The timeline from prehistory to today

Prehistory is the part of the human past that comes before writing. On the Sapiens timeline, which follows our species only, it begins with the oldest known Homo sapiens fossil, 315,000 years ago1. It ends 5,300 years ago, with the first written tablets, at Uruk in Mesopotamia2. Most human societies began to write only much later3.

The Palaeolithic, the Old Stone Age of flaked stone tools, begins with the oldest stone tools, more than two and a half million years ago3. The timeline shows only the part lived by Homo sapiens, from 315,000 to 11,700 years ago. The Neolithic, the age of farming and herding, begins in the Near East 11,700 years ago3.

Farming was invented independently in at least a dozen regions, including China, New Guinea, Mesoamerica and the Andes3. These inventions are spread over five millennia. Some populations, in the Arctic for example, never adopted it. On the timeline, each period begins at its first appearance anywhere in the world. The Bronze Age, which follows prehistory, thus begins 5,300 years ago, with the first bronze objects in the Near East3. Bronze working reaches south-west China only two thousand years later3. Antiquity and the Middle Ages are divisions of European history, with no equivalent in most other regions of the world3.

Geologists start the Holocene, the current epoch, on the same date for the whole planet: 11,700 years ago4. That date is the age of a layer of ice drilled from Greenland. In that layer the composition of the ice changes abruptly: these are the first signs of the warming that ends the last cold period4. In 2008 the International Union of Geological Sciences made that layer the world reference for the start of the Holocene4.

For earlier times, geologists identify in sea-floor sediments an alternation of cold and warm periods, each lasting a few thousand to a few tens of thousands of years. They call these periods stages and number them backwards from the present: the most recent is stage 1. On the timeline, their limits come from the curve published by Lisiecki and Raymo in 2005, which brings together measurements from 57 drill sites on the ocean floor5.

The warming recorded in the Greenland layer also makes the first cultivated fields of the Near East possible3. On the timeline, the Neolithic therefore begins on the same date as the Holocene.

References for this introduction

25 bands, across four ranks that do not nest

A period boundary is a decision before it is a date. Where the decision and the measurement do not agree, the entry for the unit gives the reason.

Ages

01
Before Sapiens
350 ka → 315 ka
Opening band of the timeline, prior to the appearance of the oldest fossils attributed to Homo sapiens. It covers the thirty-five thousand years preceding that limit and supplies the term of comparison without which the beginning of the species would not be measurable.
Two uncertainties of different nature are superimposed. The measurement carries an explicit error of 34,000 years, bounded and quantified.
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02
Palaeolithic
315 ka → 11.7 ka
Period defined by the working of chipped stone, that is, obtained by removing flakes and not by grinding, and covering from 315,000 to 11,726 years before present. It constitutes the longest band on the timeline and contains about 96 per cent of the existence of Homo sapiens, all periods subsequent to agriculture occupying the remaining 4 per cent.
The term was coined in nineteenth-century Europe and applies badly elsewhere. African archaeologists divide the same span into Early, Middle and Later Stone Age.
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03
Neolithic
11.7 ka → 3,275 BCE
Period defined by the adoption of agriculture and stock-raising, whose name, formed on Greek and meaning new stone, refers to polished stone. Over six millennia are established sedentism, marked demographic growth and dependence on a small number of plant species transformed by selection, a dietary regime that remains that of most of the world population.
There is no single Neolithic. Agriculture was invented independently in at least a dozen regions, at dates spread over five millennia.
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04
History
3,275 BCE → 2026
Period defined by the existence of written sources, that is, by a change in the nature of the available documentation and not in that of the societies described. Before this limit, knowledge proceeds exclusively from material remains; after it, part of the past is attested by texts produced by identified persons with interests of their own.
This is the most localised boundary on the timeline. Writing appears in Mesopotamia about 5,300 years ago and in Egypt almost simultaneously.
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Periods

05
Middle Stone Age
315 ka → 50 ka
Period characterised by flake tools obtained from prepared cores, the best documented method being Levallois reduction. It covers about two hundred and sixty-five thousand years, during which the technical repertoire varies little while the species appears, spreads across Africa and then leaves it.
Neither limit is the date of an event. The left-hand one follows the oldest well-dated assemblage, information relating to the state of excavation rather.
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06
Upper Palaeolithic
50 ka → 11.7 ka
Period defined in Eurasia by a set of traits appearing within a few millennia: regular blade tools, bone and antler industry, personal ornaments, parietal and portable art, and prepared burials. It covers about thirty-eight thousand years.
The opening at 50,000 years is a rounded and generous convention. Assemblages termed Initial Upper Palaeolithic are dated before 45,000 years in Bulgaria and the Levant.
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07
Neolithic
11.7 ka → 3,275 BCE
Period defined by the adoption of agriculture and stock-raising, whose name, formed on Greek and meaning new stone, refers to polished stone. Over six millennia are established sedentism, marked demographic growth and dependence on a small number of plant species transformed by selection, a dietary regime that remains that of most of the world population.
There is no single Neolithic. Agriculture was invented independently in at least a dozen regions, at dates spread over five millennia.
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08
Bronze Age
3,275 BCE → 1,175 BCE
Period defined by the use of bronze, an alloy of copper and tin. The two metals coming from distinct and often distant deposits, bronze metallurgy presupposes long-distance supply circuits, which makes distance a determining economic factor.
The designation describes a technique, whose diffusion follows its own rhythm. Bronze working reaches south-western China and mainland South-East Asia.
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09
Iron Age
1,175 BCE → 801 BCE
Period defined by the use of iron as the principal utilitarian metal. Iron is harder to work than bronze and far more widespread, so that weaponry and tools cease to depend on controllable supply circuits.
The limits retained are the round dates of European and Near Eastern periodisations. The sequence they presuppose does not apply elsewhere.
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10
Antiquity
801 BCE → 500
Period running from the eighth century BCE to the fifth century CE, defined by the existence of administrations producing and preserving documents in quantity, which makes possible reconstructions founded on texts as much as on material remains.
The frame is European and old. Its closing date, the end of the Western Roman Empire, has no equivalent in China, Mesoamerica or most of Africa.
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11
Middle Ages
500 → 1500
European period running from about 500 to 1500, whose designation, formed on the Latin medium aevum, was coined by Renaissance humanists to name the interval separating antiquity from their own age. The term is originally disparaging.
The division is conventional and explicitly European. The alternative would be to coin a neutral designation no reader would recognise.
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12
Early Modern
1500 → 1800
Period running from about 1500 to 1800, defined by the establishment of regular maritime links between continents and by their consequences: the circulation of plants, animals and pathogens between hemispheres, the first joint-stock companies and the first global silver economy.
The two limits, around 1500 and around 1800, are teaching conventions. They are disputed, and some historians deny the period any coherence.
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13
Contemporary
1800 → 2026
Period opened with industrialisation around 1800 and without closing limit. Human population is multiplied by eight, life expectancy at birth approximately doubled, and the combustion of fossil carbon modifies the composition of the atmosphere measurably in ice archives.
This is the only band without a closing limit. Its opening date is conventional and varies with author and country, from the 1780s to the 1850s.
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Climate stages

14
MIS 10
350 ka → 337 ka
Marine isotope stage 10, a glacial stage during which the chronological window of this timeline opens. The initial period of the history of the species therefore falls within a cold and not a temperate climatic regime.
The band is truncated at the left edge of the window, the stage beginning about 374,000 years ago, before this timeline starts.
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15
MIS 9
337 ka → 300 ka
Marine isotope stage 9, an interglacial period to which the oldest fossils attributed to Homo sapiens are generally referred. It constitutes the climatic setting within which the appearance of the species falls.
Two chronologies meet here without either constraining the other. The limits of the stage proceed from a smoothed global curve; the dating of Jebel Irhoud carries.
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16
MIS 8
300 ka → 243 ka
Marine isotope stage 8, a glacial stage of fifty-seven millennia during which the species exists but has left few recovered remains.
An empty band is ambiguous by construction: it may mean that little happened, that little survived or that little has been sought.
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17
MIS 7
243 ka → 191 ka
Marine isotope stage 7, classed as an interglacial but composed of several temperate intervals separated by cold episodes. It illustrates the smoothing imposed by representing a stage as a single band.
The representation masks the internal structure of the stage. A band of uniform colour presupposes underlying oscillations: the LR04 curve is continuous.
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18
Saalian glacial
191 ka → 130 ka
Glacial stage of sixty thousand years corresponding to MIS 6, the longest faced by the species to that date. The ice sheets extend far into northern Europe and the Sahara again becomes a continuous barrier.
The designation is regional and proceeds from north European glacial geology, whereas the limits retained here come from the global isotopic curve.
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19
Eemian
130 ka → 115 ka
Last interglacial before the present one, corresponding to substage MIS 5e. Polar temperatures exceed those of the present by about 3 to 5 °C, and global sea level stands several metres above the current level: the Eemian is thus the principal available example of a world warmer than ours.
The sea level value is a probabilistic estimate and not a direct measurement. It results from combining local records, each corrected for the vertical movement.
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20
Last glacial
115 ka → 11.7 ka
Last glacial stage, running from MIS 5d to MIS 2, that is, about a hundred thousand years of predominantly cold and unstable climate. It is during this interval that the species definitively leaves Africa, reaches Australia, establishes itself in Europe and enters the Americas.
A single colour represents a stage whose internal variability is strong. Three synchronised Greenland cores distinguish within it a long series of abrupt warmings.
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21
Holocene
11.7 ka → 2026
Current geological epoch, opened 11,700 years ago and characterised by climatic stability unusual in comparison with the preceding hundred thousand years. Agriculture, cities and state organisations fall entirely within it.
This limit is among the few on the timeline resulting from a formal decision, written and ratified. It does not for all that constitute a natural threshold.
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Sub-stages

22
Last Glacial Maximum
26.5 ka → 19 ka
Interval of seven thousand five hundred years, from 26,500 to 19,000 years before present, corresponding to the maximum extension of the ice sheets. Sea level stands about 130 metres below the present level.
A maximum is more easily defined than dated. The various ice sheets peaked at slightly different dates, and the interval retained corresponds to the window.
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23
Greenlandian
11.7 ka → 6,237 BCE
First age of the Holocene, running from the base of the epoch to the 8.2 ka event. Agriculture spreads within it and the first permanent villages are established.
The subdivision is ratified and official, but recent enough for its usefulness to be debated by some geologists. The debate bears on the relevance of dividing.
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24
Northgrippian
6,237 BCE → 2,251 BCE
Second age of the Holocene, running from 8,200 to 4,200 years before present. The first cities, writing, metallurgy and the first state organisations appear within this interval, independently of one another in several regions.
The age is defined by ice chemistry and not by human events. Its lower limit is an abrupt climatic signal recorded in Greenland and its upper limit.
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25
Meghalayan
2,251 BCE → 2026
Third and last age of the Holocene, currently in course, opened by the 4.2 ka event, a two-century drought episode contemporaneous with the collapse of several of the earliest state organisations.
The age was ratified in 2018 and is subject to criticism. The procedure illuminates those criticisms: a working group of specialists proposes a section.
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