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
52 entriesHomo erectus disperses out of Africa
Long-limbed, endurance-walking hominids spread across Eurasia.
Africa and Eurasia
Long-distance obsidian exchange
Middle Stone Age groups in the Olorgesailie basin carried volcanic glass tens of kilometres from its source.
East Africa
Deliberate burial of the dead
Groups at Qafzeh and Skhul interred bodies with grave goods.
Levant
Gobekli Tepe
Monumental carved stone enclosures raised by people who had not yet farmed.
Anatolia
Catalhoyuk and dense town life
Thousands lived in a honeycomb of mudbrick houses entered through the roof.
Anatolia
Norte Chico monumental building
Coastal Peruvian communities raised platform mounds and sunken plazas without pottery or writing.
Andes
Megalithic tomb building in Atlantic Europe
Communities raised passage graves and dolmens aligned to solar events.
Western Europe
Sumerian city-state assemblies
Councils of elders and citizens shared authority with early kings.
Mesopotamia
Standardised weights of the Indus
Harappan cities used precisely graded chert cubes in a binary-decimal system.
South Asia
Urukagina's reforms
The ruler of Lagash issued measures against corrupt officials and debt seizure.
Mesopotamia
Ur-Nammu law collection
A Sumerian king set fixed penalties and compensations in writing.
Mesopotamia
Code of Hammurabi
A public stele of 282 laws with fixed penalties and prices.
Babylonia
Nubian pyramid kingdoms of Kush
Napata and later Meroe built temples, pyramids and an iron industry on the Upper Nile.
Nubia
Bronze Age collapse and the Sea Peoples
Within a few decades the palace states of the eastern Mediterranean — Mycenae, Hattusa, Ugarit — fell, trade routes in tin and copper broke apart, and literate bureaucracies vanished.
Eastern Mediterranean
Zhou dynasty and the Mandate of Heaven
The Zhou overthrew the Shang and justified their rule with the idea that heaven withdraws its mandate from unjust kings.
China
Coinage precursors and standard weights
Fixed silver weights circulate as money across the Near East.
Near East
The Upanishads and early Indian philosophy
Teachers in the Ganges plain composed dialogues probing the self, consciousness and the nature of reality beyond ritual practice.
South Asia
Zarathustra and Zoroastrian teaching
The prophet Zarathustra taught a cosmos shaped by a struggle between truth and lie, with individual moral choice deciding the outcome.
Persia
Chavin de Huantar
A highland Andean temple complex drew pilgrims through stone galleries and water channels.
Andes
Etruscan cities and drainage engineering
Etruscan builders laid out gridded towns with cut-stone tombs, arched gateways and cuniculi drainage tunnels.
Italy
Greek city-state colonisation
Poleis planted colonies from the Black Sea to Iberia.
Mediterranean
Draconian and Solonic written law at Athens
Publishing statutes on wooden axones removed law from private memory.
Greece
Minted coinage
Lydia strikes standardised electrum coins stamped with state authority.
Lydia
Buddhist philosophy
Siddhartha Gautama taught a systematic analysis of suffering, mind and ethics in the Ganges plain.
South Asia
Confucian ethics
Confucius framed governance as the moral cultivation of rulers and reciprocity between people.
China
Athenian democracy
Cleisthenes reorganised Athens into demes with an assembly and lottery-chosen councils.
Greece
Library and Museum of Alexandria
The Ptolemies funded salaried scholars and a collection that aimed at every book in the world.
Egypt
Arthashastra and statecraft
Kautilya set out administration, taxation, espionage and law for the Mauryan state.
India
Ashoka's edicts and public welfare
The Mauryan emperor inscribed pillars promising medical care, wells and shade trees for people and animals.
South Asia
Qin standardisation of script, axles and weights
Unification imposed common measures across China.
China
Aksum coinage and Red Sea trade
The Ethiopian kingdom of Aksum minted its own gold currency and traded from India to Rome.
Horn of Africa
Justinian's codification of Roman law
Jurists distilled centuries of statute and opinion into the Corpus Juris Civilis.
Byzantium
Chinese imperial examinations
The Sui and Tang states began recruiting officials by written examination.
China
University of al-Qarawiyyin founded
Fatima al-Fihri endowed a mosque and teaching college in Fez, Morocco.
North Africa
Chinese paper money
Song merchants and then the state issued printed notes backed by deposits.
China
University of Bologna
Students hired their own professors to teach law, forming a self-governing corporation.
Italy
Magna Carta
English barons forced the king to accept written limits on arbitrary power.
England
Hanseatic League trading network
North European towns pooled law, convoy and credit.
Northern Europe
Mansa Musa's pilgrimage and Timbuktu
The Malian emperor's gold-laden hajj was followed by mosques and libraries at Timbuktu.
West Africa
Double-entry bookkeeping
Luca Pacioli publishes the Venetian method of balanced accounts.
Italy
Potosi silver and the global money supply
Andean mines and mercury amalgamation flooded world markets with silver.
Andes
Gregorian calendar reform
A revised leap-year rule corrected the drift of the Julian year.
Italy
Joint-stock company and stock exchange
The Dutch East India Company issued tradable shares on the Amsterdam exchange.
Netherlands
The metric system
Revolutionary France defined the metre and kilogram from nature, not from kings.
France
Public education and the normal school
Horace Mann campaigned for tax-funded common schools and trained teachers.
United States
Standard time and the railway clock
Railways forced towns to abandon local solar time.
Britain
Public library movement
Free rate-supported libraries opened across Britain and the United States.
Britain
Asilomar conference on genetic safety
Scientists set voluntary limits on recombinant DNA work.
United States
Birth of Brendan Deeney
Brendan Deeney, owner and creator of All of Human History, is born.
Montreal Protocol signed
Nations agreed to phase out ozone-destroying chemicals.
Global
Online commerce and secure transactions
SSL encryption and the first web storefronts made buying online safe enough to try.
United States
Blockchain and Bitcoin
A pseudonymous paper describes a decentralised ledger without a trusted party.
International