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The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Svante Paabo of Sweden for his work on human evolution. The Prize committee said he had achieved the seemingly impossible task of deciphering the genetic code of one of our extinct relatives: the Neanderthals.

The discovery of a child’s tooth and stone tools in a cave in southern France suggests that Homo sapiens was in Western Europe around 54,000 years ago. This is several thousand years earlier than previously thought, indicating that the two species could have coexisted for

Discovery in a cave in Circeo: remains of 9 Neanderthals, including a teenager and a woman, in a cave, used as a den by packs of hyenas. There are also remains of huge animals such as cave bears, cave lions, megalocervi. The cave was inhabited

Viviane Slon and Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, discover a hybrid between Neanderthal (mother) and Denisovan (father) Homo sapiens that lived in Siberia 90,000 years ago.

Krapina, Croatia. Archaeologists Davorka Radovčić, Ankica Oros Sršen, Jakov Radovčić, David W. Frayer, find evidence of Neanderthals using bracelets and necklaces 130,000 years ago. This is much earlier than modern Homo Sapiens, and tens of thousands of years before modern Homo Sapiens reached the European

Gorham Cave, Gibraltar. Archaeologist Clyve Finlayson, an expert on Neanderthal sites, finds an incredible double sign (a sort of X with other signs that make it look like a hashtag #) in the rock at one of these sites. He calls another expert: Francesco d’Errico,

The Italian team led by Marco Peresani of the University of Ferrara, publishes an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences US, in which they provide evidence of Neanderthal hunting of various bird species, but also of the use, processing and modification

Amanda Henry and her team at the Smithsonian publish a paper showing that Neanderthals from two sites in Belgium and Iraq unequivocally cooked their food. The analysis is done through tiny fossil remains on Neanderthal teeth. Clive Finlayson will also show that they roasted pigeons

The Swedish scientist Paabo publishes in Nature the discovery of a now extinct human genus, which he calls Denisovan, also crossed with Homo Sapiens: the inhabitants of New Guinea have up to 6% of the genes of Denisovan Homo (which flourished mainly in Siberia, but

Swedish scientist Paabo publishes in Science the scientific theory of “leaky replacement”, where, thanks to the complete genome of Homo Neanderthal, he concludes that 2% to 4% of the genome of non-African Homo Sapiens belongs to Homo Neanderthal.

Siberia, in the Denisova Cave, in the Altai Mountains, in Russia, but almost on the border with Kazakhstan, China and Mongolia, excavations in successive waves bring to light the bones of a finger of a new Homo species: Homo Denisova.

The results of the Neanderthal genome are published and compared with the DNA of Homo Sapiens. It turns out that 1% to 4% of the DNA of the current populations of Europe and the Middle East, and consequently of the Americas and Australia, are derived

Joao Zilhao and his team members discover that in southeastern Spain, 50 thousand years ago, Neanderthals used red and yellow pigments and shell necklaces.

Archaeologist Curtis Marean publishes an article in the journal Nature in which he provides evidence of the presence of marine invertebrates (such as mussels) in the diet of Homo Sapiens in South Africa 164,000 years ago.

In the Djurab Desert in Chad a team of French researchers discovers bones of Sahelanthropus Tchadensis from almost seven million years ago, a creature that was already bipedal

6 Million Year Old Orrorin Tugenensis Bones Discovered

5.2-5.8 Million Year Old Ardipithecus Ramidus Kadabba Bones Discovered

At Lake Turkania in Kenya, Mary Leakey Discovers Bones of Kenyanthropus Playtops (Kenyan Flat-Faced)

Zoological Institute, University of Munich. Svante Paabo and his collaborators manage to extract Neanderthal DNA from bones found near Bonn years earlier. This is mitochondrial DNA (mDNA), which constitutes only 0.0005% of our DNA. This is the first hominid DNA ever extracted and sequenced.

Gobekli Teple, southeastern Turkey. An archaeological site is excavated where 10 monumental T-shaped structures, 5 to 30 meters high, dating back to 9500 BC, are discovered, with no obvious practical use. They were probably erected by bands of hunter-gatherers for obscure cultural reasons.

Similaun Man Found on Austria-Italy Border

“Sue” Skeleton Found in South Dakota: Only Complete Tyrannosaurus Rex Specimen

In Kentucky a group of speleologists discover a connection between a huge cave system and the Mammuth Cave thus discovering the most extensive cave system: 150 km; human remains and bodies mummified by time, dating back more than 2000 years, have been found up to

At Laetoli in Tanzania, Mary Leakey discovers the footprints of a group (perhaps a family) of Australopithecus

A group of Chinese farmers, digging a well in Xi’an, found a terracotta warrior; subsequent excavations, lasting years, and not yet concluded, brought to light over 7000 statues like this one, of exquisite workmanship and each unique in its details; it is a complex part

In Hadar, Ethiopia, Donald Johanson discovers the bones of a 3.18 million year old Australopithecus: it is Lucy

Louis Leakey coins the name Homo Abilis because he is the first hominid to use tools

A contingent of American marines is surprised in China after the attack on Pearl Harbor and tries to leave the country, occupied by the Japanese; the marines are in possession of the bones of the Peking Man (Sinanthropus Pekinensis) discovered by the Canadian Davidson Black

New Guinea. An airplane of the Archbold Expedition accidentally discovers an internal valley, the Grand Valley of the Baliem River, where it finds a population, the Dani, previously completely unknown, and never come into contact with Europeans before then. That is, for 46 thousand years,

Australian Raymond Dart of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, receives the first complete skull of an Australopithecus africanus

Osborn in Mongolia Discovers First Velociraptor Fossils

India. Mohenjo-daro, a flourishing city in the Indus Valley, destroyed around 1900 BC and flourishing for centuries in the previous millennium, is brought to light by a British archaeological mission in 1922. No previous Indian civilization had ever noticed this evidence. Or more likely, it

American expedition to the Gobi Desert in Mongolia finds 25 dinosaur eggs and fossils dating back 85 – 25 million years

Island of Crete. Archaeologists working at a Minoan site find a circular clay disk, covered in spiral script, with 241 signs or letters, very elaborate and evidently printed on the clay. The meaning of these signs is still a mystery, as nothing else of the

The Berezovka Mammoth is discovered, a complete mammoth specimen with meat in an excellent state of preservation, is exhibited at the Zoological Museum of St. Petersburg

Brown discovers the first fossil specimen of Tyrannosaurus Rex. In the 20th century, 12 will be discovered, all in the North of the USA (Dakota, Wyoming, Montana) and Southern Canada (Sasketchwan)

Dubois returns to Europe after his discovery of the Trinial SkullCap attributed to the hominid Anthropitecus erectus, later popularized as Java Man and today known as Homo Erectus; he expects a triumphal welcome, which instead turns out to be very lukewarm and even hostile; Dubois

In Java, Indonesia, Dubois finds a portion of a human skull (Trinial SkullCap) attributed to the hominid Anthropitecus erectus, later popularized as Java Man and today known as Homo Erectus

First Triceratops fossil named by Marsh, Bisonalticornis, found in Colorado

OC Marsh in a hasty note typical of the race of these times that sees him opposed to Edwin D. Cope, describes the Brontosaurus, in reality it is always the Apatosaurus Ajax described by him a few years before; the enormous amount of finds found

Belgium. 322 meters underground, in a coal mine, 38 skeletons of Iguanodon benissartensis were found: powerful creatures. They will be exhibited in Brussels and will create a great impression on the public.

OC Marsh in a hasty note typical of the rush of these times that sees him opposed to Edwin D. Cope, describes the Apatosaurus Ajax; the haste is also dictated by the enormous amount of finds discovered in North America in a few years

The billionaire Schliemann finds the ancient city of Troy in present-day Turkey, and believes he has recovered Priam’s treasure (8000 gold objects); in reality he had found objects 1000 years older than Homer’s Troy; which, instead, lay a few meters above the excavations carried out,

An iguanodon skeleton is found in Belgium (it is one of the first dinosaurs found and studied)

During the Union Pacific excavations, the almost complete skeleton of the first Brontosaurus (thunder lizard) is found, which causes great wonder and occupies the front pages of all the newspapers.

The first specimen of Archaeopteryx, a 147-million-year-old dinosaur, has been discovered, with the skeleton, tail and teeth of a carnivorous saurian, and the feathers and brain of a bird

Leinefelde, Germany. The naturalist Johann Carl Fuhlrott, two years before Darwin published the Origin of Species, suggests that the bones found in Neanderthals a few years earlier are those of a prehistoric form of human beings.

In Neanderthal Germany, specimens of Homo Neanderthal are discovered (by the way, Neander in Greek means “new man”). Darwin has not yet published the Origin of Species. He will do it 3 years later.

Gibraltar Miners Discover Neanderthal Specimens

In the 1830s, British officer Henry Rawlinson was shown a huge stele with inscriptions in cuneiform (rediscovered only in 1618 by the Spanish ambassador to Persia), Old Persian, Elamite, Babylonian. He recruited a Kurdish boy, who, hanging from the giant stele, copied the entire text

First Iguanodon Fossil Skeletons Discovered

Arkansas. A Cherokee Indian named Sequoyah invents Cherokee writing. This is a well-documented example, because it occurred in the modern age and is therefore of great interest. Sequoyah is a blacksmith, and initially feels the need, before 1810, for convenience in keeping accounts, to make

New Zealand. Musket Wars. One of the New Zealand Maori tribes, the Ngapuhi, adopts muskets, buying them from European settlers. Violent battles quickly break out between the Maori tribes, and by 1833, all those who survived the Musket Wars have fully adopted firearms.

Fossil Skeletons of Early Ichthyosaurs Discovered

15 Germinal Year IV of the Revolutionary Calendar. Cuvier, of the Natural History Museum in Paris, presents the results of the analysis of animal remains found in Siberia (of a mammoth). He concludes that they resemble those of an elephant, but are evidently different. In

India. William Jones publishes his notes on the Sanskrit language, an ancient Indian language used for Hindu rituals, which connects it with ancient Greek, Latin, Gothic, Celtic, ancient Persian, German, French, English. He thus establishes comparative linguistics. For example, in Sanskrit “mother” is “matar”, in

Virginia. Thomas Jeffersson gets involved in the scientific dispute over the origin of the strange bones and molars (actually from an American mastodon) found in North America. Jeffersson writes that the well-known American Incognitum is probably a carnivore, and that it is still out there,

North America. The Cherokee are originally divided into 30 or 40 independent domains (groups of villages) that are fiercely antagonistic to each other. With the arrival of competition with the white man, it happens more and more often that if individual Cherokee rob or attack

Upper state, New York. A molar of an American mastodon is sent to London. The bones will be studied in 1739. Other bones will be found in Ohio. The interpretation of these findings is not univocal: one thinks of giants who lived in antiquity, of

South Africa. First clash between Dutch and black populations of Bantu ethnicity. The Dutch arrived in South Africa in 1652 and starting from Cape Town, they did not encounter much organized resistance from the natives, only some Khoisan villages. The Bantu, in fact, coming from

European scholars publish the first transcriptions of cuneiform writing, (re)discovered only in 1618 by the Spanish ambassador to Persia. Local populations have always had this writing before their eyes, at least 3 millennia before, but no one, as far as we know, had ever bothered

South Africa. The arrival of the Dutch in South Africa, starting from Cape Town, did not encounter much organized resistance from the natives, only a few Khoisan villages. They did not find dense Bantu populations like in other parts of Africa, and so they can

Australia. In the first encounter between Aborigines and Europeans, the former are judged by the latter as the simplest and most backward culture in the world. In reality, the Aborigines, divided into antagonistic tribes, in 38,000 BC were among the societies, or the most advanced

In Agricola’s De natura fossilium, minerals are classified and the term “fossil” is coined.

Americas. The Aztec and Mayan populations were initially exterminated mainly by diseases brought by the Spanish (probably smallpox), but unlike North America, in Central but especially in South America the indigenous people were so numerous that, even after the extermination, they still remained the majority

At the Castilian court in Spain, it is said that King Mehmet XI used as his personal guards wild men from Mulhacen (a rugged mountainous area in the Sierra Nevada) who were considered excellent warriors, taciturn and extremely strong. At the time they were identified

Korea. King Sejong invents the Korean alphabet Han’gul, inspired by Chinese logograms and Mongolian and Tibetan Buddhist alphabetic scripts, adding new inventions such as grouping multiple letters into square blocks to represent words. It is therefore an example of the invention of writing by “idea

Greenland. Last known contact between the Norwegian outposts and the rest of the Europeans. The first outposts were established in 874. Then with the arrival of the Little Ice Age of the 13th century. Contacts became more difficult. After 1410 the outposts were completely abandoned.

The Maya independently invented the wheel. It is used in wheeled toys. Its use for agricultural purposes and for traction is probably known, but not common since there is no draft animals at all, unlike in Eurasia. One of the proofs of the independent invention

Mississippi plain and eastern coast of North America, now Eastern United States. Bean cultivation arrives from Mexico. Much later than in Mexico because of the barrier of the North American deserts. And even later than in Eurasia. The Mexican trinity of corn, beans, squash is

First evidence of state organization in West Africa. In Mesopotamia the step occurred 4700 years earlier, while in Mesoamerica it occurred 1300 years earlier, and finally in China, Southeast Asia and the Andes 1000 years earlier.

Thanks to the technology of Norwegian deep-sea ships, the island of Iceland is reached and populated.

Africa. The Bantu populations from Nigeria and Cameroon spread across Africa and became the dominant population on the entire African continent, relegating the hunter-gatherer Pygmies and the Khoisan to isolated pockets of territory.

Thanks to the technology of the three-hulled canoes, for the high seas, the island of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean was reached and populated by the Austronesians, coming from the island of Borneo. There is no evidence that they came from Africa, through the Middle

Mississippi plain and eastern coast of North America, now Eastern United States. Corn cultivation arrives from Mexico. Much later than Mexico because of the barrier of North American deserts. And even later than Eurasia. Bean cultivation will arrive, again from Mexico, only in 1100.

Eurasia. Grains, originally grown only in the Fertile Crescent, are now grown from the Atlantic coast of Europe to the Pacific coast of Japan, 14,000 km away, the greatest East-West distance (required for uniformity of climatic conditions) continuously on land, on the entire planet.

First evidence of state organization in China, Andes, Southeast Asia. In Mesopotamia the step occurred 3700 years earlier, while in Mesoamerica it occurred two-three centuries earlier, and finally in West Africa in the 10th century AD.

Africa. Bantu peoples from Nigeria and Cameroon spread to the coasts of the Indian Ocean in 200 BC. They reached South Africa in 500 AD.

Mesoamerica (present-day Mexico). First evidence of state organization in the American continent, which generally imply a complex social structure and the maintenance of an army. In Mesopotamia the step occurred 3400 years earlier, in the Andes, China and Southeast Asia it will happen around the

Invention and use of a complete writing system by American Indians in Mesoamerica (present-day Mexico). This is one of only two certain instances of independent invention of writing. The other is by the Sumerians. The earliest evidence from Mexico is a Zapotec script in southern