History of the world

A documentary in six layers

History of
the world

From first steps to the stars. Three hundred thousand years of our road, read one layer at a time.

Begin the journey Read a chapter

SCROLL

The long line

Six epochs, end to end

Open any layer. Each one holds a short account, the dates that shaped it, and a plate for its illustration.

2.6 Mya – 3000 BCE Prehistory +

The longest chapter of human history: from the first split stone to the first metal. Four stages, in the order the ground holds them.

Palaeolithic 2.6 Mya – 10 000 BCE Read Mesolithic 10 000 – 6000 BCE Read Neolithic 6000 – 4500 BCE Read Chalcolithic / Copper Age 4500 – 3000 BCE Soon
ILLUSTRATION — CAVE INTERIOR AT DUSK
3000 BCE – 500 CE Ancient History +

Grain can be stored, and stored grain has to be counted, guarded and taxed. Within a few centuries the same answer appears along the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus and the Yellow River — and further west, Greece and Rome turn the same problem into law, philosophy and empire.

Ancient Egypt 3100 – 30 BCE Soon Mesopotamia 3500 – 539 BCE Soon Ancient India 3300 BCE – 550 CE Soon Ancient China 1600 BCE – 220 CE Soon Ancient Greece 800 – 146 BCE Soon Ancient Rome 753 BCE – 476 CE Soon
ILLUSTRATION — RIVER CITY AND ZIGGURAT
500 – 1500 Middle Ages +

Not a pause and not a dark age. The Migration Period reshuffles Europe as Charlemagne is crowned in Rome; crusades, feudal obligation and Gothic spires define the centuries that follow; then plague and the Hundred Years' War close them out — while Baghdad's Golden Age and a Mongol empire stretching from China to the Danube prove the centre of gravity lies elsewhere.

Early Middle Ages 500 – 1000 Soon High Middle Ages 1000 – 1300 Soon Late Middle Ages 1300 – 1500 Soon Islamic Golden Age 622 – 1258 Soon Mongol Empire 1206 – 1368 Soon
ILLUSTRATION — CATHEDRAL AND CARAVAN
1500 – 1800 Early Modern Period +

Ocean voyages connect landmasses that had been separate for ten thousand years, while a revival of classical learning and a religious split remake European thought from the inside. Absolute monarchs and colonial companies extend the reach of a handful of states, and a new method for testing ideas against evidence starts to outcompete every older way of knowing.

Age of Exploration 1450 – 1650 Soon Renaissance & Reformation 1400 – 1648 Soon Absolutism & Colonial Empires 1600 – 1800 Soon Scientific Revolution & Enlightenment 1543 – 1789 Soon
ILLUSTRATION — PORT AT THE HEIGHT OF TRADE
1800 – 1945 Modern Era +

Steam and coal multiply what a person can build and move; revolution in France and reaction across Europe rewrite who gets to rule; and a century of rising nationalism and empire ends in two wars that kill on a scale nothing before had matched.

Industrial Revolution 1760 – 1840 Soon Age of Revolutions 1789 – 1815 Soon 19th-Century Nationalism & Empire 1815 – 1914 Soon World War I & Interwar Period 1914 – 1939 Soon World War II 1939 – 1945 Soon
ILLUSTRATION — MILL TOWN UNDER SMOKE
1945 – present Contemporary Era +

Two competing systems race for the rest of the century while the empires that carved up the previous one dissolve into new nations. What's left, still being built, is a single networked, interdependent world — for better and worse.

Cold War 1947 – 1991 Soon Decolonization 1945 – 1975 Soon The Globalized Modern World 1991 – present Soon
ILLUSTRATION — CITY IN CROSS-SECTION AT NIGHT

Today and tomorrow

We are the first generation to see the whole thing at once

Eight billion people share one atmosphere, one network and one set of consequences. We can read a genome, land a probe on a comet and watch an ice sheet thin in real time — and we are still arguing about how to live together, which is the oldest argument there is.

Nothing about the technology settles that question. It only raises the stakes of getting it wrong, and shortens the time available to answer.

8bnpeople alive now
~300kyears as a species
1planet, so far
We are made of star-stuff.
CARL SAGAN
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