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 entriesHomo 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
Earliest Homo sapiens fossils
Remains from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco push the origin of our species back across the whole African continent.
North Africa
Stonehenge sarsen circle
Neolithic Britons hauled and jointed multi-tonne stones aligned to the solstices.
Britain
The abacus
Counting boards with positional columns speed arithmetic for scribes.
Mesopotamia
Plimpton 322 and Babylonian triples
A clay tablet lists Pythagorean triples a millennium before Pythagoras.
Mesopotamia
Babylonian mathematics
Base-60 positional arithmetic, quadratic solutions and Pythagorean triples on clay tablets.
Babylonia
Rhind Mathematical Papyrus
The scribe Ahmes copied problems on fractions, areas and the slope of pyramids.
Egypt
Panini's grammar of Sanskrit
Panini specified a language with about 4,000 ordered rules of extraordinary economy.
South Asia
Formal logic
Aristotle sets out the syllogism and the rules of valid inference.
Greece
Euclidean geometry
The Elements organises geometry into axioms, proofs and theorems.
Alexandria
Archimedes screw and mechanics
Water-raising screws, levers, pulleys and the principle of buoyancy.
Sicily
Measuring the Earth
Eratosthenes computes the planet's circumference from shadow angles.
Alexandria
Antikythera mechanism
A bronze geared computer predicting eclipses and planetary positions.
Greece
Hipparchus and the star catalogue
Hipparchus measured stellar positions, discovered precession and built trigonometry for astronomy.
Greece
Zero as a placeholder in Bakhshali arithmetic
A birch-bark manuscript from north-west India uses a dot for an empty place.
South Asia
Seismoscope
Zhang Heng's bronze vessel drops a ball toward the direction of a distant earthquake.
China
Ptolemy's Almagest and Geography
Ptolemy combined geometry, observation and coordinates into models of sky and earth.
Egypt
Maya positional zero
A vigesimal place-value system with a shell glyph for zero.
Mesoamerica
Maya calendar and astronomy
Maya astronomers tracked Venus, eclipses and a Long Count reaching over millions of days.
Mesoamerica
Aryabhata's astronomy and trigonometry
Aryabhata gave a sine table, an accurate value of pi and argued the earth rotates.
South Asia
Rules for zero and negative numbers
Brahmagupta writes arithmetic rules treating zero as a number.
India
House of Wisdom translation movement
Baghdad scholars translated and extended Greek, Persian and Indian science.
Iraq
Algebra
Al-Khwarizmi systematises the solution of equations in his Kitab al-jabr.
Baghdad
Al-Khwarizmi and the algorithm
His treatise on Hindu-Arabic numerals gave Europe both the digits and the word algorithm.
Iraq
Distillation of alcohol and rosewater
Al-Razi refined the alembic and described distillation of spirits and essences.
Persia
Optics as experiment
Ibn al-Haytham's Book of Optics establishes controlled experiment on light and vision.
Cairo
Ibn al-Haytham's Book of Optics
He proved vision works by light entering the eye and insisted on experimental testing.
Egypt
Nasir al-Din al-Tusi and the Maragha observatory
A state-funded observatory produced planetary models later echoed by Copernicus.
Persia
Heliocentric astronomy
Copernicus places the Sun at the centre of the planetary system.
Poland
Compound microscope
Dutch spectacle-makers stack lenses to magnify the very small.
Netherlands
Gilbert's De Magnete
William Gilbert showed the earth itself is a magnet through systematic experiment.
England
Telescope
Lippershey's refracting spyglass, turned skyward by Galileo a year later.
Netherlands
Kepler's laws of planetary motion
Kepler derived elliptical orbits from Tycho Brahe's precise observations.
Central Europe
Logarithms
Napier publishes tables converting multiplication into addition.
Scotland
Novum Organum and inductive method
Francis Bacon argued knowledge must be built from organised experiment.
England
Analytic geometry
Descartes joined algebra to geometry with coordinates.
France
Probability theory
Pascal and Fermat's correspondence on gambling problems created a calculus of chance.
France
Micrographia and the cell
Robert Hooke's engravings revealed a microscopic world and named the cell.
England
Speed of light measured
Ole Romer inferred a finite light speed from the timing of Jupiter's moons.
Denmark
Laws of motion and gravitation
Newton's Principia unifies terrestrial and celestial mechanics.
England
Mercury thermometer and Fahrenheit scale
Daniel Fahrenheit produced reliable, reproducible thermometers.
Netherlands
Lightning rod
Franklin shows lightning is electrical and offers it a safe path to ground.
North America
Linnaean binomial classification
Species Plantarum fixed the two-name system for every living thing.
Sweden
Oxygen isolated
Priestley and Scheele isolated the gas Lavoisier would name and explain.
Europe
Electromagnetism discovered
Oersted saw a compass needle deflect near a current; Ampere gave it mathematics.
Denmark
Electromagnetic induction
Faraday shows a moving magnet generates current.
England
Ada Lovelace's algorithm
Her notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine included a program and the idea machines might manipulate symbols, not just numbers.
England
Boolean algebra
George Boole reduced logic to algebraic operations on true and false.
Ireland
Theory of evolution by natural selection
Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species.
England
Mendel's laws of inheritance
Gregor Mendel's pea experiments revealed discrete inherited factors.
Moravia
Periodic table
Mendeleev orders the elements by weight and property, leaving gaps for the undiscovered.
Russia
Maxwell's equations
James Clerk Maxwell unified electricity, magnetism and light in four equations.
Britain
The electron
J. J. Thomson showed cathode rays were particles far lighter than atoms.
Britain
Radium and radioactivity
Marie and Pierre Curie isolated polonium and radium from tonnes of pitchblende.
France
Quantum hypothesis
Max Planck explained blackbody radiation by allowing energy only in discrete packets.
Germany
Special relativity
Einstein reformulates space, time and energy in his miracle year.
Switzerland
Superconductivity
Heike Kamerlingh Onnes saw mercury lose all resistance near absolute zero.
Netherlands
Continental drift proposed
Alfred Wegener argued the continents had moved, from fossils and coastlines.
Germany
General relativity
Einstein described gravity as the curvature of spacetime.
Germany
Cecilia Payne and the composition of stars
Her doctoral thesis showed stars are overwhelmingly hydrogen and helium.
United States