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China. First blast furnace for iron smelting.

Alexander I Soter inherits the kingdom of Egypt from Alexander the Great

Pythagoras of Samos founded the Pythagorean School: complete numerology, then ended with the “crisis of the irrationals”

After Solomon’s death, his son Rehoboam was unable to hold the Kingdom of Israel together. The northern tribes founded the “Kingdom of Israel” under King Jeroboam I, while the Kingdom of Judah was formed in the south under King Rehoboam.

First settlements of the ancestors of the Maya in Central America

India. Rig Veda. “The gods themselves come after creation. So who can know how creation truly came into being? Who knows its origin? He who watches over everything from the heavens above, He knows—or perhaps He doesn’t even know.”

The Venus Tablet of Ammi-Saduqa. Nineveh, Mesopotamia: A Sumerian scribe records the movements of the stars, including Venus, on a clay tablet. It depicts the conjunction between Venus and the Sun during the reign of Ammi-Saduqa. This document is important because it demonstrates that the

Hammurabi quickly struck Mari (now Tel Hariri on the Syrian Euphrates) in 1761 BC and, for some reason, destroyed it rather than simply conquering it. With southern Mesopotamia under control, Hammurabi turned north and west.

Cornwall. First evidence of the use of tin, which was collected from riverbeds or by lighting fires next to the rocks that abound on the peninsula, allowing it to leach. It’s possible that when the Phoenicians referred to the tin-rich Cassiteride Islands, from which they

At 65 years old, Malalael fathered Jared; Malalael lived another 830 years and fathered other sons and daughters.

Domestication of wild almonds on the coasts of the Eastern Mediterranean, while in Greece the process had occurred 5 thousand years earlier.

The first stories were written in India and were later collected and reported in the books of Vedic literature Mahabarata and Ramayana and Bhagavata Purana; it is said that they refer to an oral tradition dating back to millennia before.

First bronze tools

The first carrot crops. They are from Afghanistan and purple (the orange variety is a cross bred in Holland in the 16th century).

Cycladic Civilization in the Greek Islands

Andes. Domestication of the llama.

Mesopotamia. First evidence of state organization, which generally involved a complex social structure and the maintenance of an army. In Mesoamerica, this transition occurred around 300 BC, in the Andes, China, and Southeast Asia around the 1st century BC, and in West Africa around the

Start of the Jewish calendar (New Year’s Day is the first new moon of September, being a lunar calendar)

Livestock farming begins in the Tanzania, Kenya, and Sudan area; at the same time, the lactose tolerance genetic mutation spreads.

The first blacksmiths used the ancient method of trial and error to forge the first copper objects and weapons. The Egyptian pyramids are an example of what copper makes possible. To forge the 300,000 chisels needed to work the stones that would form the pyramids,

genetic mutation in populations of Tanzania, Kenya, and Sudan gives rise to the most common variant of lactose tolerance (i.e., our ability to digest milk even as adults).

In Lower Mesopotamia, the transition from village communities to urban societies.

First evidence of prehistoric agriculture in Central Europe: this is the so-called Linearbandkeramik culture.

Olive trees are domesticated

Trousers, intended as a garment that covered the legs up to the waist, were invented. They were later adopted by the Germanic tribes of Central Europe around 750 BC.

Humans learned to extract iron by smelting common terrestrial minerals. Before this date, pure, unalloyed iron was found only in iron meteorites.

The giant deer is also becoming extinct in northern Siberia, after having disappeared from Europe thousands of years earlier.

Egypt: invention of the chair

First clay containers for liquid foods in Egypt

New Guinea. First independent emergence of agriculture. It is therefore one of the world’s earliest uses of agriculture. However, there are some severe limitations that prevent the local populations from developing like other Eurasian populations such as the Mesopotamians, Europeans, and Chinese. These are: the

“Miyake event,” a very strong solar storm that directly impacts Earth, occurs. The event is recorded in the rings of ancient trees, which will be analyzed in 2022 in a paper published in Royal Society Publishing. Annually resolved measurements of the radiocarbon content of tree

Bananas are grown in Papua New Guinea and Malaysia

Eastern slopes of the Central Ural Mountains. The “Great Idol” is erected: a 5-meter-high totem pole decorated with elaborate carvings. It is recovered from a peat bog on Lake Sigirskoye. We know very little about the social and political systems of these prehistoric communities, but

The domestication of certain cereals in the Fertile Crescent can be seen, through the deliberate selection of the best and most suitable strains, as the first (inadvertent) modification of another living being’s genome by humans to achieve their own goals (to eat it, in this

Fertile Crescent, China. Domestication of the pig.

The domestication of certain animal species makes a difference in different societies. The Major Five are: sheep, goat, cow, pig, and horse. The Minor Nine are: one- and two-humped camel, llama, donkey, reindeer, buffalo, yak, Bali cattle, and mithan. Others will follow many centuries later:

Domestication of wild almonds in Greece.

Species of peas and lentils are domesticated.

The Middle East is dotted with permanent settlements like Jericho.

Early village-based cultures

In an article in “Science,” Charles Hockett demonstrates that the soft “f” and “v” sounds, previously thought to be more common among cultures that ate softer foods, evolved in the early Neloitic, thanks to a particular conformation of the mouth, jaw, and upper teeth. Hockett

Southwestern Turkey, western Iran, and the Levant (present-day Lebanon and Syria). First permanent settlements of farmers and herders. The first domesticated species were wheat and goats.

Fertile Crescent, China, North America. Dog domestication, perhaps independently.

Barents Sea, between present-day Norway and Russia. On the seabed, large-scale explosions of cold methane pockets occur. These pockets remained trapped there as ice for millennia and are now being released due to global warming. This contributes to a further strong greenhouse effect.

In Talal, northern Chile, the Huentelauquen people have been extracting 700 cubic meters and 2,000 tons of rock from a local mine continuously for over 1,000 years.

The first leather shoes, intended as a garment that covers and protects the feet, also sheltering them from the cold.

Bands are still the most widespread form of human organization on the planet. Tribes are still the exception rather than the rule. Kingdoms and nation-states will emerge over the next 13,000 years, becoming by far the dominant form of social organization.

Beginning of the first village communities. Until this point, the entire human race had been hunter-gatherers. The transition to village life marked a huge change, with potential that would unfold over the next millennia.

Hunter-gatherers of Eurasia and North America. Along with reindeer, they were the first species herded by humans.

The last cave lions in Europe become extinct. Remains dating to this last era were found in Spain (Cantabria) in a cave inhabited by humans, along with bone remains of red deer, brown bear, fox, hyena, horse, and aurochs. The lion bone remains are marked

In Israel live the Natufians, one of the first populations of sedentary humans.

Alaska. The first clear and undisputed evidence of the presence of human villages on the American continent. Colonization, however, likely began much earlier. In the few centuries that followed, hundreds of additional settlements are known to have taken place in the present-day United States and

Japan. The monolithic Jomon culture dominates over ten thousand years of foraging history: from 14,000 BC to 300 BC, spanning long periods preceding the advent of rice cultivation in Japan. It is documented by thousands of archaeological sites, discovered primarily in the late 20th and

Tultepec, Mexico. In 2019 AD, archaeologists discovered enormous traps containing the remains of at least 14 mammoths. The traps date back approximately 16,000 years. During 10 months of excavation at the site, which was intended to become a landfill, 824 bones have been found so

Sapiens arrive in North America. The local megafauna become extinct soon after.

At the height of the Ice Age, a huge landslide in the Mediterranean released immense quantities of methane, probably over 500 million tons, which doubled the methane in the atmosphere in a very short time, causing a sudden greenhouse effect.

In Java, Indonesia, Anthropitecus erectus, later popularized as Java Man and today known as Homo erectus, became extinct.

At the Bilancino II site (Florence), 25,000 years ago, the rhizomes of Typha, the common reed, fern, and various other wild grasses were ground with mortars. There was no oil, because the domestication of the olive tree, which occurred in the Middle East between 8,000

Chauvet Cave, France. An 8- to 10-year-old boy and his dog walk across the sand inside the cave for about 45 meters to the Room of Skulls, a cave containing several cave bear skeletons. The boy slips a couple of times and stops several times

The cave bear became extinct in Europe. It was hunted by both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens.

Our ancestors traded long distances: Baltic amber objects are found in the Mediterranean, and objects made of Mediterranean shells are found thousands of kilometers away.

The arrival of humans in Europe caused the extinction of half the species of large mammals: mammoths, rhinoceroses, hyenas, lions, panthers, bears, moose, etc.

In Central Asia, interbreeding between Homo Sapiens and Denisovans occurs.

The woolly rhinoceros is becoming extinct in Europe.

Homo Sapiens in the Americas

Phlegraean Fields, Campania. Eruption of the Campanian Ignimbrite. The Campanian Ignimbrite is the product of the largest explosive eruption in the Mediterranean region in the last 200,000 years. This eruption, which occurred in a center located in the Phlegraean Fields, buried much of Campania under

First evidence of Homo sapiens using images

The first permanent villages. These are fishing settlements in Indonesia.

Neanderthals kissed with Homo sapiens and, between one escapade and another, they (self-)medicated, and some were predominantly vegetarian. Through the sequencing of traces of ancient DNA found in five dental plaque samples, we can see that the diet of their cousin Neanderthals was very varied:

Aurignacian: Paleolithic culture widespread in Southern Europe and present-day Israel. It left behind the first artifacts representing rudimentary lunar calendars.

Humanity’s Great Leap Forward. In East Africa, the Near East, and Southeastern Europe, and subsequently in Southwestern Europe, evidence is accumulating of multi-piece weapons such as bows and arrows, complex tools such as nets and ropes that allowed the addition of fish to the diet,

The Australian Aborigines (or what are now called such) first reached Australia from the Indonesian islands. Even from the closest islands to Australia (Timor and Tanimbar), the new continent is invisible on the horizon, even considering the decline in sea levels due to glaciations. The

Southeastern Spain. Neanderthals used red and yellow pigments and shell necklaces. The discovery was made by Joao Zilhao and his team on January 19, 2010.

Homo Sapiens in Australia (Aborigines)

Peak of the Wurm Glaciation

The Cognitive Revolution. The ability to speak emerges. The beginning of history. Sapiens leave Africa, heading for Eurasia.

Mount Toba volcano eruption in Sumatra; lasts 6 years and triggers an ice age episode that lasts centuries; this event may have brought humanity to the brink of extinction, reducing the entire human population on Earth to a few thousand individuals; this may explain the

The Sangamon Interglacial Period, a period of relative climatic stability not unlike what we are experiencing now, has ended, over the past 12,000 years.

First evidence of stone carving by Homo Sapiens

First evidence of the human custom of burying the dead for ritual purposes