks2010 CE
- Scissors Found in Bacteria2012 CE
- Machines That Learn~2012 CE