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.

Centre · 3.3M years ago — Rim · today

In view · 3.3 million BCE – 2026

60 entries

c. 2.0 million BCEScience

Homo habilis and the enlarging brain

Fossils from Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania show a hominin with a markedly larger braincase associated with stone tool debris.

East Africa

c. 300,000 BCEScience

Earliest Homo sapiens fossils

Remains from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco push the origin of our species back across the whole African continent.

North Africa

c. 35,000 BCEScience

Tally marks on bone

Notched bones such as the Lebombo and Ishango records suggest systematic counting.

Africa

c. 3,000 BCEScience

Stonehenge sarsen circle

Neolithic Britons hauled and jointed multi-tonne stones aligned to the solstices.

Britain

c. 2,600 BCEScience

Egyptian surveying with cord and gnomon

Rope-stretchers reset field boundaries after each Nile flood.

Egypt

c. 2,400 BCEScience

The abacus

Counting boards with positional columns speed arithmetic for scribes.

Mesopotamia

c. 1,900 BCEScience

Plimpton 322 and Babylonian triples

A clay tablet lists Pythagorean triples a millennium before Pythagoras.

Mesopotamia

c. 1,800 BCEScience

Babylonian mathematics

Base-60 positional arithmetic, quadratic solutions and Pythagorean triples on clay tablets.

Babylonia

1,650 BCEScience

Rhind Mathematical Papyrus

The scribe Ahmes copied problems on fractions, areas and the slope of pyramids.

Egypt

c. 530 BCEScience

Pythagorean number and harmony

A school tied musical intervals to whole-number ratios.

Greece

c. 500 BCEScience

Panini's grammar of Sanskrit

Panini specified a language with about 4,000 ordered rules of extraordinary economy.

South Asia

c. 400 BCEScience

Mohist logic and siege defence

Chinese Mohists combined formal argument with practical fortification engineering.

China

c. 350 BCEScience

Formal logic

Aristotle sets out the syllogism and the rules of valid inference.

Greece

350 BCEScience

Aristotle's systematic biology

Dissection and classification of hundreds of species.

Greece

c. 300 BCEScience

Euclidean geometry

The Elements organises geometry into axioms, proofs and theorems.

Alexandria

c. 250 BCEScience

Archimedes screw and mechanics

Water-raising screws, levers, pulleys and the principle of buoyancy.

Sicily

c. 240 BCEScience

Measuring the Earth

Eratosthenes computes the planet's circumference from shadow angles.

Alexandria

c. 150 BCEScience

Antikythera mechanism

A bronze geared computer predicting eclipses and planetary positions.

Greece

c. 100 BCEScience

Hipparchus and the star catalogue

Hipparchus measured stellar positions, discovered precession and built trigonometry for astronomy.

Greece

50 BCEScience

Julian calendar reform

A 365.25-day year with leap days replaced a drifting civic calendar.

Roman Empire

79Science

Pliny's Natural History

An encyclopaedia gathering thousands of observations and sources.

Roman Empire

c. 100Science

Zero as a placeholder in Bakhshali arithmetic

A birch-bark manuscript from north-west India uses a dot for an empty place.

South Asia

132Science

Seismoscope

Zhang Heng's bronze vessel drops a ball toward the direction of a distant earthquake.

China

c. 150Science

Ptolemy's Almagest and Geography

Ptolemy combined geometry, observation and coordinates into models of sky and earth.

Egypt

c. 250Science

Maya positional zero

A vigesimal place-value system with a shell glyph for zero.

Mesoamerica

c. 250Science

Diophantus and symbolic algebra

The Arithmetica posed determinate and indeterminate equations.

Egypt

c. 300Science

Maya calendar and astronomy

Maya astronomers tracked Venus, eclipses and a Long Count reaching over millions of days.

Mesoamerica

c. 400Science

Hypatia and Alexandrian mathematics

Teaching and commentary on conics, astronomy and the astrolabe.

Egypt

476Science

Aryabhata's astronomy and trigonometry

Aryabhata gave a sine table, an accurate value of pi and argued the earth rotates.

South Asia

c. 500Science

Decimal place-value numerals of India

Nine digits and a positional zero made calculation compact.

India

628Science

Rules for zero and negative numbers

Brahmagupta writes arithmetic rules treating zero as a number.

India

c. 760Science

Arabic translation of Indian astronomy

The Sindhind brought Indian numerals and tables into Baghdad.

Iraq

c. 800Science

House of Wisdom translation movement

Baghdad scholars translated and extended Greek, Persian and Indian science.

Iraq

c. 820Science

Algebra

Al-Khwarizmi systematises the solution of equations in his Kitab al-jabr.

Baghdad

c. 830Science

Al-Khwarizmi and the algorithm

His treatise on Hindu-Arabic numerals gave Europe both the digits and the word algorithm.

Iraq

c. 900Science

Distillation of alcohol and rosewater

Al-Razi refined the alembic and described distillation of spirits and essences.

Persia

c. 984Science

Astrolabe workshops of Isfahan

Persian instrument makers refined the planispheric astrolabe into a precise brass calculator for time, latitude and star positions, with interchangeable plates for different cities.

Persia

c. 1000Science