3.3 million years · one continuous record
All of Human History
Every invention, discovery and turning point, laid out on a single coiling spiral — the centre is three million years ago, the rim is today. Drag to pan, scroll to zoom, or jump straight to a year.
In view · 3.3 million BCE – 2026
60 entriesDentistry with flint drills
Teeth from Mehrgarh in Baluchistan show cavities bored out with bow-driven flint points.
South Asia
Otzi's toolkit and tattoos
A man frozen in the Alps carried a copper axe, fire kit, medicinal fungus and therapeutic tattoos.
Alps
Ebers and Edwin Smith surgical practice
Egyptian physicians recorded examinations, prognoses and treatments for wounds and fractures.
Egypt
Indus urban sanitation
Mohenjo-daro and Harappa build grid streets, covered drains and private baths.
Indus Valley
Ayurvedic and Vedic medical tradition
South Asian texts codified diagnosis, diet, surgery and pharmacology from plants.
South Asia
Etruscan and Roman dentistry with gold bands
Practitioners bridged missing teeth with hammered gold appliances.
Italy
Sushruta's surgical compendium
Indian surgeons described cataract couching, rhinoplasty and hundreds of instruments.
South Asia
Hippocratic medicine
Disease framed as natural rather than divine, with observation and prognosis.
Greece
Roman surgical instrument kit
Standardised scalpels, forceps, catheters and bone drills served army surgeons.
Roman Empire
Dioscorides' pharmacopoeia
De Materia Medica catalogued some 600 plants and their preparations.
Mediterranean
Galen's anatomy and physiology
Dissection and experiment produced a medical system that lasted 1,400 years.
Roman Empire
Hua Tuo and surgical anaesthesia
The Chinese physician reportedly used a herbal draught, mafeisan, to render patients insensible for surgery.
China
Al-Razi's clinical case notes
Systematic bedside records distinguished smallpox from measles.
Iran
Hospitals with wards and pharmacies
Bimaristans in Baghdad and Cairo offered free care, teaching and separate wards.
Middle East
Variolation against smallpox
Chinese and later Ottoman practitioners inoculated healthy people with mild smallpox material.
China
Avicenna's Canon of Medicine
Ibn Sina organised all known medicine into a systematic, teachable encyclopedia.
Persia
Spectacles
Ground convex lenses in frames correct farsightedness in Italian workshops.
Italy
Eyeglasses spread and the spectacle trade
Venetian and Florentine guilds began producing convex lenses in quantity.
Italy
Public health boards of the Black Death
Italian cities appointed magistrates to isolate, bury and record.
Italy
Quarantine at Ragusa and Venice
Ports imposed a forty-day isolation on arriving ships during plague.
Adriatic
Paracelsus and chemical medicine
Mineral remedies and dose thinking challenged humoral theory.
Central Europe
Modern anatomy
Vesalius publishes De humani corporis fabrica from direct dissection.
Flanders and Italy
Ambroise Pare and humane surgery
The French barber-surgeon replaced cauterising oil with ligatures and gentle dressings.
France
Circulation of the blood
Harvey demonstrates that blood circulates in a closed loop driven by the heart.
England
First controlled clinical trial
Naval surgeon James Lind allotted scurvy patients to different treatments and found citrus cured them.
Britain
Vaccination
Jenner uses cowpox to protect against smallpox.
England
Morphine isolated
Friedrich Serturner separated the active alkaloid from opium.
Germany
Stethoscope
Rene Laennec rolled paper into a tube to listen to a patient's chest.
France
Sanitary reform and the sewer
Edwin Chadwick's report linked filth, disease and poverty, prompting municipal sewers.
Britain
Surgical anaesthesia
Ether demonstrated publicly at Massachusetts General Hospital.
United States
Handwashing and puerperal fever
Ignaz Semmelweis cut maternal deaths sharply by requiring chlorine handwashing.
Austria
Broad Street pump and epidemiology
John Snow mapped cholera deaths to a single water pump in London.
Britain
Germ theory of disease
Pasteur links microorganisms to fermentation and infection.
France
Pasteurisation
Louis Pasteur showed gentle heating preserved wine, beer and later milk.
France
Antiseptic surgery
Joseph Lister applied carbolic acid to wounds and instruments.
Britain
Rabies vaccine
Pasteur treated Joseph Meister with an attenuated virus and he lived.
France
X-ray imaging
Roentgen photographs the bones of a living hand.
Germany
Aspirin marketed
Acetylsalicylic acid became the first blockbuster synthetic drug.
Germany
Blood groups discovered
Karl Landsteiner identified the ABO system and why some transfusions kill.
Austria
Chemotherapy with Salvarsan
Paul Ehrlich and Sahachiro Hata found an arsenic compound that cured syphilis.
Germany
Vitamins identified
Casimir Funk named the trace substances whose absence causes deficiency disease.
Poland
Bacteriophage therapy described
D'Herelle identified viruses that kill bacteria.
France and Canada
Modern blood banking
Wartime work on citrate anticoagulation and refrigeration allowed stored blood.
Europe
Insulin
Banting, Best, Collip and Macleod extracted a usable pancreatic hormone in Toronto.
Canada
Penicillin
Fleming observes a mould killing staphylococcus in a Petri dish.
Scotland
Kidney dialysis
Willem Kolff treated patients with a rotating drum artificial kidney.
Netherlands
Streptomycin and tuberculosis treatment
Waksman's soil-microbe antibiotic cured a leading killer.
United States
HeLa cells and cell culture
Cells taken from Henrietta Lacks without consent became the first immortal human line.
United States
Heart-lung machine
John Gibbon used cardiopulmonary bypass to repair a heart defect.
United States
Kidney transplant between twins
Joseph Murray's team performed the first lasting organ transplant.
United States
Polio vaccine
Salk's inactivated vaccine is proven effective in mass trials.
United States
Oral contraceptive pill
Approval of the combined pill followed work by Pincus, Chang and Katharine McCormick's funding.
United States
Human heart transplant
Barnard transplants a heart in Cape Town.
South Africa
Artemisinin isolated
Tu Youyou extracted a potent antimalarial from sweet wormwood using an ancient text's cold-extraction hint.
China
CT scanning
Godfrey Hounsfield's scanner reconstructed cross-sections of the living body.
Britain
Recombinant DNA
Boyer and Cohen splice genes between organisms.
United States
In vitro fertilisation
Louise Brown was born after work by Steptoe, Edwards and embryologist Jean Purdy.
Britain
Smallpox eradicated
A global vaccination campaign eliminated the disease from the wild.
Global
MRI scanning in clinical use
Lauterbur and Mansfield's magnetic resonance imaging entered hospitals.
Global
DNA fingerprinting
Alec Jeffreys found individual-specific patterns in repeated DNA sequences.
Britain