13.8 billion years, laid out flat947 of the 1,040 milestones fall inside the final dot.
All of timeone dot is a million years
one dot is a million years0 of 13,800 dots
13,800 dotsmore detail in the next section
All of timemore detail in the next section
13,800 dots0 of 13,800 dots
Coloured dots mark milestones. Select one to read more.
one dot is a million years
All of time
Each dot represents one million years. The dots fill as you scroll. Earth forms about two-thirds of the way down the grid. Homo sapiens and recorded history fit in the final dot.
The first million years
The first dot covers the first million years after the Big Bang. The scale below is logarithmic, so each tick represents ten times as many seconds as the previous one.
10-40 s
10-30 s
10-20 s
10-10 s
100 s
1010 s
13.7 bn to 13.5 bnabout 201 million years
Image 9c. 13.7 billion years ago
For over a hundred million years the universe held no stars. It was neutral hydrogen gas cooling from 4,000 kelvin toward 60.
Image 10c. 13.65 billion years ago
Population III stars formed from hydrogen and helium alone. Some models give them 20 to 130 solar masses, and they lasted a few million years.
Image 11c. 13.64 billion years ago
The first giant stars exploded within a few million years. They ejected carbon, oxygen, silicon and iron into space for the first time.
Image 12c. 13.6 billion years ago
Groups of early stars combined inside dark matter haloes. The first galaxies were compact and irregular, often a few thousand light-years across.
Image 13c. 13.5 billion years ago
A galaxy confirmed at redshift 14.18, seen about 300 million years after the Big Bang. Later work found a more distant object, MoM-z14.
13.4 bn to 12.85 bnabout 551 million years
Image 14c. 13.4 billion years ago
A galaxy seen 400 million years after the Big Bang. It formed stars about twenty times faster than the Milky Way despite being far smaller.
Image 15c. 13.33 billion years ago
UHZ1 contained a black hole of about 40 million solar masses when the universe was 3 percent of its present age.
Image 16c. 13 billion years ago
Xiang and Rix dated 250,000 subgiant stars and found the thick disc forming 13 billion years ago, about 800 million years after the Big Bang.
Image 17c. 12.9 billion years ago
Dense groups of hundreds of thousands of stars. Dating by the coolest white dwarfs in them gives ages as high as 12.7 billion years.
Image 18c. 12.85 billion years ago
Ultraviolet light from young galaxies stripped electrons from hydrogen again. By one billion years, intergalactic gas was ionised.
12.6 bn to 8 bnabout 4.6 billion years
Image 19c. 12.6 billion years ago
A compact sphere holding about 100 million solar masses of metal-poor stars sits at the galaxy's centre. It is older than 12.5 billion years.
Image 20c. 12 billion years ago
HD 140283 lies 200 light-years away and contains 250 times less iron than the Sun. It is the oldest individually dated star.
Image 21c. 10.8 billion years ago
Star formation across the universe peaked between redshift 3 and 2. Galaxies formed about half of their present stars during that interval.
Image 22c. 10 billion years ago
A dwarf galaxy carrying about 50 billion solar masses collided with the young Milky Way and thickened its disc.
Image 23c. 8 billion years ago
The thick disc exhausted its gas about 8 billion years ago. Gas then settled into a layer roughly a thousand light-years thick.
6.7 bn to 4.54 bnabout 2.2 billion years
Image 24c. 6.7 billion years ago
Under the standard cosmological model, expansion began accelerating about 6.7 billion years ago. Dark energy now accounts for about 68 percent of the universe's energy.
Image 25c. 4.6 billion years ago
The Sun formed after its parent cloud collapsed. Proposed triggers include massive-star winds, nearby shocks and internal turbulence.
Image 26c. 4.58 billion years ago
A cloud fragment about one parsec across fell inward, spun up, and flattened into a disc a few hundred astronomical units wide.
Image 27c. 4.568 billion years ago
Calcium-aluminium-rich inclusions in meteorites date to 4,567.30 million years. That figure fixes the age of the Solar System.
Image 284.54 billion years ago
Radiometric dating puts the age of the Earth at 4.54 billion years. Iron sank to form a core and lighter silicates rose as a mantle.
4.54 bn to 4.03 bnabout 511 million years
Image 29c. 4.54 billion years ago
The core of the Sun reached about 15 million kelvin and hydrogen fusion began. The Sun has burned hydrogen ever since.
Image 30c. 4.5 billion years ago
A Mars-sized body struck the proto-Earth. Debris thrown into orbit cooled and gathered into the Moon.
Image 31c. 4.404 billion years ago
Zircon grains from Western Australia formed about 4.404 billion years ago. They are the oldest known fragments of the Earth itself.
Image 32c. 4.2 billion years ago
The last universal common ancestor, the cell from which all living things descend, lived about 4.2 billion years ago by a 2024 molecular clock estimate.
Image 33c. 4.03 billion years ago
Grey banded gneiss 300 km north of Yellowknife, dated to 4.031 billion years. It is the oldest intact rock formation known.
3.9 bn to 2.46 bnabout 1.4 billion years
Image 34c. 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago
Asteroid and comet impacts may have spiked across the inner Solar System from roughly 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago.
Image 35c. 3.8 billion years ago
Haematite tubes and filaments in rock on Hudson Bay may be the oldest fossils on Earth. Both the biology and the age are disputed.
Image 36c. 3.7 billion years ago
Graphite in 3.7-billion-year-old Greenland rocks is enriched in carbon-12 in the way that living cells enrich it.
Image 37c. 3.43 billion years ago
Microbial mats built layered domes in a shallow sea 3.43 billion years ago. They are the oldest fossils accepted by almost all researchers.
Image 38c. 2.46 billion years ago
Oxygen made by cyanobacteria built up in air and shallow sea between about 2.46 and 2.426 billion years ago.
2.45 bn to 1.1 bnabout 1.4 billion years
Image 39c. 2.45 billion years ago
Alternating red iron-oxide and pale chert layers, hundreds of metres thick, record dissolved iron meeting free oxygen in the sea.
Image 40c. 2.4 to 2.1 billion years ago
At least three ice ages occurred between about 2.4 and 2.1 billion years ago after atmospheric oxygen rose.
Image 41c. 1.87 billion years ago
Grypania, a coiled ribbon over a centimetre long from Michigan iron formations, may be the oldest large complex cell in the record.
Image 42c. 1.8 billion years ago
The interval from 1.8 to 0.8 billion years ago left no evidence of glaciation, and oxygen levels and evolutionary change both stayed low.
Image 43c. 1.1 billion years ago
Nearly all continental crust gathered into one landmass between about 1.26 and 0.90 billion years ago.
1.05 bn to 518 mabout 530 million years
Image 44c. 1,047 million years ago
A red alga from Somerset Island, dated to 1,047 million years ago, preserves reproductive cells distinct from the body of the organism.
Image 45c. 717 to 635 million years ago
Two Cryogenian glaciations left glacial deposits at tropical latitudes. The Sturtian ran about 717 to 660 million years ago.
Image 46c. 575 million years ago
Fronds, discs and quilted mats up to a metre across covered the sea floor about 575 million years ago. They were the first large complex organisms.
Image 47538.8 million years ago
From about 538.8 million years ago almost every animal body plan alive today appeared in the rocks within 13 to 25 million years.
Image 48c. 518 million years ago
Myllokunmingia and Haikouichthys, jawless and thumb-sized, come from 518-million-year-old shales in Yunnan. They are the earliest animals with a backbone.
505 m to 385 mabout 121 million years
Image 49c. 505 million years ago
Black shale in British Columbia preserved the guts, eyes and gills of soft-bodied Cambrian animals 505 million years ago.
Image 50c. 445 million years ago
Two pulses about 445 million years ago removed 49 to 60 per cent of marine genera, the first of the five great extinctions.
Image 51c. 433 million years ago
Cooksonia was a few centimetres tall, with forking green stems, and includes the oldest known plant with a vascular strand.
Image 52c. 425 million years ago
A one-centimetre millipede-like fossil from Stonehaven, Scotland, carries spiracles for breathing air, among the oldest known animals to have lived on land.
Image 53c. 385 million years ago
Wattieza stood eight metres tall at Gilboa in New York about 385 million years ago. Archaeopteris followed with real wood and a spreading canopy.
375 m to 305 mabout 71 million years
Image 54c. 375 million years ago
Tiktaalik was a flat-headed lobe-finned fish from Ellesmere Island with shoulder, elbow and wrist bones inside its fins.
Image 55c. 372 million years ago
The Kellwasser event, about 372 million years ago, killed roughly 40 per cent of marine species and destroyed reef systems worldwide.
Image 56c. 359 million years ago
Waterlogged equatorial forests of scale trees fell into peat that never fully rotted, between 358.86 and 298.9 million years ago.
Image 57c. 318 million years ago
Hylonomus lyelli, a lizard-like animal 20 to 25 centimetres long found in fossil tree stumps at Joggins, Nova Scotia, lived 318 million years ago.
Image 58c. 305 million years ago
About 305 million years ago the equatorial coal forests broke into isolated patches. Populations in them shrank, dwarfed and often died out.
300 m to 201.4 mabout 99 million years
Image 59c. 300 million years ago
Meganeura had a wingspan of roughly 65 to 75 centimetres. Its fossils came from Carboniferous coal measures at Commentry in France.
Image 60c. 252 million years ago
Siberian flood basalts erupted for about two million years. The extinction removed 81 per cent of marine species and 70 per cent of land vertebrates.
Image 61c. 231 million years ago
Eoraptor, a metre-long omnivore from northwestern Argentina, lived roughly 231 to 228 million years ago and is among the earliest dinosaurs known.
Image 62c. 205 million years ago
Morganucodon was shrew-sized and appeared about 205 million years ago, with the jaw and ear bones that define mammals.
Image 63201.4 million years ago
About 23 to 34 per cent of marine genera vanished at the Triassic-Jurassic boundary, and the conodonts, a group of jawless animals, were wiped out entirely.
200 m to 66 mabout 135 million years
Image 64c. 200 million years ago
The last supercontinent began splitting about 200 million years ago. This opened the Atlantic and moved continents toward their present positions.
Image 65c. 150 million years ago
Archaeopteryx was a magpie-sized feathered dinosaur with teeth, clawed fingers and a bony tail, preserved in the Solnhofen limestone of Bavaria.
Image 66c. 125 million years ago
Archaefructus, an aquatic herb from the Yixian Formation in northeastern China, dates to about 125 million years ago.
Image 67c. 68 million years ago
Tyrannosaurus rex hunted across the island continent of Laramidia in the last two to three million years before the dinosaurs died out.
Image 68c. 66 million years ago
A rat-sized tree dweller from Montana, known from teeth and ankle bones, appears within about 100,000 years of the asteroid impact.
66 m to 50 mabout 17 million years
Image 6966 million years ago
Flood basalt erupted across west-central India in layers more than two kilometres thick, covering about 500,000 square kilometres with roughly a million cubic kilometres of lava.
Image 7066 million years ago
An asteroid about ten kilometres across struck what is now the Yucatan. Three quarters of species died out, including all non-avian dinosaurs.
Image 71c. 56 million years ago
About 56 million years ago a large carbon release warmed the planet by 5 to 8 degrees Celsius for roughly 200,000 years.
Image 72c. 55 million years ago
The Indian plate collided with Eurasia and began raising the Himalayas, which now rise nearly 10 millimetres a year at Nanga Parbat.
Image 73c. 50 million years ago
Pakicetus was a wolf-sized hoofed mammal that hunted fish around fresh water in South Asia about 50 million years ago.
41.3 m to 21 mabout 22 million years
Image 74c. 41 million years ago
Basilosaurus was a fully aquatic whale up to 20 metres long and 15 tonnes that hunted sharks and smaller whales in shallow late Eocene seas.
Image 75c. 35 million years ago
C4 photosynthesis arose about 35 million years ago and became ecologically significant by about 21 million years ago.
Image 7633.9 million years ago
Permanent ice covered Antarctica for the first time, and mean annual temperature in central North America fell by about 8.2 degrees Celsius over some 400,000 years.
Image 77c. 23 million years ago
Otodus megalodon, a shark with a bite of up to 182,000 newtons, appeared in the Early Miocene and lasted until about 3.6 million years ago.
Image 78c. 21 million years ago
Proconsul, tailless and tree-dwelling, lived in Kenya and Uganda from 21 to 17 million years ago.
7 m to 3.2 mabout 4 million years
Image 79c. 7 million years ago
Toumai, a crushed cranium from the Djurab desert in Chad, is about 7 million years old and the oldest fossil put forward as a human relative.
Image 805.33 million years ago
Atlantic water flowed through the Strait of Gibraltar and refilled a largely dried-out Mediterranean, ending the Messinian salinity crisis.
Image 81c. 3.7 million years ago
Three hominins walked across wet volcanic ash in northern Tanzania and left a trail about 27 metres long holding roughly 70 footprints.
Image 82c. 3.3 million years ago
Struck cores and flakes at Lomekwi 3, west of Lake Turkana, date to 3.3 million years ago and predate the genus Homo.
Image 83c. 3.2 million years ago
Found at Hadar, Ethiopia, in 1974, Lucy preserves about 40 per cent of an Australopithecus afarensis skeleton with an ape-sized brain and bipedal gait.
3 m to 2 mabout 2 million years
Image 84c. 3 million years ago
A land bridge joined North and South America and separated the Atlantic from the Pacific, redirecting ocean currents and creating the Gulf Stream.
Image 85c. 2.9 million years ago
Chipped cores and sharp flakes appear from 2.9 million years ago across much of Africa, making Oldowan the first widely accepted stone-tool tradition.
Image 862.58 million years ago
An alternating series of glacial and interglacial periods began about 2.58 million years ago and, with polar ice sheets still present, has not ended.
Image 87c. 2.4 million years ago
Homo habilis lived in East and South Africa from about 2.4 to 1.65 million years ago, with a brain of 500 to 900 cubic centimetres.
Image 88c. 2 million years ago
Homo erectus was the first human species with a modern body plan and stride, and the first to live outside Africa.
1.8 m to 1 mabout 2 million years
Image 89c. 1.8 million years ago
Five skulls and more than a hundred bones from Dmanisi, Georgia, dated to 1.85 to 1.77 million years ago, are the earliest well-dated hominins outside Africa.
Image 90c. 1.76 million years ago
By about 1.76 million years ago, people in West Turkana, Kenya, made oval and pear-shaped handaxes worked on both faces, as dated by magnetostratigraphy.
Image 91c. 1.75 million years ago
Mary Leakey found the skull OH 5 at Olduvai Gorge on 17 July 1959; potassium-argon dating in 1965 gave it an age of 1.75 million years.
Image 92c. 1.6 million years ago
Kamoya Kimeu found the near-complete skeleton of a Homo erectus child, KNM-WT 15000, on the Nariokotome River in 1984.
No image available
No imagec. 1 million years ago
Ash and charred bone lie deep inside a South African cave, beyond the reach of any wildfire, implying that people deliberately maintained fire.
1,000 times more detail1,000 dots in the next section
One million years in 1,000 dots
The next section uses one dot for every 1,000 years. Homo sapiens appears in the final third.
The last million yearsone dot is a thousand years
one dot is a thousand years0 of 1,000 dots
1,000 dotsmore detail in the next section
The last million yearsmore detail in the next section
1,000 dots0 of 1,000 dots
Coloured dots mark milestones. Select one to read more.
one dot is a thousand years
The last million years
Each dot represents 1,000 years. Homo sapiens appears around dot 700. Writing appears in the sixth dot from the end.
609,000 to 300,000about 310,000 years
Image 94c. 609,000 years ago
A quarry worker found a chinless human mandible in a sandpit near Heidelberg in 1907. It was dated in 2010 to 609,000 years.
Image 95c. 430,000 years ago
At least 29 individuals lay at the bottom of a 13 m shaft in northern Spain, dated to about 430,000 years ago.
Image 96c. 315,000 years ago
Fossils from a Moroccan mine, redated in 2017 to a weighted average of 315,000 years, are the oldest known Homo sapiens.
Image 97c. 300,000 years ago
Ten wooden throwing spears survived waterlogged in a German lignite mine. They are the oldest complete hunting weapons found.
Image 98c. 300,000 years ago
A small-brained human species from Rising Star Cave in South Africa, dated between 335,000 and 236,000 years ago.
250,000 to 170,000about 81,000 years
Image 99c. 250,000 years ago
Cold-adapted humans with brains as large as ours inhabited Europe and western Asia. Their Mousterian toolkit changed little for 150,000 years.
Image 100c. 233,000 years ago
Skulls from the Omo River in Ethiopia were redated in 2022 by the volcanic ash above them to at least 233,000 years.
Image 101c. 200,000 years ago
Mitochondrial DNA from a girl's finger bone in a Siberian cave identified a previously unknown population of archaic humans in 2010.
Image 102c. 170,000 years ago
The body louse, which lives only in clothing, split from the head louse about 170,000 years ago, the best estimate for when humans began to dress.
Image 103c. 170,000 years ago
People at caves near Mossel Bay gathered shellfish, ground ochre and heat-treated stone from about 170,000 years ago.
100,000 to 65,000about 36,000 years
Image 104c. 100,000 to 60,000 years ago
A skeleton found at Liang Bua cave on Flores in 2003 belonged to a human about 1.1 metres tall, a separate species living alongside our own.
Image 105c. 100,000 years ago
Early Homo sapiens at two caves in the Levant buried their dead about 100,000 years ago, some with red ochre and pierced shell beads.
Image 106c. 74,000 years ago
A volcano in northern Sumatra erupted about 74,000 years ago at volcanic explosivity index 8. Its collapsed caldera now holds Lake Toba.
Image 107c. 73,000 years ago
Someone drew nine red lines with an ochre crayon on a stone flake about 73,000 years ago, creating the oldest known drawing.
Image 108c. 65,000 years ago
Between about 70,000 and 50,000 years ago one dispersal out of Africa succeeded. Perhaps 150 to 1,000 people made the crossing.
65,000 to 50,000about 16,000 years
No image available
No imagec. 65,000 years ago
People occupied a sandstone shelter in Arnhem Land by about 65,000 years ago, leaving ground-edge axes, grinding stones and ochre.
Image 110c. 64,000 years ago
Small stone points from Sibudu rock shelter, 64,000 years old, carry wear and residues that match arrowheads rather than spears.
Image 111c. 51,200 years ago
A painted scene of a wild pig and three human-like figures in Sulawesi, dated to at least 51,200 years, is the oldest known figurative art.
Image 112c. 50,000 years ago
A needle of bird bone about 50,000 years old from Denisova Cave, attributed to Denisovans, is the oldest complete sewing needle known.
Image 113c. 50,000 years ago
Genome sequencing showed that Homo sapiens interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans. Everyone outside Africa carries about 1 to 4 percent Neanderthal DNA.
40,000 to 34,000about 7000 years
Image 114c. 40,000 years ago
A 31 cm figure with a human body and a cave lion's head, carved from mammoth ivory with a flint knife.
Image 115c. 40,000 years ago
A flute with five finger holes, cut from the wing bone of a griffon vulture, recovered from a cave in southern Germany in 2008.
Image 116c. 40,000 years ago
Neanderthals disappear from the record around 40,000 years ago, close to the time modern humans spread across Europe.
Image 117c. 36,000 years ago
Charcoal drawings of lions, rhinos and horses in a cave in the Ardèche. The oldest are about 36,500 years old.
Image 118c. 34,000 years ago
Two children were buried head to head near Vladimir, sewn into clothing covered with thousands of mammoth-ivory beads.
30,000 to 21,000about 10,000 years
Image 119c. 30,000 years ago
An 11 cm limestone figure of a woman, tinted with red ochre, found beside the Danube in Lower Austria in 1908.
Image 120c. 28,000 years ago
A charcoal drawing at Narwala Gabarnmang in Arnhem Land returned an age of 28,000 years, the oldest securely dated rock art in Australia.
Image 121c. 26,000 years ago
Ice sheets reached their greatest extent between about 26,000 and 20,000 years ago, and global sea level fell about 120 m.
Image 122c. 23,000 years ago
Sixty-one bare human footprints in New Mexico gypsum, dated to between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago. The dating is disputed.
Image 123c. 21,000 years ago
With sea level 120 m lower, a treeless plain up to 1,000 km wide joined Siberia to Alaska.
20,000 to 15,000about 6000 years
Image 124c. 20,000 years ago
Pottery sherds from Xianren Cave in Jiangxi were dated to between 20,000 and 19,000 years before present. Many carry scorch marks from use over fire.
Image 125c. 17,000 years ago
More than 600 paintings of aurochs, horses and stags cover a cave in the Dordogne, found by four teenagers in 1940.
Image 126c. 16,000 years ago
Foragers in the Japanese islands pressed twisted cord into wet clay before firing. This pottery tradition lasted more than thirteen thousand years.
Image 127c. 15,000 years ago
Hunter-gatherers in the Levant built permanent stone houses and harvested wild cereals from about 15,000 years before present.
Image 128c. 14,500 to 5,000 years ago
A stronger monsoon turned much of the Sahara into grassland with lakes and rivers, where people herded cattle and painted rock walls.
15,000 to 13,000about 3000 years
Image 129c. 14,500 years ago
A peat bog near Puerto Montt in southern Chile sealed wooden tent frames, cordage and chewed seaweed, dated to about 14,500 years ago.
Image 130c. 14,400 years ago
Charred crumbs of flatbread made from wild wheat, barley and tubers were found at Shubayqa 1 in Jordan, 4,000 years before farming.
Image 131c. 14,000 years ago
A puppy buried with a man and a woman near Bonn about 14,000 years ago is the oldest undisputed domestic dog.
Image 132c. 13,000 years ago
Residues of a gruel-like beer, 13,000 years old, were found in stone mortars at Raqefet Cave, used by Natufians for ritual feasting.
Image 133c. 12,900 years ago
The last cold phase of the ice age ran from about 12,900 to 11,700 years before present. Greenland cooled by up to 10 degrees Celsius.
12,000 to 11,000about 3000 years
Image 134c. 10,000 BCE
Humans domesticated the wild mouflon in Mesopotamia between about 11,000 and 9,000 BCE, among the first livestock ever kept.
Image 135c. 10,000 BCE
More than 750 shelters in Madhya Pradesh carry India's oldest known paintings, dating from about 10,000 BCE.
Image 136c. 11,700 years ago
Communities across the Fertile Crescent began growing emmer, einkorn and barley about 11,700 years ago, at the start of the Holocene.
Image 137c. 9500 BCE
People in south-eastern Turkey raised circles of carved T-shaped limestone pillars from about 9500 BCE, before pottery and before farming.
Image 138c. 10,500 years ago
Taurine cattle were domesticated from wild aurochs about 10,500 years ago in Anatolia, the Levant and western Iran, perhaps from as few as 80 animals.
10,000about 2000 years
Image 139c. 8000 BCE
Tell es-Sultan, beside a perennial spring, was enclosed by a stone wall with a round tower 8.5 m high inside it.
Image 140c. 10,000 years ago
The earliest remains of domesticated goats, 10,000 years old, come from Ganj Dareh in the Zagros Mountains of Iran, bred from the wild bezoar ibex.
100 times more detail1,000 dots in the next section
Ten thousand years in 1,000 dots
The next section uses one dot for every ten years.
The last ten thousand yearsone dot is ten years
one dot is ten years0 of 1,000 dots
1,000 dotsmore detail in the next section
The last ten thousand yearsmore detail in the next section
1,000 dots0 of 1,000 dots
Coloured dots mark milestones. Select one to read more.
one dot is ten years
The last ten thousand years
Each dot represents ten years, and each row covers 400 years. This section includes farming, cities, writing, empires, and major religious texts.
7500 BCE to 7000 BCEabout 510 years
Image 141c. 7500 BCE
A cat buried beside a human in a Neolithic grave at Shillourokambos, Cyprus, about 7500 BCE, is the earliest sign of tamed wildcats.
Image 142c. 7500 BCE
A town on the Konya Plain, occupied from about 7500 BCE. Its houses had no doors at ground level, and people entered through openings in the roof.
Image 143c. 7000 BCE
Asian rice was first domesticated in China about 9,000 years ago by Neolithic farmers of the upper and lower Yangtze.
Image 144c. 7000 BCE
Maize was bred from wild teosinte in southern Mexico about 9,000 years ago; most of the difference between the two plants is controlled by two genes.
Image 145c. 7000 BCE
A farming village near the Bolan Pass in Balochistan, settled about 7000 BCE. Its people grew wheat and barley and drilled human teeth with flint bits.
6500 BCE to 5500 BCEabout 1010 years
Image 146c. 6500 BCE
Traces of silk fibroin were found in Neolithic tombs at Jiahu in China, more than 8,500 years old.
Image 147c. 6200 BCE
A 290-kilometre stretch of Norway's continental shelf collapsed into the deep sea and sent a tsunami across the North Atlantic.
Image 148c. 6000 BCE
The earliest known traces of wine come from Neolithic pottery found near Tbilisi, Georgia, dated to about 6000 BCE.
Image 149c. 8,000 years ago
Farmers around Lake Titicaca domesticated the potato from a wild Solanum species between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago.
Image 150c. 5500 BCE
A Vinča town of 120 hectares near Prokuplje in Serbia worked copper from about 5500 BCE. Its cast axes are held by the National Museum of Serbia.
3500 BCE to 3200 BCEabout 310 years
Image 151c. 3500 BCE
A clay vase from south-central Poland is incised with a four-wheeled wagon. It is the oldest known picture of a wheeled vehicle.
Image 152c. 3300 BCE
Starch grains, theobromine and cacao DNA in pottery of the Mayo-Chinchipe culture of Ecuador show cacao in use by about 3300 BCE.
Image 153c. 3250 BCE
Two hikers found a mummified man in the Ötztal Alps in 1991, at about 3,200 metres. He died around 3250 BCE with an arrowhead in his shoulder.
Image 154c. 3200 BCE
Archaeologists pulled an ash wheel and its oak axle from peat south of Ljubljana in 2002. It is 5,100 to 5,350 years old.
Image 155c. 3200 BCE
Scribes at Uruk in southern Mesopotamia pressed wedge-shaped marks into wet clay to record grain, beer and livestock. It is the earliest known writing.
3100 BCE to 3000 BCEabout 110 years
Image 156c. 3100 BCE
Neolithic farmers in the Boyne valley raised a great passage tomb around 3100 BCE, aligned so that the winter solstice sunrise floods its inner chamber.
Image 157c. 3100 BCE
A city in southern Mesopotamia that held as many as 50,000 people around 3100 BCE, with 80,000 more living in the country around it.
Image 158c. 3100 BCE
A carved greywacke palette from about the 31st century BCE shows one king wearing the crowns of both Upper and Lower Egypt.
Image 159c. 3000 BCE
Six platform mounds and sunken circular courts stand in a Peruvian desert valley 182 kilometres north of Lima. No pottery or weapons have been found there.
Image 160c. 3000 BCE
Copper alloyed with tin gave a metal hard enough to hold an edge. Tin is rare, so bronze required trade across thousands of kilometres.
2650 BCE to 2500 BCEabout 160 years
Image 161c. 2650 BCE
An Indus city of 47 hectares built in stone on Khadir Bet island in the Rann of Kutch, supplied by cut-stone reservoirs that held monsoon runoff.
Image 162c. 2600 BCE
The tomb of the pharaoh Khufu, built around 2600 BCE over about 26 years. It stood 146.6 metres tall and was faced in polished white limestone.
Image 163c. 2600 BCE
A Bronze Age civilisation across Pakistan, northwestern India and northeast Afghanistan, with gridded streets, covered drains and a script nobody has deciphered.
Image 164c. 2500 BCE
Glassmakers in Mesopotamia and Egypt produced the earliest known glass objects, small beads, around the middle of the third millennium BCE.
Image 165c. 2500 BCE
Sarsen stones of about 25 tonnes were raised on Salisbury Plain between 2600 and 2400 BCE and jointed with mortise and tenon.
2500 BCE to 2300 BCEabout 210 years
Image 166c. 2500 BCE
A brick city of 40,000 people or more in Sindh, built around 2500 BCE, with wells in most houses and covered drains under the streets.
Image 167c. 2400 BCE
The Harappan port town of Lothal held a brick-lined basin about 217 metres long, read by its excavators as a tidal dock.
Image 168c. 2400 BCE
Funerary spells cut into the burial chamber of Unas at Saqqara around 2400 BCE, the oldest religious writing known anywhere.
Image 169c. 2334 BCE
Sargon, once cup-bearer to the king of Kish, conquered the Sumerian city-states and ruled from his capital Akkad what is often called the first empire.
Image 170c. 2300 BCE
Enheduanna is the earliest named author in world history, though scholars dispute the attribution. An inscribed alabaster disk records her name and office.
2200 BCE to 2000 BCEabout 210 years
Image 171c. 2200 BCE
A severe drought lasting most of the 22nd century BCE has been linked to the fall of the Akkadian Empire and Egypt's Old Kingdom.
Image 172c. 2200 BCE
Genomic work traced the lineage of every modern domestic horse to about 2200 BCE in the Volga-Don region, not to the older Botai settlements of Kazakhstan.
Image 173c. 2100 BCE
Ur-Nammu raised a stepped mudbrick platform to the moon god Nanna in the 21st century BCE. Its Sumerian name means house whose foundation creates terror.
Image 174c. 2100 BCE
A Sumerian composition listing cities, kings and reign lengths. The earliest kings are given reigns of thousands of years, before a flood divides the list.
Image 175c. 2000 BCE
The one-humped dromedary was probably first domesticated in the Arabian Peninsula about 4,000 years ago.
1900 BCE to 1650 BCEabout 260 years
Image 176c. 1900 BCE
The centre of Minoan Crete, five kilometres south of Heraklion. Its first palace was built around 1900 BCE, with light wells, drains and bull frescoes.
Image 177c. 1800 BCE
Five Sumerian poems about a king of Uruk were reworked into a single Akkadian poem in the 18th century BCE.
Image 178c. 1753 BCE
About 282 rulings on wages, surgery, marriage and debt, cut into a basalt stele 2.25 metres tall in the name of the king of Babylon.
Image 179c. 1750 BCE
Palaces and a bronze foundry rose at Erlitou on the Yi River, an early Bronze Age state centre in the Yellow River valley.
Image 180c. 1650 BCE
The Hittites made Hattusa their capital around 1650 BCE and built an empire that contested the Near East with Egypt, Mitanni and Assyria.
1600 BCE to 1500 BCEabout 110 years
Image 181c. 1600 BCE
A bronze disc 30 centimetres across, inlaid with gold symbols read as the sun, a crescent moon and the Pleiades. It was found near Nebra in 1999.
Image 182c. 1600 BCE
A volcanic eruption on Santorini around 1600 BCE threw out 28 to 41 cubic kilometres of rock and buried the Minoan town of Akrotiri in ash.
Image 183c. 1550 BCE
Funerary spells copied onto papyrus for private buyers from about 1550 BCE, made to order with the buyer's name written into the blanks.
Image 184c. 1500 BCE
A collection of 1,028 hymns in Vedic Sanskrit, composed in the northwestern subcontinent and carried by memory for centuries before it was written down.
Image 185c. 1500 BCE
Austronesian sailors settled Island Melanesia by sea between about 1600 and 500 BCE, leaving pottery stamped with a fine toothed comb.
1479 BCE to 1274 BCEabout 220 years
Image 186c. 1479 BCE
Hatshepsut ruled as regent for the two-year-old Thutmose III, then took the full royal titles and reigned as pharaoh for about two decades.
Image 187c. 1400 BCE
A Sanskrit creation hymn in the Rigveda ends by suggesting that the overseer in the highest heaven may not know where the world came from.
Image 188c. 1350 BCE
In his fifth regnal year Amenhotep IV renamed himself Akhenaten, disbanded the priesthoods of the other gods and built a new capital for the sun disc Aten.
Image 189c. 1323 BCE
Howard Carter found the tomb intact in the Valley of the Kings in 1922. It held more than 5,000 objects, including a 10-kilogram gold mask.
Image 190c. 1274 BCE
Ramesses II and Muwatalli II fought near the Orontes in 1274 BCE with 5,000 to 6,000 chariots. Both kings claimed the victory.
1250 BCE to 1200 BCEabout 60 years
Image 191c. 1250 BCE
Mycenae's builders set two carved lionesses over the citadel's main gate around 1250 BCE, the largest surviving sculpture of the Bronze Age Aegean.
Image 192c. 1250 BCE
The earliest probable chicken bones, about 3,250 years old, come from Ban Non Wat in Thailand, where red junglefowl were drawn to rice fields.
Image 193c. 1250 BCE
Diviners for the Shang royal house heated ox shoulder blades and turtle shells until they cracked, then carved the question and the answer into the bone.
Image 194c. 1200 BCE
At 3,180 metres in the Andes, Chavín de Huántar drew pilgrims to a temple whose hidden gallery held the Lanzón, a feline-headed god.
Image 195c. 1200 BCE
In 1986 workers at Sanxingdui uncovered pits of broken, burned bronze heads, gold masks and jade from a Bronze Age kingdom absent from the histories.
1200 BCE to 1100 BCEabout 110 years
Image 196c. 1200 BCE
Seventeen heads carved from single basalt boulders, up to 3.4 metres tall. The stone came from the Tuxtla Mountains, tens of kilometres away.
Image 197c. 1200 BCE
Between the late 13th and early 12th centuries BCE the Hittite Empire disappeared and the Mycenaean palaces fell. Greece lost writing for four centuries.
Image 198c. 1200 BCE
Smelted iron replaced bronze in everyday tools from about 1200 BCE. Iron ore is common, while bronze needed tin carried across continents.
Image 199c. 1150 BCE
Sin-leqi-unninni compiled earlier Akkadian material into twelve tablets between 1300 and 1000 BCE, opening with the words Sha naqba imuru.
Image 200c. 1100 BCE
The Babylonian creation epic in which Marduk kills the sea goddess Tiamat and builds the sky and the earth from the halves of her body.
1046 BCE to 911 BCEabout 150 years
Image 201c. 1046 BCE
King Wu of Zhou defeated the last Shang king, Di Xin, at Muye and took the capital Yin, founding a dynasty that claimed the Mandate of Heaven.
Image 202c. 1000 BCE
Seventeen hymns in Old Avestan, running to 5,567 words with the Yasna Haptanghaiti, the oldest surviving Iranian text.
Image 203c. 1000 BCE
An abjad of 22 consonant signs used across the Mediterranean. The sarcophagus of Ahiram of Byblos carries one of the earliest substantial inscriptions.
Image 204c. 1000 BCE
An Iranian religious reformer who broke with the existing Iranian religion. The Gathas, the oldest Zoroastrian scriptures, are traditionally his own compositions.
Image 205911 BCE
From Adad-nirari II's accession in 911 BCE, Assyria grew into the largest empire yet seen, ruling from Egypt to Iran until Nineveh fell in 612 BCE.
900 BCE to 753 BCEabout 160 years
Image 206c. 900 BCE
Fired-clay figures with triangular eyes and drilled pupils were found on the Jos Plateau in Nigeria. The earliest date from about 900 BCE.
Image 207c. 814 BCE
Phoenician settlers from Tyre built a harbour town on the Lake of Tunis, traditionally in 814 BCE. It became the capital of a Punic empire.
Image 208c. 800-500 BCE
Manuals for laying out Vedic fire altars stated the diagonal rule for rectangles and gave the square root of two as 577/408.
Image 209776 BCE
Athletes from the Greek city-states competed at the sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia, traditionally from 776 BCE. The four-year interval became a unit of dating.
Image 210c. 753 BCE
Hilltop villages above the Tiber combined into one town in the later 8th century BCE. Varro's chronology fixed the traditional date at 753 BCE.
750 BCE to 700 BCEabout 60 years
Image 211c. 750 BCE
A Greek epic of 15,693 lines in 24 books, composed for oral performance between about 800 and 750 BCE.
Image 212c. 744 BCE
Piye, king of Kush at Napata, marched north from Nubia, took Egypt from its quarrelling rulers and founded the Twenty-fifth Dynasty.
Image 213c. 8th century BCE
Twenty-four books about a man taking ten years to sail home, composed in Homeric Greek around the eighth or seventh century BCE.
Image 214c. 730-700 BCE
A poem of 1,022 lines that gives the Greek gods a family tree, composed around 730 to 700 BCE by a Boeotian farmer-poet.
Image 215c. 700 BCE
The Brihadaranyaka and Chandogya turn ritual manuals into arguments about the self. Both were composed before the Buddha.
650 BCE to 600 BCEabout 60 years
Image 216c. 650 BCE
More than 30,000 clay tablets from the royal library at Nineveh survive. The fire that destroyed the palace in 612 BCE baked them hard.
Image 217c. 600 BCE
Sixteen kingdoms and republics, from Gandhara in the northwest to Anga in the east, filled the Ganges plain as India's first cities since the Indus rose.
Image 218c. 600 BCE
Sappho wrote lyric poetry to be sung to music on Lesbos; only about 650 of her roughly 10,000 lines survive.
Image 219c. 600 BCE
The kingdom of Lydia struck the earliest coins, lumps of electrum stamped with a lion, in the late seventh century BCE.
Image 220c. 7th-5th century BCE
Nearly 24,000 shlokas in seven kandas follow Rama from exile to Lanka. The core was composed orally between about 750 and 500 BCE.
599 BCE to 551 BCEabout 60 years
Image 221c. 599 BCE
A teacher in what is now Bihar who gave up his possessions at about thirty. His doctrine of ahimsa forbids harm to any living being.
Image 222c. 587 BCE
After a siege of about 30 months, Nebuchadnezzar II's army took Jerusalem, burned Solomon's Temple and deported the Judean elite to Babylon.
Image 223c. 585 BCE
Herodotus wrote that Thales of Miletus foretold the year of a solar eclipse that stopped a battle between the Lydians and the Medes.
Image 224c. 569 BCE
Nebuchadnezzar II faced Babylon's eighth gate in blue glazed brick with rows of dragons, bulls and lions for the goddess Ishtar.
Image 225551 BCE
A minor official in Lu who taught that good government comes from the personal morality of those who govern. His sayings were collected as the Analects.
550 BCE to 515 BCEabout 50 years
Image 226c. 6th century BCE
A priestly writer opened the Hebrew Bible with a creation of six numbered days and a seventh day set apart.
Image 227550 BCE
Cyrus II defeated the Median Empire in 550 BCE, then took Lydia and Babylon. The empire covered about 5.5 million square kilometres.
Image 228c. 539 BCE
A clay cylinder found in the ruins of Babylon in 1879, inscribed in Akkadian in the name of Cyrus the Great. It is held by the British Museum.
Image 229c. 530 BCE
Around 530 BCE Pythagoras of Samos settled at Croton in southern Italy and founded a secretive community whose members shared their possessions and studied number.
Image 230c. 515 BCE
The ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire in Fars, standing by 515 BCE. Its Apadana stairway shows 23 subject peoples bringing tribute.
509 BCE to 490 BCEabout 30 years
Image 231c. 509 BCE
Rome overthrew its monarchy, traditionally in 509 BCE, and gave power to two annually elected consuls, a Senate and popular assemblies.
Image 232508 BCE
Cleisthenes sorted Athenian citizens into ten tribes by where they lived rather than what they owned, in 508 to 507 BCE.
Image 233c. 500 BCE
Zapotec builders levelled a ridge 400 metres above the Valley of Oaxaca around 500 BCE and founded one of Mesoamerica's earliest cities.
Image 234c. 500 BCE
Siddhartha Gautama taught across the eastern Indo-Gangetic plain in the 6th or 5th century BCE and built a monastic order, the sangha.
Image 235490 BCE
Athenian hoplites under Miltiades, helped only by Plataea, defeated Darius I's invasion force on the plain of Marathon in 490 BCE.
480 BCE to 449 BCEabout 40 years
Image 236480 BCE
Leonidas's rearguard died holding the pass at Thermopylae; weeks later Themistocles's fleet broke Xerxes's navy in the straits of Salamis.
Image 237472 BCE
Aeschylus' The Persians won first prize at the City Dionysia in 472 BCE and is the oldest surviving play in the world.
Image 238c. 5th century BCE
Thirteen chapters attributed to Sun Tzu argued that war is a costly last resort, best kept short and won by intelligence, deception and calculation.
Image 239c. 5th century BCE
Buddhist Jataka tales described Taxila, capital of Gandhara, as a centre of learning to which students travelled from across India.
Image 240449 BCE
After long plebeian agitation, Rome's decemviri wrote its customary law on twelve tables and published them in the Forum in 449 BCE.
447 BCE to 400 BCEabout 60 years
Image 241447 BCE
A temple to Athena on the Athenian Acropolis, begun in 447 BCE and finished in 438 BCE, paid for largely from the treasury of the Delian League.
Image 242431 BCE
Sparta's king Archidamus II invaded Attica in 431 BCE, opening 27 years of war that ended with the surrender of Athens in 404 BCE.
Image 243c. 430 BCE
Herodotus of Halicarnassus set down the results of his enquiry into the Persian Wars so that the deeds of Greeks and non-Greeks would not be erased by time.
Image 244430 BCE
An epidemic struck Athens in the second year of the Peloponnesian War, killing an estimated 75,000 to 100,000 people, about a quarter of the population.
Image 245c. 400 BCE
About 60 Greek medical works were gathered under the name of Hippocrates, born around 460 BCE on Kos; the collection includes the Hippocratic Oath.
400 BCE to 350 BCEabout 60 years
Image 246c. 400 BCE
A war between cousins grew into the longest epic composed in any language, with its oldest preserved parts around 400 BCE.
Image 247c. 400 BCE
The Ashtadhyayi sets out slightly under 4,000 rules for Sanskrit, organised by meta-rules that decide which rule applies when two of them conflict.
Image 248399 BCE
An Athenian jury convicted Socrates of impiety and corrupting the young in 399 BCE. He was executed by hemlock.
Image 249c. 387 BCE
Plato founded a school in a grove outside Athens around 387 BCE. Aristotle studied there for twenty years.
Image 250c. 6th-2nd century BCE
The Vaisheshika Sutra attributed to Kanada argued that matter was built from indivisible, eternal particles called paramanu.
350 BCE to 320 BCEabout 40 years
Image 251c. 4th century BCE
A Chinese gazetteer of more than 550 mountains and 300 waterways, listing the minerals, plants, animals and spirits of each.
Image 252c. 350 BCE
Aristotle wrote on physics, biology, logic, ethics, politics and rhetoric, and classified hundreds of animal species from his own dissections.
Image 253326 BCE
Alexander crossed the monsoon-swollen Jhelum to outflank Porus and his war elephants, won at heavy cost, and then reinstated Porus as satrap.
Image 254323 BCE
Alexander campaigned from the Aegean to the Punjab between 336 and 323 BCE. He died at 32 and his generals divided the conquests.
Image 255c. 320 BCE
Chandragupta Maurya defeated the Nanda dynasty around 320 BCE and ruled from Pataliputra, extending his reach past the Hindu Kush and into the Deccan.
312 BCE to 300 BCEabout 20 years
Image 256312 BCE
The censor Appius Claudius Caecus began the Via Appia in 312 BCE, the first long Roman road built to move armies south from Rome.
Image 257c. 300 BCE
A stone block at San Bartolo carries the oldest identifiably Maya inscription, from about 300 BCE; its murals of 100 BCE are the oldest Maya paintings.
Image 258c. 300 BCE
Smiths in southern India sealed iron and carbon in clay crucibles to make a high-carbon steel that was later forged into Damascus blades.
Image 259c. 300 BCE
Hundreds of stories about the earlier lives of the Buddha, most of them lived as animals, dated between 300 BCE and 400 CE.
Image 260c. 300 BCE
Eighty-one short chapters on how things proceed when nobody forces them. The oldest copy is bamboo slips buried before 300 BCE.
300 BCE to 250 BCEabout 60 years
Image 261c. 300 BCE
Thirteen books written at Alexandria around 300 BCE, deriving geometry and number theory from definitions, postulates and common notions.
Image 262c. 280 BCE
Aristarchus of Samos proposed that the Earth revolved around the Sun once a year and turned on its axis once a day, the first known heliocentric model.
Image 263c. 280 BCE
Part of the Mouseion at Alexandria, built under the early Ptolemies. Estimates of its holdings range from 40,000 to 700,000 scrolls.
Image 264c. 260 BCE
Ashoka's own edicts record that he conquered Kalinga around 260 BCE and that the suffering it caused turned him towards dhamma.
Image 265c. 3rd century BCE
Sri Lanka's chronicles record that Mahinda, a son of Ashoka, met King Devanampiya Tissa hunting in the Mihintale hills and converted him to Buddhism.
250 BCEabout 10 years
Image 266c. 3rd-2nd century BCE
Pingala's treatise on Sanskrit metre listed every pattern of light and heavy syllables, a scheme equivalent to counting in binary.
Image 267c. 3rd century BCE
The Pabbata Sutta answers a question about the length of an aeon with a mountain rubbed once a century with a cloth.
Image 268c. 250 BCE
More than thirty inscriptions on pillars, boulders and cave walls, cut in Prakrit, Kharosthi, Greek and Aramaic so that each region could read them.
Image 269c. 250 BCE
A hemispherical brick dome over relics of the Buddha, commissioned by Ashoka in the 3rd century BCE on a hilltop in Madhya Pradesh.
Image 270c. 250 BCE
Archimedes of Syracuse bounded pi with 96-sided polygons and found that a sphere has two-thirds the volume of its enclosing cylinder.
247 BCE to 218 BCEabout 40 years
Image 271247 BCE
Arsaces I led the Parni into Parthia in 247 BCE, founding a dynasty that ruled Iran for nearly five centuries and stopped Rome at Carrhae.
Image 272c. 240 BCE
Eratosthenes, chief librarian at Alexandria, used noon shadows at Alexandria and Syene to calculate the circumference of the Earth as about 250,000 stadia.
Image 273221 BCE
Ying Zheng conquered the last of the warring states in 221 BCE. He standardised the script, weights, coinage and the axle width of carts.
Image 274c. 220 BCE
Separate state walls were linked into one frontier system under the Qin dynasty. The complete network measures 21,196 kilometres.
Image 275218 BCE
Hannibal led a Carthaginian army with elephants over the Alps into Italy in 218 BCE, carrying the Second Punic War onto Roman soil.
210 BCE to 196 BCEabout 20 years
Image 276c. 210 BCE
Farmers digging a well outside Xi'an found the figures in 1974. Estimates run to more than 8,000 life-size soldiers, buried in 210 to 209 BCE.
Image 277209 BCE
Modu killed his father Touman in 209 BCE, united the steppe tribes and built a Xiongnu empire that forced Han China to pay it tribute.
Image 278202 BCE
Liu Bang founded the dynasty in 202 BCE and it lasted until 220 CE. China's majority ethnic group, its language and its characters are named after it.
Image 279c. 200 BCE
Lines and figures were scraped into the desert of southern Peru between 500 BCE and 500 CE. Together they run more than 1,300 kilometres.
Image 280196 BCE
A decree of 196 BCE cut in hieroglyphs, Demotic and Greek. Jean-François Champollion announced the decipherment of the Egyptian scripts in 1822.
150 BCE to 100 BCEabout 60 years
Image 281c. 150 BCE
A hand-powered Greek device of at least thirty bronze gears, recovered from a shipwreck in 1901. It predicted eclipses and planetary positions.
Image 282c. 141 BCE
Tea leaves found in 2016 in the mausoleum of Emperor Jing of Han, who died in 141 BCE, are the earliest physical evidence of tea.
Image 283127 BCE
Comparing his star positions with older records, Hipparchus found that the equinoxes drift slowly along the sky, the precession of the equinoxes.
Image 284c. 114 BCE
A network of overland routes more than 6,400 kilometres long, opened in 114 BCE after Han envoys pushed west into Central Asia.
Image 285c. 100 BCE
Nearly 15,000 scrolls and fragments were found in caves near Qumran between 1946 and 1956, including the oldest surviving manuscripts of whole biblical books.
100 BCE to 44 BCEabout 70 years
Image 286c. 1st century BCE
Seven hundred verses inside the Mahabharata in which Krishna argues a paralysed archer back into a battle he has refused to fight.
Image 287c. 91 BCE
The Shiji covers 2,500 years in 130 chapters and about 526,500 Chinese characters. Later Chinese dynastic histories followed its structure.
Image 28873 BCE
About 70 gladiators broke out of a school at Capua in 73 BCE; within two years 120,000 people had joined them and beaten Roman legions.
Image 28949 BCE
In January 49 BCE Caesar led the 13th Legion across the Rubicon into Italy, a capital offence that began the civil war which ended the Republic.
Image 29044 BCE
A conspiracy of senators killed Caesar in the Senate house on 15 March 44 BCE. He had taken the title dictator for life that year.
30 BCE to 9 CEabout 50 years
Image 29130 BCE
The last active pharaoh of Egypt ruled from 51 to 30 BCE. She was the one ruler of her Macedonian dynasty known to have learned Egyptian.
Image 292c. 29 BCE
In the reign of King Vattagamani, about 454 years after the Buddha's death, Sri Lankan monks wrote the orally transmitted Tipitaka on palm leaves.
Image 29327 BCE
Octavian took the name Augustus in 27 BCE and ruled as the first Roman emperor until 14 CE, keeping the Senate and the republican titles in place.
Image 29419 BCE
Virgil died at Brundisium on 21 September 19 BCE, leaving his 9,896-line epic of Aeneas unfinished and asking for it to be burned.
Image 2959 CE
Arminius, a Germanic officer trained by Rome, ambushed and destroyed three legions under Varus in September 9 CE, possibly near Kalkriese.
30 CE to 70 CEabout 50 years
Image 296c. 30 CE
A Jewish preacher in the Roman province of Judaea, crucified on the order of the prefect Pontius Pilate around 30 CE.
Image 297c. 50 CE
Paul of Tarsus wrote to churches in Galatia, Thessalonica, Corinth and Rome; his seven undisputed letters are the earliest surviving Christian documents.
Image 298c. 50 CE
Roman engineers built the three-tiered Pont du Gard in the first century to carry water 50 kilometres to the colony of Nemausus, now Nîmes.
Image 29960 CE
Boudica of the Iceni led the Britons against Rome in 60 or 61 CE, burning Camulodunum, Londinium and Verulamium before Suetonius Paulinus crushed her army.
Image 30070 CE
Roman legions under Titus, at least 48,200 strong, breached Jerusalem and burned the Second Temple in the month of Av, 70 CE.
70 CE to 100 CEabout 40 years
Image 301c. 70 CE
An anonymous author, later named Mark, wrote the earliest gospel around 70 CE, probably in Rome for Gentile readers.
Image 30279 CE
Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE and buried Pompeii, Herculaneum and smaller settlements, some under more than four metres of ash.
Image 30380 CE
Vespasian began the Flavian Amphitheatre in 72 CE on the site of Nero's artificial lake. His son Titus completed it in 80 CE.
Image 304c. 1st-2nd century CE
Charaka revised an older medical compendium into 8 sections and 120 chapters that became a central text of Ayurveda.
Image 305c. 100 CE
A culture on the northern coast of Peru from about 100 to 800 CE, known for adobe platforms, desert irrigation canals and portrait ceramics.
100 CE to 127 CEabout 40 years
Image 306c. 100 CE
A Horn of Africa power that minted gold, silver and bronze coins from the reign of Endybis and controlled trade on the Red Sea.
Image 307c. 105 CE
In 105 CE Cai Lun reported a papermaking process using tree bark, hemp ends, rags and fishing nets, which made cheap and uniform sheets.
Image 308117 CE
When Trajan died in August 117 CE the Roman Empire stood at its largest, having added Dacia, Nabataea, Armenia and Mesopotamia.
Image 309122 CE
Begun in 122 CE, Hadrian's Wall ran 80 Roman miles from the Tyne to the Solway with forts, milecastles and turrets across the width of Britain.
Image 310c. 127 CE
A dynasty formed by the Yuezhi ruled from Bactria to Varanasi. Its coins carried Greek letters alongside Iranian, Greek and Indian gods.
132 CE to 150 CEabout 30 years
Image 311132 CE
In 132 the Han astronomer Zhang Heng presented the first seismoscope, which reported a distant earthquake in Gansu before any messenger arrived.
Image 312c. 150 CE
Nagarjuna, a south Indian monk, founded the Madhyamaka school with the Mulamadhyamakakarika, root verses arguing that all things are empty of fixed nature.
Image 313c. 2nd century CE
The Chola king Karikala is credited with a stone weir across the Kaveri, over 300 metres long, that still diverts water to the delta.
Image 314c. 2nd century CE
Patanjali gathered 195 or 196 aphorisms on the practice of yoga, including the eight limbs that run from restraint to absorption.
Image 315c. 150 CE
A geocentric model of the planets built from epicycles and deferents, accurate enough to predict positions. It included a catalogue of over a thousand stars.
162 CE to 220 CEabout 70 years
Image 316162 CE
Galen arrived in Rome in 162 CE and built an anatomy from animal dissection that governed Western medicine for more than 1,300 years.
Image 317c. 165 CE
A pandemic, probably smallpox, spread from the siege of Seleucia through the Roman Empire from 165 to 180 CE, killing an estimated 5 to 10 million people.
Image 318c. 200 CE
A planned city of 21 square kilometres in the Valley of Mexico, laid out on a strict grid around the Avenue of the Dead.
Image 319c. 200 CE
A Maya city in the Peten Basin of Guatemala that dominated the region between about 200 and 900 CE and recorded dynastic dates on carved stelae.
Image 320220 CE
The Han dynasty ended in 220 CE and China split into Cao Wei, Shu Han and Eastern Wu, three kingdoms at war until Jin reunified China in 280.
224 CE to 322 CEabout 110 years
Image 321224 CE
Ardashir I defeated the last Parthian king, Artabanus IV, at Hormozdgan in 224 CE and founded the Sasanian dynasty that ruled Iran until 651.
Image 322284 CE
Proclaimed by his troops in 284 CE, Diocletian ended the Crisis of the Third Century and divided imperial rule among four emperors.
Image 323c. 300 CE
The Sanskrit surgical compendium reached its surviving form around the 3rd to 4th century CE, describing 1,120 illnesses, 700 medicinal plants and cheek-flap rhinoplasty.
Image 324313 CE
The Edict of Milan of 313 decriminalised Christian practice across the Roman Empire. Constantine convened the First Council of Nicaea in 325.
Image 325c. 322 CE
Riders in Jin dynasty China adopted paired stirrups in the early fourth century; a Nanjing tomb figure of 322 shows the first full riding pair.
325 CE to 350 CEabout 40 years
Image 326325 CE
Constantine summoned at least 200 bishops to Nicaea from May to July 325; they condemned Arius and wrote the first Nicene Creed.
Image 327330 CE
Constantine consecrated his New Rome on the site of Byzantium on 11 May 330 CE, a capital that would outlast Rome by a thousand years.
Image 328c. 350 CE
A mid-fourth-century Greek Bible written on parchment holds the oldest complete copy of the New Testament; most of it is in the British Library.
Image 329c. 350 CE
A dynasty that ruled much of northern India from the mid-3rd to the mid-6th century CE, patron of the poet Kalidasa and the astronomer Aryabhata.
Image 330c. 350 CE
The Mahabharata, at around 100,000 verses, and the Ramayana, at nearly 24,000, were canonised in the Gupta period.
366 CE to 400 CEabout 40 years
Image 331366 CE
About 500 rock-cut temples near Dunhuang in Gansu. The first were dug in 366 CE, and new caves were cut there into the 14th century.
Image 332380 CE
On 27 February 380 Theodosius I made Nicene Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire and branded other creeds as heresy.
Image 333c. 400 CE
Kalidasa's Sanskrit play Abhijnanashakuntalam, the recognition of Shakuntala, is usually placed in the 4th century CE.
Image 334c. 400 CE
Between 397 and 400 Augustine of Hippo wrote thirteen books addressed to God, recounting his sinful youth, his Manichaean years and his conversion.
Image 335c. 400 CE
A wrought-iron column 7.21 metres tall and over six tonnes was raised for a Gupta king and has barely rusted in 1,600 years.
400 CE to 451 CEabout 60 years
Image 336c. 400 CE
The Puranas define a kalpa, one day of Brahma, as 4.32 billion years, and a full cosmic day and night as 8.64 billion.
Image 33724 August 410 CE
Alaric's Visigoths entered Rome by the Salarian Gate on 24 August 410 and looted it for three days, its first fall to an enemy in almost 800 years.
Image 338415 CE
Hypatia headed the Platonic school at Alexandria and taught mathematics and astronomy. A Christian mob seized and killed her in March 415.
Image 339427 CE
A Buddhist mahavihara in Magadha, established around 427 CE by Kumaragupta I. It operated until about 1400 and drew students from across Asia.
Image 340451 CE
Attila, ruler of the Huns from 434, crossed the Rhine in 451 and reached Orléans before a Roman and Visigothic army halted him on the Catalaunian Plains.
470 CE to 500 CEabout 40 years
Image 341c. 470 CE
Thirty rock-cut Buddhist monuments carved into a 75-metre basalt cliff in Maharashtra. Their murals illustrate the Buddha's previous lives.
Image 342c. 476 CE
Odoacer deposed the boy emperor Romulus Augustus on 4 September 476 and named no successor. He sent the imperial regalia to Constantinople.
Image 343499 CE
Aryabhata wrote 121 verses in 499 CE giving pi to four decimal places, a table of sine differences, and the length of the sidereal year.
Image 344c. 500 CE
Valluvar's Tirukkural, 1,330 Tamil couplets of seven words each on virtue, wealth and love, was composed around 450 to 500 CE.
Image 345c. 500 CE
The academies of Babylonia closed the Talmud, 63 tractates of rabbinic debate on the Mishnah, traditionally under Rav Ashi and Ravina II around 500 CE.
530 CE to 541 CEabout 20 years
Image 346c. 530 CE
Benedict of Nursia wrote a Latin rule for monks living under an abbot around 530; it has governed Benedictine houses for fifteen centuries.
Image 347534 CE
Justinian's jurists, led by Tribonian, compiled Roman law into the Code, the Digest and the Institutes between 529 and 534, and gave all three the force of law.
Image 348536 CE
An eruption dimmed the sun for over a year; Procopius wrote that it gave light without brightness, and crops failed across Europe and Asia.
Image 349537 CE
Justinian I rebuilt the cathedral of Constantinople in under six years and dedicated it on 27 December 537. Its dome is about 33 metres across.
Image 350c. 541 CE
Plague reached Roman Egypt in 541 and spread around the Mediterranean; Procopius wrote that it killed about a fifth of the people of Constantinople.
550 CE to 605 CEabout 60 years
Image 351c. 6th century CE
Carvers cut a temple to Shiva into the basalt of an island in Mumbai harbour, with a three-faced Sadashiva about seven metres high.
Image 352c. 6th century CE
A board game of four army divisions, infantry, cavalry, elephants and chariots, appeared in Gupta India and passed to Persia as chatrang.
Image 353c. 552 CE
The Nihon Shoki records that in 552 King Seong of Baekje sent Emperor Kinmei an image of the Buddha, banners and sutras.
Image 354575 CE
Varahamihira of Ujjain summarised five earlier astronomical systems, including one built on Greek epicycles, in the Pancha-siddhantika.
Image 355605 CE
Under Emperor Yang of Sui, a recorded five million labourers completed the first major section of the Grand Canal in 605, linking the Yangtze delta to Luoyang.
610 CE to 629 CEabout 30 years
Image 356610 CE
Muslims hold that in 610, during a retreat in the cave of Hira near Mecca, the angel Gabriel brought Muhammad the first verses of the Quran.
Image 357618 CE
The Tang held power from 618 to 907. Their capital Chang'an, on the site of modern Xi'an, was the largest city in the world.
Image 358622 CE
Muhammad and the early Muslim community left Mecca for Yathrib, renamed Medina, in 622. The year became the epoch of the Islamic calendar.
Image 359628 CE
Brahmagupta completed the Brahmasphutasiddhanta in 628 CE. It is the first surviving text to treat zero as a number rather than a placeholder.
Image 360629 CE
The monk Xuanzang left Chang'an in 629, travelled in India until 645, and brought back 657 Sanskrit texts.
629 CE to 680 CEabout 60 years
Image 361629 CE
Bhaskara I wrote the oldest surviving prose commentary on Aryabhata and gave a rational formula for the sine accurate to about 0.002.
Image 362August 636 CE
Over six days in August 636, Khalid ibn al-Walid's Rashidun army defeated a larger Byzantine force at the Yarmouk River and ended Roman rule in Syria.
Image 363c. 7th-8th century CE
Pallava kings cut chariot-shaped temples from single boulders and carved one of the largest open-air rock reliefs on the Coromandel coast.
Image 364c. 650 CE
The caliph Uthman ordered a single written text of the Quran after recitations began to diverge; it was fixed within twenty years of Muhammad's death.
Image 365680 CE
On 10 October 680 the caliph Yazid's army killed Husayn, grandson of Muhammad, and his small company at Karbala; Shia Muslims mourn it each Ashura.
683 CE to 755 CEabout 80 years
Image 366c. 683 CE
A Khmer stone at Sambor on the Mekong wrote the Saka year 605 with a dot for zero, the oldest dated use of a zero numeral yet found.
Image 367691 CE
The Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik built an octagonal shrine over the Foundation Stone in Jerusalem. Its dedication inscription is dated 691 or 692 CE.
Image 368712 CE
Japan's oldest surviving book, completed in 712, records the gods making the islands and traces the emperors back to the sun goddess.
Image 369c. 750 CE
Shankara, a scholar-monk of the eighth century, wrote commentaries on the Brahma Sutras that made Advaita Vedanta, the teaching that self and Brahman are one, a system.
Image 37016 December 755 CE
On 16 December 755 the general An Lushan marched his army out of Fanyang against the Tang; the eight-year civil war that followed broke the dynasty's power.
760 CE to 793 CEabout 40 years
Image 371c. 760 CE
Rashtrakuta carvers cut a complete temple, 32.6 metres tall, downward out of a single basalt cliff, working from the top.
Image 372762 CE
Al-Mansur founded Baghdad on 30 July 762. Within two generations its library employed salaried translators turning Greek, Persian and Indian science into Arabic.
Image 373770 CE
Du Fu died in 770 CE, leaving nearly 1,500 poems of war, displacement and daily life from the height of Tang poetry.
Image 374785 CE
Abd al-Rahman I bought the Christian half of a shared church site for 100,000 dinars in 785 and began the Great Mosque of Córdoba on it.
Image 375793 CE
Norse raiders sacked the monastery on Holy Island off Northumberland in 793. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded the attack with horror.
800 CE to 850 CEabout 60 years
Image 376800 CE
The Pope crowned the Frankish king Charlemagne emperor in Rome on Christmas Day 800. He was the first recognised emperor in the west since 476.
Image 377c. 800 CE
A stone mandala of nine stacked platforms in central Java, built under the Sailendra dynasty, carrying 504 Buddha statues and 1,460 relief panels.
Image 378c. 800 CE
The Pala king Dharmapala founded a second great Buddhist monastery-university, remembered for a hundred teachers and a thousand monks.
Image 379c. 820 CE
Al-Khwarizmi worked in Baghdad around 820. His book on completion and balancing gave European languages the word algebra, from al-jabr.
Image 380c. 9th century CE
The oldest surviving fragment of the Nights, a few Syrian pages titled Kitab Hadith Alf Layla, dates to the early 9th century.
850 CE to 950 CEabout 110 years
Image 381850 CE
The Kavirajamarga of 850 CE, tied to the Rashtrakuta king Amoghavarsha I, is the earliest surviving work in Kannada.
Image 382c. 859 CE
Fatima al-Fihri, a merchant's daughter from Kairouan, founded the Qarawiyyin mosque in Fez in 857 to 859; it became a centre of learning that still teaches.
Image 38311 May 868 CE
A Chinese woodblock scroll with a colophon dated 11 May 868. It is the oldest printed book that carries a date.
Image 384May 878 CE
In May 878 Alfred of Wessex came out of the Athelney marshes, beat Guthrum's Danish army at Edington and had the Viking leader baptised three weeks later.
Image 385c. 950 CE
The Chandela dynasty built most of the Khajuraho temples between 885 and 1000 CE; 85 stood by the 12th century and about 25 survive.
950 CE to 1000about 60 years
Image 386c. 10th century
Chola workshops cast solid bronze images by the lost-wax method, above all Shiva as Nataraja dancing within a ring of flame.
Image 387c. 10th century CE
A birch-bark manuscript found near Peshawar in 1881 uses a solid dot as a placeholder in positional notation. Its date is disputed.
Image 388960 CE
Emperor Taizu usurped the Later Zhou throne in 960; his Song dynasty went on to issue the world's first paper money and keep a standing navy.
Image 389964 CE
Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi completed an illustrated star catalogue in Shiraz that included the earliest known description of the Andromeda Galaxy as a little cloud.
Image 390c. 1000
Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad excavated eight Norse turf buildings at L'Anse aux Meadows in the 1960s. The occupation dates to around 1000 CE.
1000 to 1011about 20 years
Image 391c. 1000
3,182 alliterative lines of Old English survive in one book, the Nowell Codex, written between 975 and 1025.
Image 392c. 1010
Murasaki Shikibu wrote a 54-chapter prose narrative at the Heian court in the early eleventh century, in Japanese kana rather than Chinese.
Image 3931010
Rajaraja I built a granite temple at Thanjavur between 1003 and 1010, in a river delta that has no granite of its own.
Image 3941010
Ferdowsi finished the Shahnameh on 8 March 1010 after 33 years: some 50,000 couplets, the longest epic by a single author.
Image 3951011-1021
Ibn al-Haytham argued from experiment that sight happens when light enters the eye, not when rays leave it; the treatise runs to seven volumes.
1024 to 1025about 10 years
Image 3961024
In 1024 the Song government in Sichuan issued the first standard state paper notes, jiaozi, after taking over a merchants' scheme.
Image 3971025
In 1025 the Chola emperor Rajendra I sent a fleet across the Bay of Bengal against Srivijaya and founded a new capital, Gangaikonda Cholapuram.
Image 3981025
Ibn Sina completed a five-book encyclopedia of medicine in 1025; translated at Toledo, it was still a standard European textbook in the eighteenth century.
10 times more detail1,000 dots in the next section
One thousand years in 1,000 dots
The next section uses one dot for every year.
The last thousand yearsone dot is a year
one dot is a year0 of 1,000 dots
1,000 dotsmore detail in the next section
The last thousand yearsmore detail in the next section
1,000 dots0 of 1,000 dots
Coloured dots mark milestones. Select one to read more.
one dot is a year
The last thousand years
Each dot represents one year. Many of this section's milestones sit in the later centuries.
1040 to 1054about 15 years
Image 399c. 1040
Bi Sheng made movable type from fired clay tiles between 1039 and 1048, one tile for each Chinese character.
Image 4001044
The Wujing Zongyao, compiled for the Song court by 1044, gives three recipes of saltpetre, sulfur and charcoal, the earliest written anywhere.
Image 401c. 1050
A city rose beside the Mississippi around 1050; at its height it held 15,000 to 20,000 people and about 120 earthworks across six square miles.
Image 4024 July 1054
Song court astronomers recorded a guest star near Zeta Tauri in 1054. It was bright enough to be seen in daylight for over three weeks.
Image 4031054
In 1054 a legate of Pope Leo IX and Patriarch Michael Cerularius exchanged excommunications, and the Catholic and Orthodox churches have been out of communion since.
1063 to 1094about 32 years
Image 404c. 1063
Queen Udayamati built a seven-storey stepwell at Patan, an inverted temple with more than 500 major sculptures descending to the water.
Image 40514 October 1066
From 9 am until dusk on 14 October 1066 William of Normandy fought Harold Godwinson's English army near Hastings; Harold died and William was crowned at Christmas.
Image 4061088
By 1088 Chinese sailors were steering by magnetised needles, as the Song polymath Shen Kuo described in his Dream Pool Essays.
Image 407c. 1088
Teaching of the recovered Roman law began at Bologna around 1088; by the late twelfth century the students had organised into guilds and the first university existed.
Image 4081094
Su Song completed a 40-foot water-driven astronomical clock tower in Kaifeng in 1094, with an escapement, a chain drive and 133 figures to sound the hours.
1095 to 1150about 56 years
Image 4091095
In 1095 al-Ghazali, head of the Nizamiyya of Baghdad, suffered a spiritual crisis, gave up his post and wealth and spent ten years as a wandering ascetic.
Image 41015 July 1099
After a five-week siege the crusaders stormed Jerusalem on 15 July 1099, massacred thousands of Muslims and Jews, and elected Godfrey of Bouillon their first ruler.
Image 411c. 1100
At Srirangam, Ramanuja wrote the Sri Bhashya, a commentary on the Brahma Sutras that presented devotion to a personal god as the means to liberation.
Image 4121144
Abbot Suger's new choir at Saint-Denis, dedicated on 11 June 1144 before the king, was the first building to use every element of Gothic architecture.
Image 413c. 1150
A temple to Vishnu built between 1113 and 1150 under Suryavarman II, covering 162 hectares. It is the largest religious complex ever constructed.
1150 to 1199about 50 years
Image 414c. 12th century
Smelters at Zawar packed ore and charcoal into clay retorts and distilled zinc vapour downward, the first zinc made on an industrial scale.
Image 4151150
Bhaskara II composed the Lilavati in 1150 as the first part of his Siddhanta Shiromani, teaching arithmetic through verse problems addressed to a girl.
Image 416c. 1160
Basava, chief minister to the Kalachuri king Bijjala II, opened the Anubhava Mantapa, a hall where men and women of any caste debated in Kannada vachana poems.
Image 417c. 1190
Between 1185 and 1190 Maimonides sent his student Joseph ben Judah, part by part, a Judeo-Arabic work reconciling Aristotle with rabbinic Judaism.
Image 4181199-1220
A 73-metre minaret of red sandstone in Mehrauli, Delhi, with 399 steps. Qutb-ud-din Aibak began it and later sultans finished it.
1200 to 1206about 7 years
Image 4191200
Zhu Xi, who died on 23 April 1200, made the Four Books the core of Confucian learning; his commentaries set the civil service examinations from 1313 to 1905.
Image 4201202
Leonardo of Pisa, later called Fibonacci, wrote the Liber Abaci in 1202, showing Europe the Hindu-Arabic numerals and the methods of calculating with them.
Image 4211206
A kurultai of steppe chiefs acknowledged Temujin as Genghis Khan in 1206. By 1279 his descendants ruled from Korea to Hungary.
Image 4221206
In 1206 the engineer al-Jazari completed his Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, describing fifty machines he had built himself.
Image 4231206
In 1206 the Turkic slave-general Qutb ud-Din Aibak made himself sultan at Delhi; five dynasties ruled from the city for 320 years until Babur's arrival.
1209 to 1250about 42 years
Image 4241209
In 1209 Francis wrote a short rule from Gospel verses and led eleven followers to Rome, where Pope Innocent III approved the Friars Minor.
Image 42515 June 1215
Rebel barons forced King John to seal the charter at Runnymede on 15 June 1215. Four original 1215 exemplifications survive.
Image 426c. 1220
An Icelandic lawspeaker compiled a handbook for poets around 1220 that preserves almost everything known of Norse myth.
Image 427c. 1235
Sundiata Keita defeated the Sosso around 1235 and founded an empire that controlled the Bambuk and Bure goldfields.
Image 428c. 1250
Shona builders raised mortarless granite walls up to 11 metres high near Masvingo. The site spans 7.22 square kilometres.
1250 to 1271about 22 years
Image 429c. 1250
Narasingha Deva I built a temple to Surya shaped as a stone chariot on 24 carved wheels drawn by seven horses.
Image 430c. 1250
Thirty-one anonymous Old Norse poems in one thirteenth-century vellum book, unaccounted for until it reached a bishop in 1643.
Image 43110 February 1258
Caliph al-Musta'sim surrendered Baghdad to Hulegu's Mongol army on 10 February 1258; the looting began three days later and killed perhaps 200,000 people.
Image 432c. 1270
Thomas Aquinas worked on the Summa from about 1265 until his death in 1274, reaching Question 90 of Part III; it married Aristotle to Catholic theology.
Image 4331271
Marco Polo left Venice in 1271 and returned in 1295. His account of Yuan China was dictated to Rustichello da Pisa in a Genoese prison.
1271 to 1300about 30 years
Image 4341271
In 1271 Kublai Khan proclaimed the Great Yuan in Chinese imperial style from his new capital at Khanbaliq; by 1279 all of China was under Mongol rule.
Image 435c. 1273
Rumi began dictating the Masnavi around 1258, at 54, and continued until his death in 1273: six books, about 25,000 verses, on the soul's way to God.
Image 436c. 1290
The first spectacles were made in central Italy around 1290; a friar preaching in 1306 said the art was not yet twenty years old.
Image 437c. 1299
Around 1299 the Turkoman leader Osman I turned a frontier beylik near Söğüt into an independent state; his descendants ruled an empire until 1922.
Image 438c. 1300 to 1850
Centuries of regional cooling brought advancing glaciers, frozen rivers and failed harvests, most sharply in the North Atlantic region.
1300 to 1325about 26 years
Image 439c. 1300
East Polynesian voyagers reached New Zealand by canoe; rat bones and gnawed seeds put people there by about 1280, on the last large landmass humans settled.
Image 4401305
Giotto finished his fresco cycle in the Scrovegni Chapel around 1305, the year the chapel was consecrated on 25 March.
Image 441c. 1321
Dante began the poem around 1308 in exile and finished it before his death in 1321. He wrote in Tuscan rather than Latin.
Image 4421324
Musa of Mali crossed into Cairo on 19 July 1324 on his way to Mecca. His gift-giving is reported to have driven down the price of gold there.
Image 4431325
The Mexica built a city on an island in Lake Texcoco, extended it with chinampas, and linked it to the shore with three causeways.
1336 to 1377about 42 years
Image 4441336
The brothers Harihara I and Bukka Raya I founded a city on the Tungabhadra in 1336. Its ruins at Hampi are a World Heritage Site.
Image 4451347
Plague reached Mediterranean ports on Genoese ships in 1347. It killed between 30 and 60 percent of Europe's population by 1353.
Image 4461354
Ibn Battuta left Tangier in 1325 and travelled for thirty years. He dictated his account to the scholar Ibn Juzayy, completed in 1355.
Image 4471368
Zhu Yuanzhang, a peasant and former monk who joined the Red Turbans in 1352, drove out the Mongol Yuan and proclaimed the Ming in 1368.
Image 4481377
In 1377 Ibn Khaldun wrote the Muqaddimah as the introduction to his world history; it analysed how group solidarity raises dynasties and how their decline follows.
1386 to 1420about 35 years
Image 449c. 1386
An iron verge-and-foliot clock made about 1386 for Salisbury Cathedral is claimed as the oldest working mechanical clock in the world.
Image 450c. 1387
Geoffrey Chaucer wrote the twenty-four Canterbury Tales in Middle English between 1387 and 1400, as a storytelling contest among pilgrims.
Image 451c. 1400
Madhava of Sangamagrama, working in Kerala around 1400, expanded sine, cosine and arctangent as infinite series and gave pi/4 as 1 - 1/3 + 1/5 and so on.
Image 4521405
Seven Chinese fleets sailed between 1405 and 1433 under Admiral Zheng He, reaching Calicut, Hormuz, Arabia and the East African coast.
Image 4531420
Built from 1406 to 1420 by more than a million workers for the Yongle Emperor, the Forbidden City housed 24 Ming and Qing emperors until 1924.
1429 to 1446about 18 years
Image 4548 May 1429
Joan of Arc rode into besieged Orléans on 29 April 1429; nine days later the English abandoned a siege begun on 12 October 1428.
Image 4551436
Brunelleschi's dome for Florence Cathedral, begun in 1420 and finished in 1436, is still the largest masonry dome ever built.
Image 4561437
At his Samarkand observatory Ulugh Beg measured the sidereal year to within 58 seconds and redetermined the positions of 992 stars.
Image 457c. 1438
Pachacuti, ninth Sapa Inca, took power after the Chanka war and turned the chiefdom of Cusco into Tawantinsuyu, the empire that within three generations spanned the Andes.
Image 4581446
King Sejong announced a new alphabet for Korean around late 1443 and published it in 1446 as the Hunminjeongeum, with a commentary explaining its design.
1450 to 1469about 20 years
Image 459c. 1450
An Inca royal estate on a ridge 2,430 metres up, about 80 kilometres northwest of Cusco. Around 750 people lived there.
Image 460c. 1450
A weaver-poet of Varanasi who attacked caste, idol worship and clerical authority in short vernacular couplets called dohas.
Image 46129 May 1453
Mehmed II besieged the city from 6 April 1453 and his cannon breached the Theodosian walls on 29 May. Constantine XI died in the fighting.
Image 462c. 1455
Johannes Gutenberg printed either 158 or 180 copies at Mainz, finished in 1454 or 1455. Forty-nine survive, 21 of them complete.
Image 46315 April 1469
Nanak, born at Rai Bhoi di Talvandi on 15 April 1469, taught Ik Onkar, one God dwelling in all creation, and was the first of ten Sikh Gurus.
1482 to 1493about 12 years
Image 4641482
Portugal built São Jorge da Mina on the Gold Coast in 1482, the first European post on the Gulf of Guinea, later a slave-trade depot.
Image 465c. 1490
A Yoruba divination system of 16 principal signs that combine into 256 Odu, each with its own body of verse, held in memory.
Image 4661492
Three Spanish ships made landfall in the Bahamas in October 1492. Columbus led four expeditions and believed to the end that he had reached Asia.
Image 4672 January 1492
On 2 January 1492 Boabdil surrendered Granada and the Alhambra to Ferdinand and Isabella, ending Islamic rule in Iberia; the Alhambra Decree expelled the Jews that same year.
Image 4681493
Askia Muhammad took the Songhai throne in 1493 and ruled from Gao. Timbuktu's mosques anchored a manuscript culture of law, astronomy and medicine.
1494 to 1504about 11 years
Image 4697 June 1494
On 7 June 1494 Castile and Portugal divided the world outside Europe along a meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands: Portugal east, Castile west.
Image 4701498
Vasco da Gama sailed from Lisbon in July 1497, rounded the Cape of Good Hope and reached Kozhikode on the Malabar coast in May 1498.
Image 471July 1501
In July 1501 Ismail I took Tabriz, proclaimed himself shahanshah and made Twelver Shi'ism the official religion of a reunited Iran.
Image 472c. 1503
A half-length portrait in oil on a poplar panel about 77 by 53 centimetres, generally identified as Lisa Gherardini of Florence.
Image 4731504
Michelangelo carved the 5.17-metre David from 1501 to 1504; it was set before the Palazzo della Signoria after four days of hauling.
1508 to 1521about 14 years
Image 4741508-1512
Michelangelo frescoed about 500 square metres of vault between 1508 and 1512, with more than 300 figures, working standing on scaffolding.
Image 4751517
Martin Luther wrote 95 Latin propositions against the sale of indulgences in 1517. Printers translated and reprinted them across the German lands within months.
Image 4761519-1522
Five ships left Spain in 1519. One returned in 1522 with 18 of the roughly 270 crew, after a voyage of 60,440 kilometres.
Image 4771520
Smallpox was first recorded in the Americas in 1518; an estimated 40 per cent of the 200,000 people in Tenochtitlan died of it in 1520.
Image 47813 August 1521
The Mexica surrendered Tenochtitlan on 13 August 1521 to Hernán Cortés and tens of thousands of Tlaxcaltec allies; smallpox had already killed the emperor Cuitláhuac.
1526 to 1543about 18 years
Image 47921 April 1526
Babur defeated Ibrahim Lodi at Panipat on 21 April 1526, using cannon and matchlocks against elephants and cavalry. Lodi was killed.
Image 48016 November 1532
On 16 November 1532 Francisco Pizarro's 168 men seized the Inca Atahualpa in the plaza of Cajamarca and killed thousands of his unarmed attendants.
Image 4811536
John Calvin published the Institutes of the Christian Religion in Latin at Basel in 1536, a textbook of Protestant doctrine that grew through editions until 1559.
Image 48227 September 1540
Paul III confirmed the Society of Jesus on 27 September 1540 by the bull Regimini militantis ecclesiae; Ignatius of Loyola and six companions had vowed together in 1534.
Image 4831543
De revolutionibus orbium coelestium was printed at Nuremberg in 1543, shortly before its author died. It placed the Sun at the centre.
1543 to 1556about 14 years
Image 4841543
Andreas Vesalius published De humani corporis fabrica in Basel in 1543, seven books of human anatomy from his own dissections with more than 250 woodcuts.
Image 48513 December 1545
The Catholic Church's answer to the Reformation met for 25 sessions between 13 December 1545 and 4 December 1563, defining doctrine and condemning Protestant teaching.
Image 486c. 1555
K'iche' Maya scribes wrote down their creation story in the Latin alphabet between 1554 and 1558, decades after the Spanish burned the painted books.
Image 4871556
Akbar reigned from 1556 to 1605. He abolished the jizya tax on non-Muslims and held debates between rival faiths at Fatehpur Sikri.
Image 48823 January 1556
An earthquake in the Wei River valley collapsed the loess cave homes of Huaxian, killing about 100,000 outright, the deadliest quake in history.
1572 to 1602about 31 years
Image 489November 1572
A new star appeared in Cassiopeia, brighter than Venus; Tycho Brahe's measurements placed it beyond the Moon, among stars then thought changeless.
Image 4901574
Tulsidas began his retelling of the Ramayana at Ayodhya in 1574. He wrote it in Awadhi, a spoken dialect, rather than in Sanskrit.
Image 4918 August 1588
Philip II's fleet sailed from Lisbon in May 1588 to invade England; English fireships scattered it off Calais on the night of 7 to 8 August.
Image 49221 October 1600
On 21 October 1600 Tokugawa Ieyasu defeated the coalition loyal to the Toyotomi at Sekigahara; in 1603 the emperor named him shogun and his house ruled until 1868.
Image 49320 March 1602
The States General chartered the VOC on 20 March 1602 with a 21-year monopoly on Asian trade; any Dutch citizen could buy and resell its shares.
1603 to 1608about 6 years
Image 4941603
In 1603 the former shrine maiden Izumo no Okuni formed a female dance troupe in Kyoto, the beginning of kabuki theatre.
Image 49529 August 1604
Guru Arjan finished compiling the Adi Granth on 29 August 1604 and installed it in the Golden Temple three days later; it runs to 1,430 pages.
Image 4961605
Cervantes published the first part in 1605 and the second in 1615, the second partly to answer a spurious sequel by another writer.
Image 4971607
Monteverdi's L'Orfeo was first performed at the Gonzaga court in Mantua on 24 February 1607 and is the earliest opera still regularly staged.
Image 4981608
On 2 October 1608 the spectacle maker Hans Lipperhey applied for a Dutch patent on a tube for seeing things far away as if nearby.
1609 to 1620about 12 years
Image 4991609
In Astronomia nova Kepler showed from Tycho Brahe's data that Mars moved on an ellipse, and that a line to the Sun swept equal areas in equal times.
Image 5001610
Galileo published his telescopic observations on 13 March 1610. He reported mountains on the Moon and four bodies circling Jupiter.
Image 5011611
Commissioned at the Hampton Court Conference of 1604 and made by 47 scholars in six committees, the Authorized Version was published in 1611.
Image 5021614
John Napier's Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio of 1614 turned multiplication and root extraction into addition, with 90 pages of tables he had spent 20 years computing.
Image 50321 November 1620
After ten weeks at sea the Mayflower anchored off Cape Cod on 21 November 1620 with 102 passengers, who signed a compact of self-government before landing.
1623 to 1637about 15 years
Image 5041623
John Heminges and Henry Condell collected 36 plays in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death. Eighteen had not been printed before.
Image 5051628
William Harvey published De Motu Cordis in Frankfurt in 1628, a 72-page argument that the heart pumps blood round the body in a closed circuit.
Image 5061632-1653
Shah Jahan commissioned a white marble mausoleum for Mumtaz Mahal in 1631. It took about twenty years and stands above the Yamuna at Agra.
Image 5071637
Descartes published the Discourse in French at Leiden in 1637; its fourth part contains the line I think, therefore I am.
Image 5081637
Descartes published La Géométrie in 1637 as an appendix to his Discourse on the Method, joining algebra and geometry into one subject for the first time.
1642 to 1654about 13 years
Image 5091642
Rembrandt finished the Night Watch, 363 by 437 centimetres, in 1642 for Captain Frans Banninck Cocq and seventeen of his militiamen.
Image 5106 June 1644
Beijing fell to the rebel Li Zicheng on 24 April 1644 and the last Ming emperor hanged himself; on 6 June the Manchus took the city.
Image 511October 1648
Two treaties signed at Osnabrück and Münster in October 1648 ended the Thirty Years' War, which had killed between 4.5 and 8 million people.
Image 5121650
James Ussher published a date for creation in 1650, the evening of 23 October 4004 BCE, from a literal reading of the Old Testament.
Image 5131654
In 1654 Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat, prompted by a gambler's question about dividing stakes, worked out the first theory of probability by letter.
1656 to 1676about 21 years
Image 5141656
Christiaan Huygens invented the pendulum clock on 25 December 1656, cutting clock error from fifteen minutes a day to fifteen seconds.
Image 5151662
First recorded by Dutch sailors in 1598, the flightless dodo of Mauritius was last reliably seen in 1662, within 65 years of contact.
Image 516January 1665
Robert Hooke's Micrographia, published by the Royal Society in January 1665, gave the first microscope drawings of insects and plants and coined the word cell.
Image 5176 June 1674
On 6 June 1674 Shivaji Bhonsale was crowned king of the Marathas at Raigad fort in a ceremony that cost about 1.5 million rupees, founding Hindavi Swaraj.
Image 5189 October 1676
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek's letter of 9 October 1676 reported single-celled animalcules seen with his handmade lenses, the first observation of microbial life.
1677 to 1689about 13 years
Image 5191677
Written between 1661 and 1675 and printed after Spinoza's death in 1677, the Ethics derived hundreds of propositions about God, mind and freedom in Euclid's geometrical manner.
Image 5201684
Leibniz's Nova Methodus pro Maximis et Minimis appeared in the Acta Eruditorum in October 1684, the first published work on the calculus.
Image 5211687
Published in 1687, it set out three laws of motion and derived Kepler's elliptical orbits from an inverse-square law of gravitation.
Image 5221689
Bashō left Edo in the spring of 1689 with his disciple Sora and walked about 2,400 kilometres through the northern provinces.
Image 5231689
Published anonymously in 1689 after the Glorious Revolution, Locke's Two Treatises argued that government rests on natural rights and the consent of the governed.
1699 to 1734about 36 years
Image 52413 April 1699
At Vaisakhi, 13 April 1699, Guru Gobind Singh gathered Sikhs at Anandpur, drew his sword and initiated the first five of the Khalsa, giving men the name Singh.
Image 525c. 1700
A Hawaiian creation chant of about 2,000 lines that begins in darkness with the coral polyp and ends in a royal genealogy.
Image 52627 May 1703
Peter the Great founded Saint Petersburg on 27 May 1703 on a captured Swedish site on the Neva; it was Russia's capital from 1712 to 1918.
Image 5271712
Thomas Newcomen built the first practical steam engine in 1712. Condensed steam let atmospheric pressure drive a piston that worked a mine pump.
Image 5281734
Sawai Jai Singh II completed an observatory of 19 masonry instruments, including the largest stone sundial in the world.
1735 to 1755about 21 years
Image 5291735
Carl Linnaeus published the first edition of Systema Naturae in 1735, 11 large pages sorting nature into three kingdoms; the 10th edition of 1758 fixed two-word species names.
Image 5301735
Euler found that 1 + 1/4 + 1/9 + 1/16 and so on sums to pi squared over six, solving a problem the Bernoullis had not.
Image 53122 March 1739
Nader Shah of Persia beat the Mughals at Karnal, entered Delhi, ordered a massacre on 22 March 1739 and left with the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor.
Image 53220 May 1747
On 20 May 1747 ship's surgeon James Lind gave twelve scorbutic sailors six different treatments; the two on oranges and lemons recovered, an early controlled trial.
Image 5331 November 1755
On All Saints' Day an earthquake, fire and tsunami destroyed Lisbon, killed tens of thousands and prompted Enlightenment debate about a benevolent order.
1756 to 1764about 9 years
Image 5341756
From 1756 to 1763 Britain and Prussia fought France, Austria and their allies in Europe, North America and India; France lost Canada and Britain took command of Bengal.
Image 53523 June 1757
Robert Clive defeated Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah on 23 June 1757, after the Nawab's commander Mir Jafar defected. The Company then installed Mir Jafar.
Image 53625 December 1758
Edmond Halley had calculated in 1705 that the comets of 1531, 1607 and 1682 were one body; the farmer Johann Palitzsch saw it return on Christmas night 1758.
Image 5371762
Rousseau's 1762 book argued that only the general will of the people can make law; Geneva burned it, and revolutionaries later took it up.
Image 538c. 1764
James Hargreaves built the spinning jenny at Stanhill, Lancashire, in 1764 or 1765, letting one worker spin eight spindles at once.
1769 to 1781about 13 years
Image 5391769
James Watt patented a condenser kept permanently cold in 1769. Keeping the cylinder hot roughly doubled the fuel efficiency of the steam engine.
Image 5404 July 1776
The Second Continental Congress adopted the text on 4 July 1776. It asserted that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.
Image 5419 March 1776
Adam Smith published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations on 9 March 1776, the first comprehensive system of political economy.
Image 5421780
Hyder Ali's army fired rockets with hammered-iron tubes, the first iron-cased war rockets, and helped rout a British column at Pollilur.
Image 54313 March 1781
From his garden in Bath, William Herschel spotted a slow-moving object with a homemade 6.2-inch reflector; it proved to be the first planet found with a telescope.
1781 to 1788about 8 years
Image 5441781
Kant's first Critique, published in 1781 and revised in 1787, asked what reason can know without experience and answered with the transcendental idealism of space and time.
Image 5458 June 1783
A 25-kilometre fissure poured out 14 cubic kilometres of lava over eight months, killing a fifth of Iceland's people and chilling the Northern Hemisphere.
Image 54615 January 1784
William Jones and 30 British residents of Calcutta founded a society for the study of Asia, the start of modern Indology.
Image 5471 May 1786
Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro, to Lorenzo Da Ponte's libretto, opened at the Burgtheater in Vienna on 1 May 1786.
Image 54826 January 1788
Eleven British ships carrying over 1,400 convicts, marines and officials under Arthur Phillip anchored at Port Jackson on 26 January 1788 and founded New South Wales.
1788 to 1793about 6 years
Image 5491788
James Hutton found vertical greywacke overlain by horizontal red sandstone at Siccar Point in 1788, a gap of tens of millions of years.
Image 5501789
The Revolution ran from the Estates General of 1789 to the coup of 9 November 1799. Louis XVI was executed in January 1793.
Image 5511789
Lavoisier's Traité élémentaire de chimie of 1789 defined an element as a substance that analysis cannot break down and listed 33 of them.
Image 5521792
Mary Wollstonecraft answered Talleyrand's 1791 plan for a domestic education for girls with an essay demanding that women be educated and treated as rational beings.
Image 5531793
Eli Whitney built a gin in 1793 that pulled short-staple cotton through a wire screen, cleaning fifty pounds of lint a day.
1795 to 1804about 10 years
Image 5541795
On 7 April 1795 French law defined the metre as one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator through Paris.
Image 55514 May 1796
On 14 May 1796 Jenner inoculated eight-year-old James Phipps with cowpox. Challenged with smallpox on 1 July, the boy did not fall ill.
Image 55620 March 1800
On 20 March 1800 Alessandro Volta wrote to the Royal Society describing a stack of copper and zinc discs separated by brine-soaked cloth that gave a continuous current.
Image 5571 January 1804
Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared independence at Gonaives on 1 January 1804, after a revolt that had begun in Saint-Domingue in August 1791.
Image 5581804
Napoleon Bonaparte became Emperor of the French on 18 May 1804 and crowned himself that December. He was defeated at Waterloo in 1815.
1804 to 1813about 10 years
Image 5591804
Joseph Marie Jacquard patented in 1804 a loom attachment driven by a chain of punched cards, each card weaving one row of a pattern.
Image 5601807
The Slave Trade Act took effect on 1 May 1807 and prohibited the Atlantic slave trade across the British Empire. Slavery itself was abolished in 1833.
Image 5611807
Robert Fulton's North River Steamboat, later called the Clermont, steamed from New York to Albany on 17 August 1807, proving commercial steam navigation.
Image 5621808
John Dalton's A New System of Chemical Philosophy of 1808 proposed that each element consists of identical atoms of characteristic weight that combine in whole-number ratios.
Image 56328 January 1813
Thomas Egerton published Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice in three volumes on 28 January 1813, having bought the copyright for 110 pounds.
1815 to 1824about 10 years
Image 56418 June 1815
On Sunday 18 June 1815 Wellington's Anglo-allied army and 50,000 arriving Prussians under Blücher destroyed Napoleon's last army near Waterloo; he abdicated four days later.
Image 56510 April 1815
Tambora threw out 37 to 45 cubic kilometres of rock, cooled the planet and produced the Year Without a Summer in 1816; at least 71,000 people died.
Image 5661817
Cholera broke out near Jessore in the Ganges delta in 1817, reached Calcutta by September and spread across Asia to the Middle East and Mediterranean by 1824.
Image 5671820
In 1820 Hans Christian Ørsted published that a compass needle swung when an electric current passed nearby, tying electricity to magnetism for the first time.
Image 5687 May 1824
First performed in Vienna on 7 May 1824. It was the first major symphony to use voices, setting Schiller's Ode to Joy in the final movement.
1824 to 1831about 8 years
Image 5699 December 1824
On 9 December 1824 Antonio José de Sucre's 5,780 patriots defeated 6,906 royalists at Ayacucho, securing Peru's independence and ending Spain's rule on the South American mainland.
Image 57027 September 1825
The world's first public railway to use steam locomotives opened on 27 September 1825, carrying coal from collieries near Shildon to Darlington and Stockton.
Image 571c. 1827
Nicephore Niepce fixed a view from his window onto a pewter plate coated with bitumen, between 4 June and 18 July 1827.
Image 5721829
Robert Stephenson's Rocket won the Rainhill Trials in October 1829, running at up to 30 miles per hour and settling the future of the railway.
Image 5731831
In 1831 Faraday found that changing the current in one coil induced a current in another, and that moving a magnet through a coil produced current.
1831 to 1837about 7 years
Image 5741831
Katsushika Hokusai made the print in late 1831 as the first sheet of Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. Its blue is imported Prussian blue.
Image 5751831
Cyrus McCormick first demonstrated a horse-drawn mechanical reaper at Steeles Tavern, Virginia, in 1831 and patented it in 1834.
Image 57628 August 1833
Parliament's Slavery Abolition Act received royal assent on 28 August 1833 and took effect on 1 August 1834, freeing around 800,000 people in the colonies.
Image 5771835
Elias Lönnrot assembled Karelian runic songs into a Finnish epic, 12,078 verses in 1835 and 22,795 by 1849.
Image 5781837
James Prinsep read the forgotten Brahmi script from a recurring word on the Sanchi railings, and Ashoka's edicts spoke again.
1838 to 1844about 7 years
Image 5791838
Friedrich Bessel measured the parallax of 61 Cygni with a Fraunhofer heliometer and put the star about 10.4 light-years away, the first direct stellar distance.
Image 5801839
In 1839 Matthias Schleiden and Theodor Schwann proposed that every plant and animal is built of cells; Virchow added in 1855 that all cells come from cells.
Image 5811839
Britain fought Qing China from 1839 to 1842 after Commissioner Lin Zexu destroyed 1,420 tonnes of British opium; the Treaty of Nanking ceded Hong Kong Island.
Image 582September 1843
Lovelace translated a paper on Babbage's analytical engine and added seven notes; Note G set out a method for computing Bernoulli numbers on the machine.
Image 58324 May 1844
The line opened on 24 May 1844, when Morse sent the words What hath God wrought from the Capitol to Baltimore.
1844 to 1847about 4 years
Image 5843 June 1844
The last two confirmed great auks were strangled by collectors on the island of Eldey off Iceland on 3 June 1844.
Image 5851845
Potato blight arrived in 1845 and killed the crop for years; about one million people died and more than one million emigrated by 1852.
Image 58623 September 1846
Working from Urbain Le Verrier's prediction, Johann Galle at the Berlin Observatory found Neptune within a degree of the position calculated from Uranus's wobbles.
Image 58716 October 1846
On 16 October 1846 William Morton put printer Edward Gilbert Abbott to sleep with ether while John Collins Warren removed a neck tumour at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Image 5881847
In 1847 Ignaz Semmelweis made doctors at Vienna's First Obstetrical Clinic wash in chlorinated lime; maternal deaths from childbed fever fell from 18 percent to under 2.
1848 to 1852about 5 years
Image 5891848
Uprisings spread through more than fifty countries and states between January 1848 and October 1849. Almost all were reversed within eighteen months.
Image 590February 1848
Marx and Engels published the Manifesto of the Communist Party in London in late February 1848, on the eve of the year's revolutions.
Image 59119 July 1848
The first women's rights convention met in the Wesleyan Chapel at Seneca Falls on 19 and 20 July 1848 and adopted a Declaration of Sentiments.
Image 5921850
Hong Xiuquan's Taiping Heavenly Kingdom fought the Qing from 1850 until Nanjing fell in 1864; estimates of the dead run from 20 to 30 million.
Image 5931852
Radhanath Sikdar, chief computer of the Great Trigonometrical Survey, calculated that Peak XV was the highest mountain on Earth.
1853 to 1854about 2 years
Image 59416 April 1853
Three locomotives, Sahib, Sindh and Sultan, hauled 14 carriages and about 400 passengers 34 kilometres from Bori Bunder to Thane.
Image 5951853
In 1853 Elisha Otis devised a brake that held a lift if its cable broke; the first passenger safety elevator opened in New York in 1857.
Image 5968 July 1853
Commodore Matthew Perry's steam warships reached Uraga at the mouth of Edo Bay on 8 July 1853; the Convention of Kanagawa followed on 31 March 1854.
Image 59721 October 1854
On 21 October 1854 Florence Nightingale left for the Crimean War with 38 volunteer nurses and 15 nuns to run the British military hospital at Scutari.
Image 5981854
George Boole, a shoemaker's son who never attended university, published The Laws of Thought in 1854, turning logic into equations.
1854 to 1859about 6 years
Image 5991854
A cholera outbreak near Broad Street in Soho killed 616 people; John Snow studied the pattern and argued the cause was contaminated water, not bad air.
Image 6001856
Henry Bessemer patented in 1856 a way of blowing air through molten pig iron to make cheap steel in bulk.
Image 60110 May 1857
Sepoys mutinied at Meerut on 10 May 1857. The revolt spread across north India, and the Crown took direct control on 1 November 1858.
Image 6021 July 1858
On 1 July 1858 papers by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace on natural selection were read together to the Linnean Society of London, its first public statement.
Image 60324 November 1859
Darwin's book appeared on 24 November 1859 and the print run sold out at once. He published after Alfred Russel Wallace sent him the same idea.
1859 to 1862about 4 years
Image 6041859
On Liberty, written jointly by John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill and published under his name in 1859 after her death, set limits on power over individuals.
Image 6051859
Edwin Drake's well near Titusville struck oil at 69.5 feet on 27 August 1859, setting off the first oil boom.
Image 60617 March 1861
Parliament proclaimed Victor Emmanuel II King of Italy on 17 March 1861, a year after Garibaldi's Thousand landed in Sicily.
Image 60712 April 1861
The Confederacy bombarded Fort Sumter on 12 April 1861; four years of war left about 700,000 soldiers dead and ended slavery in the United States.
Image 6081862
Louis Pasteur's swan-neck flask experiments disproved spontaneous generation, earning the Academy's Alhumbert Prize in 1862, and in 1864 he devised pasteurisation.
1862 to 1865about 4 years
Image 6091862
William Thomson treated the Earth as a body cooling from a molten start and published an age of 20 to 400 million years in 1862.
Image 61026 October 1863
Eleven London clubs and schools met at the Freemasons' Tavern on 26 October 1863 and founded the FA, the first governing body of football.
Image 61122 April 1863
On 22 April 1863, in the Najibiyyih garden by the Tigris, the exiled Iranian Husayn-Ali, Baha'u'llah, first announced his claim to revelation from God, founding the Baha'i Faith.
Image 6121865
Maxwell presented his theory to the Royal Society on 8 December 1864 and published it in 1865. It showed that light is an electromagnetic wave.
Image 6131865
After the Great Stink of 1858, Joseph Bazalgette built London's intercepting sewers between 1859 and 1865, nearly 100 miles of them.
1865 to 1867about 3 years
Image 6146 December 1865
The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified by 27 of 36 states on 6 December 1865, made slavery and involuntary servitude illegal throughout the United States.
Image 6151866
The Great Eastern landed a working telegraph cable at Heart's Content, Newfoundland, in July 1866, joining Europe and America permanently.
Image 6161866
Mendel grew some 28,000 plants between 1856 and 1863 and showed that seven traits of the pea passed to offspring in predictable ratios.
Image 617September 1867
Marx delivered the manuscript of Capital, Volume I, to Otto Meissner in Hamburg in April 1867; it was published that September. Engels finished the other two volumes.
Image 6181867
Alfred Nobel patented dynamite in 1867 after finding that diatomaceous earth made nitroglycerin safe to handle.
1867 to 1869about 3 years
Image 61910 March 1867
Joseph Lister published his carbolic acid method in The Lancet from 10 March 1867, after first dressing a boy's compound fracture with it on 12 August 1865.
Image 6201868
Formal power returned to the emperor Meiji in 1868, ending the Tokugawa shogunate. Japan defeated China in 1895 and Russia in 1905.
Image 62118 August 1868
During a total eclipse at Guntur, Jules Janssen recorded an unknown yellow line in the Sun's spectrum; Norman Lockyer named the new element helium.
Image 62217 November 1869
A 193-kilometre sea-level cut between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea opened on 17 November 1869, after ten years of construction.
Image 6231869
Mendeleev arranged 63 elements by atomic weight in February 1869, left gaps, and predicted the weights and properties of three unknown elements.
1869 to 1874about 6 years
Image 6241869
Tolstoy published War and Peace in full in 1869, after serialising an early version called The Year 1805 from 1865 and rewriting the whole.
Image 62510 May 1869
Leland Stanford tapped the gold Last Spike at Promontory Summit on 10 May 1869, joining 1,911 miles of track between Omaha and Sacramento.
Image 62618 January 1871
German princes proclaimed Wilhelm of Prussia German Emperor in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on 18 January 1871, uniting 25 states under Prussia.
Image 6271 March 1872
President Grant signed the act that set apart 8,983 square kilometres of geysers and wilderness as a public park, the first in the world.
Image 6281874
Remington put the Sholes and Glidden typewriter on sale on 1 July 1874, the first commercial typewriter and the origin of the QWERTY keyboard.
1874 to 1877about 4 years
Image 6291874
Georg Cantor's 1874 paper proved that the real numbers cannot be counted, so that some infinities are larger than others.
Image 630April 1874
Thirty artists rejected by the official Salon showed at Nadar's studio; a hostile critic named the movement after a Monet painting, and the name stuck.
Image 6317 March 1876
The Patent Office issued Alexander Graham Bell patent 174,465 on 7 March 1876. Three days later he spoke the first intelligible telephone sentence.
Image 6321877
Edison built a machine in 1877 in which a stylus indented tinfoil on a rotating cylinder, and a second stylus read the indentations back.
Image 63315 March 1877
A Combined Australian XI beat James Lillywhite's English professionals by 45 runs at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in the match later counted as the first Test.
1877 to 1883about 7 years
Image 6341877
In 1877 Ludwig Boltzmann tied entropy to the number of ways a gas's molecules can be arranged, the relation now written S = k log W.
Image 6351879
A carbon filament burned for 13.5 hours on 22 October 1879. Edison filed his patent two weeks later, on 4 November.
Image 63624 March 1882
On 24 March 1882 Robert Koch announced the bacterium that causes tuberculosis, and laid out rules for proving a germ causes a disease.
Image 6371883
Nietzsche published Zarathustra in four parts between 1883 and 1885, a philosophical fiction whose prophet preaches the Ubermensch and the eternal recurrence.
Image 63827 August 1883
The explosion destroyed over 70 per cent of the island, was heard 4,800 kilometres away, and with its tsunamis is credited with at least 36,417 deaths.
1884 to 1888about 5 years
Image 63915 November 1884
Fourteen powers convened by Bismarck met in Berlin from 15 November 1884 to 26 February 1885 and signed the General Act regulating the colonisation of Africa.
Image 64028 December 1885
Seventy-two delegates met in Bombay on 28 December 1885 and elected Womesh Chunder Bonnerjee as the first president.
Image 6416 July 1885
On 6 July 1885 Louis Pasteur and Emile Roux began injecting nine-year-old Joseph Meister, mauled by a rabid dog, with the first rabies vaccine; the boy lived.
Image 6421886
Karl Benz received German patent 37435 in 1886 for a three-wheeled vehicle with a single-cylinder four-stroke engine of under one horsepower.
Image 6431888
Nikola Tesla was granted patents in May 1888 for an alternating-current induction motor, which Westinghouse licensed the same year.
1888 to 1893about 6 years
Image 6441888
George Eastman patented the Kodak camera in 1888: 25 dollars bought a box loaded with 100 exposures, and the factory did the rest.
Image 6451889
Built on the Champ de Mars between 1887 and 1889 for the Exposition Universelle. It rises about 330 metres and held the height record until 1930.
Image 646June 1889
Van Gogh painted The Starry Night in mid-June 1889 from the east window of his room at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum.
Image 64711 September 1893
On 11 September 1893 Swami Vivekananda opened his Parliament of the World's Religions speech with Sisters and brothers of America, bringing Vedanta to a mass Western audience.
Image 64819 September 1893
New Zealand became the first country in which all women could vote in parliamentary elections; the final petition carried nearly 32,000 signatures.
1894 to 1895about 2 years
Image 6491894
Plague from Yunnan reached Hong Kong in 1894, where Alexandre Yersin isolated the bacillus; the pandemic killed at least 15 million people, most of them in India.
Image 65028 December 1895
The Lumière brothers charged an audience to watch ten short films at the Grand Cafe in Paris on 28 December 1895.
Image 6518 November 1895
On 8 November 1895 Röntgen saw a screen fluoresce beside a covered tube. Within seven weeks he had radiographed his wife's hand.
Image 6521895
In the summer of 1895 Marconi raised his aerial and earthed his transmitter, then sent a wireless signal over a hill out of line of sight.
Image 653November 1895
Jagadish Chandra Bose sent 60-gigahertz waves through two walls and 23 metres to ring a bell and fire gunpowder before an audience in Calcutta.
1896 to 1897about 2 years
Image 6541896
Svante Arrhenius calculated how much changing atmospheric carbon dioxide would alter the temperature of Earth's surface, the first such estimate.
Image 6556 April 1896
The Games of the I Olympiad opened in the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens on 6 April 1896, with 241 athletes from 14 nations.
Image 6561897
Rudolf Diesel's third prototype passed its main test on 17 February 1897, reaching 26.2 percent efficiency by igniting fuel with compressed air alone.
Image 65720 August 1897
On 20 August 1897 Ronald Ross, dissecting mosquitoes fed on a patient named Husein Khan, found the malaria parasite in the insect's gut, proving mosquitoes carry the disease.
Image 658April 1897
In 1897 J. J. Thomson showed that cathode rays were streams of negatively charged particles more than a thousand times smaller than an atom.
1898 to 1901about 4 years
Image 65926 December 1898
Marie and Pierre Curie announced radium on 26 December 1898, after processing tonnes of pitchblende to isolate fractions of a gram.
Image 66014 December 1900
On 14 December 1900 Max Planck told the German Physical Society that radiation was emitted only in multiples of an elementary unit of energy.
Image 6611901
In 1901 Karl Landsteiner showed that human blood falls into groups, A, B and one he called C, now O, explaining why transfusions so often killed.
Image 6621 January 1901
Six British colonies became states of the Commonwealth of Australia when its constitution came into force on 1 January 1901, proclaimed in Centennial Park, Sydney.
Image 66310 December 1901
The first Nobel Prizes were awarded on 10 December 1901, the fifth anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death; Röntgen took physics and Dunant shared peace.
1903 to 1906about 4 years
Image 664May 1903
Tsiolkovsky calculated that reaching orbit needs a horizontal speed of 8,000 metres per second, attainable with a multistage rocket burning liquid oxygen and hydrogen.
Image 66517 December 1903
Orville Wright flew 120 feet in 12 seconds at Kill Devil Hills on 17 December 1903. The longest of four flights that morning covered 852 feet.
Image 6668 February 1904
Japan sank Russia's Baltic Fleet at Tsushima in May 1905, fifteen months after its surprise attack on Port Arthur, the first modern Asian victory over a European power.
Image 6671905
Albert Einstein sent four papers to Annalen der Physik while working as a patent examiner in Bern. One of them introduced special relativity.
Image 66818 April 1906
A magnitude 7.9 rupture of the San Andreas Fault and the fires that followed killed more than 3,000 people and destroyed over 80 percent of the city.
1907 to 1910about 4 years
Image 6691907
Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907, depicting five women in a Barcelona brothel as fractured planes that preceded Cubism.
Image 67030 June 1908
A stony asteroid about 50 to 60 metres wide exploded in the air over the Siberian taiga and flattened 2,150 square kilometres of forest.
Image 6711 October 1908
Ford launched the car at $850 in 1908. A moving assembly line cut chassis assembly to about ninety minutes and the price to around $260 by 1925.
Image 67227 May 1909
Jamsetji Tata's plan for a research institute, backed by 371 acres from the Mysore court, came into being by a government vesting order.
Image 67320 November 1910
Francisco Madero's call to arms against Porfirio Díaz on 20 November 1910 began a decade of revolution that killed about one million people.
1911 to 1912about 2 years
Image 67410 October 1911
The Wuchang Uprising of 10 October 1911 toppled the Qing; the Republic of China was declared on 1 January 1912 and Puyi abdicated on 12 February.
Image 675May 1911
In May 1911 Ernest Rutherford proposed that an atom's mass and positive charge sit in a tiny central core, after alpha particles bounced back from gold foil.
Image 67614 December 1911
Roald Amundsen's team of five reached the geographic South Pole on 14 December 1911. Scott's party arrived 34 days later and died on the return march.
Image 6771912
From 25 Cepheids in the Small Magellanic Cloud, Henrietta Leavitt linked period to true brightness, allowing distance calculations using apparent brightness.
Image 67815 April 1912
Titanic struck an iceberg at 11:40 pm on 14 April 1912 and sank at 2:20 am. About 1,500 of the 2,208 people aboard died.
1913about a year
Image 67929 May 1913
Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, choreographed by Nijinsky for the Ballets Russes, caused a sensation at its premiere on 29 May 1913.
Image 68013 November 1913
On 13 November 1913 the Swedish Academy awarded Rabindranath Tagore the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first to a non-European.
Image 6817 October 1913
Ford's moving assembly line began operating at Highland Park on 7 October 1913, cutting the time to build a Model T to 93 minutes.
Image 682July 1913
Niels Bohr's paper On the constitution of atoms and molecules appeared in July 1913, putting electrons on quantized orbits around Rutherford's nucleus.
Image 68316 January 1913
On 16 January 1913 a clerk in Madras, Srinivasa Ramanujan, sent nine pages of theorems to G. H. Hardy at Cambridge; two professors had already returned his work.
1913 to 1914about 2 years
Image 6841913
Ammonia was first made industrially from air at BASF's Oppau plant in 1913; the food supply of nearly half the world's population now rests on the process.
Image 6853 May 1913
Dadasaheb Phalke's silent feature opened to the public in Bombay on 3 May 1913. It ran roughly 40 minutes and retold a story from the Mahabharata.
Image 6861 September 1914
A bird that once numbered three to five billion, the most abundant in North America, ended with Martha's death at the Cincinnati Zoo.
Image 68715 August 1914
The cargo ship SS Ancon made the first official transit of the 82-kilometre canal on 15 August 1914, joining the Atlantic and Pacific.
Image 6881914-1918
An assassination in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 began a war that killed roughly 15 to 22 million people by the armistice of 11 November 1918.
1915 to 1917about 3 years
Image 68924 April 1915
On 24 April 1915 Ottoman authorities arrested hundreds of Armenian leaders in Constantinople; deportations to the Syrian desert killed around one million people.
Image 690November 1915
Einstein read the final field equations to the Prussian Academy on 25 November 1915. Eddington's 1919 eclipse expeditions measured starlight bending as predicted.
Image 6911916
Serving in the German army, Karl Schwarzschild found the first exact solution of Einstein's equations, describing gravity around a sphere and a radius of no return.
Image 6922 November 1917
In a 67-word letter dated 2 November 1917, Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour declared British support for a Jewish national home in Palestine.
Image 6937 November 1917
Bolshevik Red Guards took the Winter Palace in Petrograd on the night of 7 November 1917 and arrested the Provisional Government.
1918 to 1920about 3 years
Image 6941918
Emmy Noether proved in 1918 that every continuous symmetry of a physical system implies a conserved quantity, in a paper titled Invariante Variationsprobleme.
Image 695c. 1918-1920
An H1N1 influenza infected perhaps a third of humanity between 1918 and 1920. Estimates of the dead run from 17 million to over 50 million.
Image 69613 April 1919
Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer's troops fired 1,650 rounds into a Baisakhi crowd at Amritsar on 13 April 1919, killing at least 379 people.
Image 69728 June 1919
Germany signed the peace treaty in the Palace of Versailles on 28 June 1919; its Part I created the League of Nations and Article 231 assigned war guilt.
Image 6981920
Meghnad Saha related the ionisation of a hot gas to its temperature and pressure, explaining why stars show the spectra they do.
1920 to 1923about 4 years
Image 6992 November 1920
Westinghouse's station in East Pittsburgh broadcast the Harding-Cox presidential election returns on 2 November 1920, the start of scheduled radio broadcasting.
Image 70018 August 1920
The Nineteenth Amendment took effect on 18 August 1920 when Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify it, barring denial of the vote on the basis of sex.
Image 7011921
Written in the trenches and finished on leave in 1918, the Tractatus appeared in German in 1921: 525 numbered statements under seven propositions on language and the world.
Image 70211 January 1922
On 11 January 1922 Leonard Thompson, a 14-year-old dying of diabetes at Toronto General Hospital, received the first injection of insulin.
Image 70329 October 1923
Mustafa Kemal proclaimed the Republic of Turkey on 29 October 1923 and served as its first president; the caliphate was abolished on 3 March 1924.
1924 to 1925about 2 years
Image 70423 November 1924
Using Cepheids found with the 100-inch Hooker telescope, Edwin Hubble showed that the Andromeda Nebula lay far outside the Milky Way and was a galaxy of its own.
Image 7051924
A fossil skull from the Buxton Limeworks at Taung in 1924 was named Australopithecus africanus by Raymond Dart in 1925, the first early human ancestor found in Africa.
Image 7061924
In 1924 Satyendra Nath Bose, a reader at the new University of Dhaka, derived Planck's radiation law by counting indistinguishable light quanta, and Einstein had it published.
Image 707July 1925
In 1925 Werner Heisenberg, escaping hay fever on the island of Heligoland, wrote the paper that became matrix mechanics, the first consistent quantum mechanics.
Image 708c. 1925
Louis Armstrong began the Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions in Chicago in November 1925. They moved jazz from ensemble playing to the virtuoso soloist.
1926about 2 years
Image 70916 March 1926
The world's first liquid-fuelled rocket rose 41 feet and travelled 184 feet in 2.5 seconds from a field in Auburn, Massachusetts.
Image 71026 January 1926
John Logie Baird gave the first public demonstration of true television images to members of the Royal Institution at 22 Frith Street, London, on 26 January 1926.
10 times more detail1,000 dots in the next section
One hundred years in 1,000 dots
The next section uses one dot for about 36 days.
The last hundred yearsone dot is thirty-six days
one dot is thirty-six days0 of 1,000 dots
1,000 dotsnow
The last hundred yearsnow
1,000 dots0 of 1,000 dots
Coloured dots mark milestones. Select one to read more.
one dot is thirty-six days
The last hundred years
Each dot represents about 36 days, so each row covers four years.
1927 to 1929about 2 years
Image 71128 February 1928
C. V. Raman announced on 28 February 1928 that light scattered by a transparent substance comes out shifted in wavelength. He took the 1930 Nobel Prize.
Image 7121928
Paul Dirac's 1928 equation married quantum mechanics to special relativity, explained electron spin and implied the existence of antimatter.
Image 713September 1928
Alexander Fleming found a mould killing bacteria on a spoiled culture plate on 3 September 1928. An Oxford team purified the drug in 1940.
Image 71418 November 1928
Steamboat Willie, Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks's Mickey Mouse cartoon with a synchronised soundtrack, opened at the Colony Theater on 18 November 1928.
Image 7151929
Edwin Hubble found in 1929 that the farther a galaxy lies, the faster it recedes. Georges Lemaître had derived the same expansion two years earlier.
1929 to 1931about 2 years
Image 71629 October 1929
On Black Tuesday, 29 October 1929, some 16.4 million shares changed hands on the New York Stock Exchange as prices collapsed, opening the Great Depression.
Image 71718 February 1930
Comparing photographic plates in a blink comparator, 23-year-old Clyde Tombaugh found a moving point at Lowell Observatory after nearly a year of searching.
Image 71812 March - 6 April 1930
Gandhi left Sabarmati Ashram on 12 March 1930 with 78 followers and walked about 385 kilometres to Dandi, where he lifted a handful of salty mud.
Image 71913 July 1930
The first FIFA World Cup opened in Montevideo on 13 July 1930 with 13 teams; Uruguay beat Argentina 4-2 in the final on 30 July before 68,346 people.
Image 7201931
Calculating on the ship carrying him from India to Cambridge, 19-year-old Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar showed that a white dwarf above about 1.4 solar masses must collapse.
1931 to 1933about 2 years
Image 7211931
Kurt Gödel published in 1931 that any consistent formal system rich enough for arithmetic contains true statements it cannot prove.
Image 72225 August 1931
Flooding on the Yangtze and Huai, ending in a dike breach at Lake Gaoyou, killed as many as two million people, among the deadliest natural disasters on record.
Image 723February 1932
In February 1932 James Chadwick wrote to Nature on the Possible Existence of a Neutron, after about two weeks of experiments at the Cavendish Laboratory.
Image 72430 January 1933
President Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933, after backroom negotiations with Franz von Papen and others.
Image 725April 1933
Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky traced a faint radio hiss to the centre of the Milky Way in Sagittarius, opening astronomy beyond visible light.
1934 to 1936about 2 years
Image 72615 February 1935
Gerhard Domagk's team at Bayer reported on 15 February 1935 that the red dye Prontosil cured streptococcal infections, the first drug to kill bacteria inside the body.
Image 72726 February 1935
Robert Watson-Watt's team bounced BBC shortwave signals off a Handley Page Heyford bomber near Daventry on 26 February 1935, the demonstration that launched British radar.
Image 72814 April 1935
On Black Sunday a wall of dust rolled across the plains; drought and broken sod turned the American prairies into a decade of storms.
Image 7293 October 1935
Two hundred thousand Italian troops crossed from Eritrea on 3 October 1935 without declaring war; Addis Ababa fell on 5 May 1936.
Image 7301936
Turing's 1936 paper described an abstract device that reads and writes symbols on an endless tape, and proved that the halting problem has no general solution.
1936 to 1938about 2 years
Image 7317 September 1936
The last known thylacine died at Hobart Zoo on the night of 7 September 1936, 59 days after Tasmania finally protected the species.
Image 7321937
Picasso painted a mural 3.49 by 7.77 metres in about five weeks, after German and Italian aircraft bombed the Basque town on 26 April 1937.
Image 73313 December 1937
Japanese troops entering Nanjing on 13 December 1937 murdered and raped civilians and prisoners for weeks; the Tokyo tribunal put the dead at over 200,000.
Image 7349 November 1938
On 9 and 10 November 1938 Nazi paramilitaries destroyed over 1,400 synagogues and 7,000 Jewish businesses and sent 30,000 Jewish men to concentration camps.
Image 735December 1938
In December 1938 Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann found barium in neutron-bombarded uranium; Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch worked out that the nucleus had split.
1939 to 1942about 3 years
Image 7361939-1945
Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. The war killed an estimated 60 to 75 million people, most of them civilians, and ended in September 1945.
Image 73727 August 1939
The Heinkel He 178, powered by Hans von Ohain's turbojet, made the first jet aircraft flight on 27 August 1939 with Erich Warsitz at the controls.
Image 7381 May 1941
Orson Welles's Citizen Kane opened at the RKO Palace on Broadway on 1 May 1941 after Radio City refused to premiere it.
Image 7397 December 1941
Carrier aircraft of the Japanese navy struck the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, killing 2,403 Americans and sinking four battleships.
Image 7408 August 1942
Gandhi called on Indians to 'Do or Die' at Gowalia Tank Maidan, Bombay, on 8 August 1942; the Congress leadership was jailed within hours.
1942 to 1943about a year
Image 7412 December 1942
At 15:25 on 2 December 1942, under the stands of Stagg Field in Chicago, Enrico Fermi's team ran the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.
Image 7422 February 1943
The German 6th Army surrendered at Stalingrad on 2 February 1943, the first of Hitler's field armies to capitulate, in the deadliest battle of the war.
Image 7431943
Sartre's 1943 treatise, begun after he read Heidegger as a prisoner of war, argued that existence precedes essence and that humans are condemned to be free.
Image 744c. 1943
Famine in wartime Bengal killed an estimated 800,000 to 3.8 million people from starvation and disease; the scholarly consensus is about 2.1 million.
Image 74519 October 1943
On 19 October 1943 Albert Schatz, a student in Selman Waksman's laboratory at Rutgers, isolated streptomycin from a soil bacterium, the first antibiotic to cure tuberculosis.
1943 to 1945about 2 years
Image 7465 February 1944
Colossus, built by Tommy Flowers to break the German Lorenz cipher, attacked its first message at Bletchley Park on 5 February 1944.
Image 7476 June 1944
On 6 June 1944 the Allies landed on five Normandy beaches from a fleet of 6,939 vessels, the largest seaborne invasion in history.
Image 74820 June 1944
The vertical launch of a V-2 designated MW 18014 passed 100 kilometres altitude, making it the first artificial object to reach space.
Image 74927 January 1945
Soviet troops reached Auschwitz on 27 January 1945; of 1.3 million people sent there, 1.1 million had been murdered, most of them Jews.
Image 75030 June 1945
Herman Goldstine circulated John von Neumann's First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC on 30 June 1945, the first published description of a stored-program computer.
1945about 8 months
Image 75116 July 1945
A plutonium device detonated at 5:29 am on 16 July 1945 at the Alamogordo range in New Mexico, with a yield of about 25 kilotons.
Image 752c. 6 and 9 August 1945
A uranium bomb detonated above Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 and a plutonium bomb destroyed Nagasaki on 9 August. Japan surrendered on 15 August.
Image 75324 October 1945
Delegates from 50 countries signed the UN Charter at San Francisco on 26 June 1945. It entered into force on 24 October, with 51 founding members.
Image 75420 November 1945
From 20 November 1945 to 1 October 1946 an international tribunal of four powers tried 22 surviving Nazi leaders, Hermann Göring among them.
Image 75515 February 1946
ENIAC, the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer, was dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania on 15 February 1946.
1947 to 1948about 10 months
Image 756c. 15 August 1947
British rule over 390 million people ended at midnight on 14 to 15 August 1947. Partition uprooted some 15 million and killed somewhere between 200,000 and two million.
Image 75723 December 1947
John Bardeen and Walter Brattain demonstrated a germanium amplifier at Bell Labs on 23 December 1947. They shared the 1956 Nobel Prize with William Shockley.
Image 75830 January 1948
Nathuram Godse shot Mohandas Gandhi three times at point-blank range on the lawn of Birla House in Delhi as he walked to his evening prayer meeting.
Image 7597 April 1948
The WHO's constitution, signed by 61 countries on 22 July 1946, came into force on 7 April 1948, the first World Health Day.
Image 76014 May 1948
David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the State of Israel at the Tel Aviv Museum; around 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled in the war that followed.
1948 to 1949about 11 months
Image 76126 May 1948
D. F. Malan's National Party won South Africa's whites-only election on a promise of apartheid, opening 46 years of legally enforced racial separation.
Image 7621948
Claude Shannon's paper founded information theory and formally introduced the term bit as a unit of information.
Image 763c. 1948
Over thirty-three days a Dogon elder in Mali set out a cosmology of the creator Amma and the water spirits called Nommo.
Image 76410 December 1948
The UN General Assembly adopted thirty articles at the Palais de Chaillot on 10 December 1948, by 48 votes to none, with eight abstentions.
Image 7654 April 1949
Twelve states signed the North Atlantic Treaty in Washington, agreeing under Article 5 that an armed attack on one would count as an attack on all.
1949 to 1950about a year
Image 7661949
Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex in about 14 months and published it in two volumes in 1949; the Vatican banned it, second-wave feminism began with it.
Image 7671 October 1949
Mao Zedong declared the People's Republic from the Tiananmen gate on 1 October 1949. Chiang Kai-shek's government withdrew to Taiwan.
Image 76826 January 1950
India's constitution, 395 articles and 8 schedules at enactment, came into force and turned the Dominion of India into a republic.
Image 76925 June 1950
North Korea's army crossed the 38th parallel into the South; three years of war killed around a million soldiers and up to three million civilians.
Image 77025 August 1950
Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon premiered at Tokyo's Imperial Theatre on 25 August 1950 and won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1951.
1953 to 1955about 2 years
Image 77125 April 1953
Watson and Crick published a model of DNA in Nature on 25 April 1953. It depended on Rosalind Franklin's Photograph 51 and her measurements.
Image 77229 May 1953
Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary reached the 8,849-metre summit at 11:30 am on 29 May 1953 and spent about fifteen minutes there.
Image 77325 April 1954
Bell Labs announced the first practical silicon solar cell on 25 April 1954, the work of Calvin Fuller, Daryl Chapin and Gerald Pearson.
Image 77427 June 1954
The AM-1 reactor at Obninsk was connected to the Soviet grid on 27 June 1954, the world's first nuclear power plant to feed electricity to a grid.
Image 77512 April 1955
Jonas Salk's killed-virus vaccine was tested on about 1.8 million schoolchildren in 1954. It was declared safe and effective on 12 April 1955.
1955 to 1956about 2 years
Image 77618 April 1955
Twenty-nine Asian and African states, representing 1.5 billion people, met in Bandung to oppose colonialism and chart a course between the two blocs.
Image 7771955
Satyajit Ray filmed his first feature over about three years on weekends, with an almost entirely amateur cast. It won a prize at Cannes in 1956.
Image 77826 April 1956
Malcom McLean's converted tanker Ideal X sailed from Port Newark to Houston with 58 containers on 26 April 1956, the first container ship voyage.
Image 779Summer 1956
The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, organised by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon, met in the summer of 1956.
Image 78014 October 1956
On 14 October 1956 at Deekshabhoomi in Nagpur, B. R. Ambedkar took Buddhist vows and around 365,000 Dalit followers converted with him.
1956 to 1957about a year
Image 78129 October 1956
Israel, then Britain and France, invaded Egypt to reverse Nasser's nationalisation of the Suez Canal; American and Soviet pressure forced them out.
Image 78225 March 1957
Six countries signed the treaty founding the European Economic Community, a common market that grew into the European Union.
Image 783April 1957
IBM delivered the first FORTRAN compiler in April 1957, after John Backus proposed a practical alternative to assembly language for the IBM 704.
Image 7841957
Margaret and Geoffrey Burbidge, William Fowler and Fred Hoyle explained how stars forged the elements heavier than helium, in the paper known as B2FH.
Image 7854 October 1957
The Soviet Union launched an 83.6-kilogram aluminium sphere from Baikonur on 4 October 1957. It circled the Earth about every 96 minutes.
1957 to 1958about a year
Image 7863 November 1957
Sputnik 2 carried the dog Laika into orbit on 3 November 1957, the first animal to circle the Earth; she died within hours of reaching orbit.
Image 7871 February 1958
The first American satellite launched on 1 February 1958 GMT; its Geiger counter, built under James Van Allen, found the radiation belts around Earth.
Image 788March 1958
Charles David Keeling began continuous measurement of carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa, producing the record that showed the gas rising year after year.
Image 7891958
Frank Rosenblatt described a machine that learned to classify inputs by adjusting weights; the Mark I Perceptron was built for image recognition.
Image 79012 September 1958
Jack Kilby showed Texas Instruments management a working integrated circuit on a piece of germanium on 12 September 1958.
1958 to 1959about a year
Image 791October 1958
William Higinbotham built a tennis game on a five-inch oscilloscope for Brookhaven National Laboratory's visitors' day in October 1958.
Image 79210 March 1959
Protests in Lhasa against Chinese rule ended with the People's Liberation Army shelling the Dalai Lama's summer palace and the Dalai Lama fleeing to India.
Image 793c. 1959-1961
The Great Leap Forward's communes and grain seizures produced the deadliest famine in history, with estimates of 15 to 46 million deaths.
Image 79413 September 1959
The Soviet probe Luna 2 hit the Moon east of Mare Imbrium on 13 September 1959, the first human-made object to reach another world.
Image 7957 October 1959
On 7 October 1959 Luna 3 photographed the hidden far side of the Moon, 29 frames covering 70 percent of a hemisphere no one had ever seen.
1960 to 1961about a year
Image 79616 May 1960
On 16 May 1960 Theodore Maiman fired the first working laser, a flashlamp-pumped ruby rod at Hughes Research Laboratories, giving red light at 694 nanometres.
Image 79722 May 1960
A magnitude 9.4 to 9.6 megathrust earthquake off southern Chile, the strongest ever recorded, sent tsunamis across the Pacific to Hawaii and Japan.
Image 79823 June 1960
On 23 June 1960 the US Food and Drug Administration approved Searle's Enovid as a contraceptive, the first oral contraceptive pill.
Image 7991960
Seventeen African states took independence in 1960, fourteen of them from France. Nigeria alone brought some 45 million people into self-rule.
Image 80012 April 1961
Vostok 1 lifted off at 9:07 am Moscow time on 12 April 1961. Gagarin completed one orbit in 108 minutes and parachuted into a field near Engels.
1961 to 1962about a year
Image 80113 August 1961
East Germany sealed off West Berlin overnight with a barrier that grew into more than 140 kilometres of concrete, guard towers and death strip.
Image 80220 February 1962
John Glenn circled the Earth three times in Friendship 7 on 20 February 1962, the first American in orbit, ten months after Gagarin.
Image 80327 September 1962
Rachel Carson's book documented the environmental harm caused by indiscriminate use of DDT and accused the chemical industry of spreading disinformation.
Image 80411 October 1962
Nearly 2,500 bishops met in St Peter's from 11 October 1962 to 8 December 1965 and issued sixteen documents changing Catholic practice and relations with the modern world.
Image 80516 October 1962
For 13 days the United States and the Soviet Union faced each other over Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, the closest the Cold War came to nuclear war.
1962 to 1963about 10 months
Image 80614 December 1962
Mariner 2 passed 34,773 kilometres from Venus on 14 December 1962, the first spacecraft to report back from another planet.
Image 8071 January 1963
Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy premiered on Fuji TV on New Year's Day 1963, the first popular animated series in the style now known as anime.
Image 80816 June 1963
Tereshkova launched on Vostok 6 on 16 June 1963 and spent 70 hours 50 minutes in orbit, making 48 revolutions alone.
Image 8091963
Maarten Schmidt found that the starlike radio source 3C 273 had a redshift of 0.158, placing it billions of light-years away and impossibly luminous.
Image 81028 August 1963
About 250,000 people marched for jobs and freedom, and Martin Luther King Jr. gave his I Have a Dream speech from the Lincoln Memorial.
1964 to 1965about a year
Image 8111964
Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig proposed independently in 1964 that protons, neutrons and the rest of the hadron zoo are built from three kinds of quark.
Image 8121964
The Beatles played to about 73 million American television viewers in February 1964. In April they held the top five places on the Billboard singles chart.
Image 8131 October 1964
The Tokaido Shinkansen opened between Tokyo and Osaka on 1 October 1964, nine days before the Tokyo Olympics, with 0 series trains running at up to 210 km/h.
Image 81418 March 1965
Alexei Leonov left Voskhod 2 through an inflatable airlock on 18 March 1965 and floated outside for 12 minutes 9 seconds, the first spacewalk.
Image 8151965
Penzias and Wilson found a hiss coming equally from every direction while calibrating a Bell Labs antenna. They published in 1965.
1965 to 1967about 2 years
Image 81615 July 1965
Mariner 4 flew 9,846 kilometres above Mars on 15 July 1965 and sent back 21 pictures, the first close-up images of another planet.
Image 8173 February 1966
Luna 9 made the first soft landing on the Moon on 3 February 1966 and sent back the first photographs taken from its surface.
Image 81816 May 1966
Mao Zedong launched a decade of upheaval in which Red Guards purged officials, teachers and traditions; estimates of the dead run from hundreds of thousands to two million.
Image 819May 1967
Editorial Sudamericana published Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Cien anos de soledad in Buenos Aires in May 1967; it has sold more than 50 million copies.
Image 8205 June 1967
Israel destroyed Egypt's air force on the ground and in six days took the Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.
1967 to 1968about a year
Image 821c. 1967
Symmetrical magnetic stripes either side of mid-ocean ridges showed new crust spreading outward. The theory was assembled between 1965 and 1967.
Image 82228 November 1967
Scanning miles of chart paper from a Cambridge radio array, Jocelyn Bell Burnell found a signal ticking every 1.3373 seconds, jokingly labelled LGM-1.
Image 8233 December 1967
On 3 December 1967 Christiaan Barnard at Groote Schuur Hospital transplanted the heart of Denise Darvall into 54-year-old Louis Washkansky, who lived 18 days.
Image 8244 April 1968
Martin Luther King Jr. was shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis; riots broke out in cities across the United States that night.
Image 825c. 1968
New dwarf wheat varieties, fertiliser and irrigation raised the 1968 harvest so far that schools were requisitioned to store the grain.
1968 to 1969about 8 months
Image 8269 December 1968
Douglas Engelbart demonstrated the mouse, windows, hypertext and video conferencing in one 90-minute session at the Fall Joint Computer Conference on 9 December 1968.
Image 82724 December 1968
Bill Anders photographed the Earth rising over the lunar horizon from Apollo 8 on Christmas Eve 1968. The frame is catalogued AS08-14-2383.
Image 82828 June 1969
Patrons of the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village fought back against a police raid, and the modern gay rights movement dates itself from that night.
Image 8291969
Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and colleagues at Bell Labs began Unix in 1969, and in 1973 rewrote it in C, making it the first portable operating system.
Image 83020 July 1969
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed the lunar module Eagle in the Sea of Tranquility on 20 July 1969. About 650 million people watched on television.
1969 to 1970about a year
Image 83129 October 1969
Charley Kline at UCLA tried to log in to a machine at Stanford on 29 October 1969. The system crashed after he had typed two letters.
Image 83211-17 April 1970
An oxygen tank exploded two days into Apollo 13's flight to the Moon; the crew survived in the lunar module and splashed down on 17 April 1970.
Image 83324 April 1970
Dong Fang Hong 1 reached orbit on 24 April 1970 on a Long March 1 rocket, making China the fifth nation to launch its own satellite.
Image 8341970
Vera Rubin and Kent Ford measured how the Andromeda galaxy rotated and found its outer stars moving as fast as its inner ones, evidence of dark matter.
Image 83512 November 1970
A storm surge over the low islands of the Ganges Delta killed at least 300,000 people, the deadliest tropical cyclone on record.
1970 to 1971about a year
Image 83615 December 1970
A Soviet probe reached the surface of Venus on 15 December 1970 and transmitted for 23 minutes. It measured 475 °C and about 90 atmospheres.
Image 83719 April 1971
The Soviet Union launched Salyut 1, the world's first space station, on 19 April 1971; its only crew died on the way home.
Image 8381 October 1971
On 1 October 1971 Godfrey Hounsfield's EMI scanner at Atkinson Morley Hospital examined its first patient, a woman with a suspected brain tumour, and found it.
Image 83915 November 1971
Intel released the 4004 on 15 November 1971, a 4-bit central processing unit of 2,300 transistors on a single chip, first built for a Busicom calculator.
Image 84016 December 1971
Pakistan's forces surrendered in Dhaka after a nine-month war and Indian intervention, and East Pakistan became the independent state of Bangladesh.
1972 to 1973about 2 years
Image 8411972
Louise Webster, Paul Murdin and Charles Bolton showed that the X-ray source Cygnus X-1 orbited a hidden companion too massive to be anything but a black hole.
Image 8423 April 1973
Martin Cooper of Motorola made the first public call from a handheld cellular phone on a Manhattan sidewalk on 3 April 1973, ringing his rival at Bell Labs.
Image 84311 August 1973
At a back-to-school party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue on 11 August 1973, DJ Kool Herc extended record breaks, a date associated with hip hop's origin.
Image 844c. 20 October 1973
Arab oil producers embargoed countries that had supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War, and the price of oil rose nearly 300 percent.
Image 8453 December 1973
Pioneer 10 passed 132,252 kilometres from Jupiter on 3 December 1973, the first spacecraft to cross the asteroid belt and visit an outer planet.
1974 to 1975about 7 months
Image 846January 1975
The MITS Altair 8800 made the cover of Popular Electronics in January 1975, drew 1,000 orders in February, and led Bill Gates and Paul Allen to found Microsoft.
Image 84719 April 1975
ISRO's 360-kilogram satellite was launched by a Soviet rocket from Kapustin Yar on 19 April 1975. Parts of it were assembled in a shed in Bengaluru.
Image 84830 April 1975
North Vietnamese forces took Saigon, ending the Vietnam War; helicopters lifted 7,000 people out of the city in the final evacuation.
Image 84925 June 1975
Indira Gandhi had a state of emergency declared, suspending civil liberties for 21 months and jailing more than 100,000 opponents and journalists.
Image 85017 July 1975
An American Apollo docked with a Soviet Soyuz on 17 July 1975 and Thomas Stafford and Alexei Leonov shook hands through the hatch.
1975 to 1977about 2 years
Image 85115 August 1975
Ramesh Sippy's Sholay opened on 15 August 1975 to poor reviews, then ran for more than five years at Bombay's Minerva theatre.
Image 85220 July 1976
Viking 1 touched down on Chryse Planitia on 20 July 1976 and returned the first clear pictures from the Martian surface, beginning with its own footpad.
Image 85325 May 1977
George Lucas's Star Wars opened in 32 American theatres on Wednesday 25 May 1977 and by 1978 was the highest-grossing film ever made.
Image 854June 1977
Steve Wozniak's computer went on sale on 10 June 1977 at $1,298, with colour graphics, a built-in keyboard and a moulded plastic case.
Image 855August-September 1977
Voyager 2 launched on 20 August 1977 and Voyager 1 on 5 September. Both continue to transmit after 49 years.
1978 to 1980about 2 years
Image 85625 July 1978
Louise Brown was born by caesarean at Oldham General Hospital at 11:47 pm on 25 July 1978, weighing 2.6 kilograms.
Image 85711 February 1979
The Pahlavi monarchy fell and Ruhollah Khomeini took power, replacing the Shah's Iran with an Islamic republic.
Image 85825 December 1979
The Soviet 40th Army crossed into Afghanistan; a decade of war killed one to three million Afghans and drove millions into Pakistan and Iran.
Image 8598 May 1980
The World Health Assembly certified smallpox eradicated on 8 May 1980. The last natural case was Ali Maow Maalin in Somalia in October 1977.
Image 86018 May 1980
The volcano's north face slid away in the largest landslide in recorded history, then blew out sideways, killing 57 people.
1981 to 1982about 2 years
Image 86112 April 1981
Columbia launched on 12 April 1981 with John Young and Robert Crippen aboard, orbited the Earth 37 times, and landed at Edwards Air Force Base.
Image 8625 June 1981
On 5 June 1981 the CDC reported five gay men in Los Angeles with a rare pneumonia, the first report of AIDS; the virus was isolated in 1983.
Image 86312 August 1981
IBM released the Personal Computer model 5150 on 12 August 1981, an Intel 8088 machine with an open architecture that became the standard for desktop computing.
Image 86423 July 1982
The International Whaling Commission voted by a three-quarters majority to set commercial catch limits to zero from the 1985/86 season.
Image 86529 November 1982
Epic Records released Thriller on 29 November 1982; it became the best-selling album of all time, with about 70 million copies sold.
1982 to 1984about 2 years
Image 8661 January 1983
On 1 January 1983 the ARPANET permanently switched from NCP to TCP/IP, the flag day that made the modern internet's protocols the standard.
Image 8671983
In 1983 Kary Mullis at Cetus Corporation devised PCR, a way to copy a chosen stretch of DNA millions of times with primers and a polymerase.
Image 86824 January 1984
Apple's Macintosh went on sale on 24 January 1984 at $2,495, two days after Ridley Scott's 1984 commercial aired during the Super Bowl.
Image 8693 April 1984
Indian Air Force pilot Rakesh Sharma flew to the Salyut 7 station on Soyuz T-11 on 3 April 1984 and spent almost eight days in orbit.
Image 87031 October 1984
Two of Indira Gandhi's Sikh bodyguards shot her at her residence, months after she ordered the army into the Golden Temple; anti-Sikh pogroms followed.
1984 to 1985about a year
Image 8713 December 1984
Methyl isocyanate leaked from a Union Carbide pesticide plant over sleeping Bhopal, exposing over 500,000 people in the world's worst industrial accident.
Image 872May 1985
British Antarctic Survey scientists reported a springtime collapse of ozone over Antarctica far larger than any model had predicted.
Image 87313 September 1985
Nintendo released Super Mario Bros. for the Famicom in Japan on 13 September 1985; it has sold more than 58 million copies.
Image 87428 January 1986
Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after launch on 28 January 1986, killing all seven aboard, including teacher Christa McAuliffe.
Image 87520 February 1986
The Mir core module launched on 20 February 1986; the station was assembled in orbit over ten years and housed people for most of fifteen.
1986 to 1989about 3 years
Image 87626 April 1986
Reactor number four at Chernobyl exploded during a safety test at 1:23 am on 26 April 1986. Around 350,000 people were permanently resettled.
Image 87723 February 1987
A blue supergiant exploded 168,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the closest supernova since 1604 and the first whose neutrinos were caught.
Image 87816 September 1987
Agreed on 16 September 1987, the treaty phased out CFCs. It is the one UN treaty ratified by every member state.
Image 8791988
The World Meteorological Organization and the UN Environment Programme set up a panel to assess the science of climate change for governments.
Image 8804 June 1989
After seven weeks of student-led protests, the Chinese army cleared Tiananmen Square by force; estimates of the dead run from several hundred to thousands.
1989 to 1990about 11 months
Image 8811989-1991
Tim Berners-Lee circulated a memo at CERN in March 1989. The first website went live at info.cern.ch on 6 August 1991.
Image 88225 August 1989
Voyager 2 made its closest approach to Neptune on 25 August 1989, the only visit any spacecraft has made to the outermost planet.
Image 8839 November 1989
An East German spokesman announced relaxed travel rules on 9 November 1989. An officer at Bornholmer Strasse opened the barrier late that evening without orders.
Image 88414 February 1990
NASA turned Voyager 1 back towards home on 14 February 1990, from about 6 billion kilometres out, and took 60 frames of the Solar System.
Image 88524 April 1990
Discovery carried Hubble to orbit on 24 April 1990. Its mirror was the wrong shape, and a shuttle crew installed corrective optics in 1993.
1991about 7 months
Image 88615 June 1991
The second-largest eruption of the 20th century sent ash 40 kilometres high and cooled the whole planet for more than a year.
Image 8871991
Sony and Asahi Kasei commercialised the lithium-ion battery in 1991, based on Akira Yoshino's 1985 prototype and John Goodenough's 1980 cobalt oxide cathode.
Image 88824 July 1991
Facing reserves worth less than three weeks of imports, finance minister Manmohan Singh presented the budget that dismantled the Licence Raj.
Image 88917 September 1991
Linus Torvalds, a student at the University of Helsinki, released the first version of the Linux kernel on 17 September 1991.
Image 89026 December 1991
Mikhail Gorbachev resigned on 25 December 1991, and the Supreme Soviet voted the country out of existence the next day. Fifteen republics became independent states.
1992 to 1994about 2 years
Image 89123 April 1992
NASA's COBE satellite mapped faint cosmic microwave background temperature variations, the primordial unevenness from which galaxies formed.
Image 8923 June 1992
108 heads of state met in Rio de Janeiro and opened the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, signed there by 154 states.
Image 89323 January 1993
Marc Andreessen announced the first release of NCSA Mosaic on 23 January 1993, the browser that showed images inline with text and made the web popular.
Image 89423 June 1993
On 23 June 1993 Andrew Wiles ended a Cambridge lecture by proving Fermat's Last Theorem, claimed in a margin in 1637; a gap took two years to close.
Image 8957 April 1994
Over about 100 days Hutu militias killed between 500,000 and 662,000 Tutsi, often neighbour by neighbour, while the world declined to intervene.
1994 to 1995about a year
Image 89627 April 1994
Close to 20 million people voted in the first non-racial election on 27 April 1994. Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as president on 10 May.
Image 89716 July 1994
Fragments of a comet torn apart by Jupiter's tides struck the planet at 60 kilometres a second, leaving dark scars larger than the Great Red Spot.
Image 89812 January 1995
Eight grey wolves captured near Jasper, Alberta, arrived in Yellowstone on 12 January 1995, 69 years after park rangers killed the last two pups.
Image 8995 June 1995
On 5 June 1995 Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman cooled about two thousand rubidium atoms to 170 billionths of a degree above zero, into one quantum state.
Image 90016 July 1995
Jeff Bezos's online bookstore Amazon.com launched on 16 July 1995, a year after he founded the company as Cadabra in Bellevue, Washington.
1995 to 1997about 2 years
Image 9016 October 1995
Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz announced a planet at least half Jupiter's mass circling 51 Pegasi every four days, found by the star's tiny wobble.
Image 9027 December 1995
Galileo arrived at Jupiter on 7 December 1995, the first spacecraft to orbit an outer planet, after six years of gravity assists past Venus and Earth.
Image 90318 December 1995
Hubble stared for ten days at a patch of sky the size of a tennis ball 100 metres away and found about 3,000 galaxies in it.
Image 9045 July 1996
Dolly was born at the Roslin Institute on 5 July 1996, from a mammary cell of an adult ewe. She was the single success from 277 attempts.
Image 905May 1997
An IBM supercomputer evaluating 200 million chess positions a second won a six-game rematch against the reigning world champion, three and a half to two and a half.
1997 to 1998about a year
Image 90626 June 1997
Bloomsbury published J. K. Rowling's first Harry Potter novel on 26 June 1997 in a print run of 500 hardbacks, 300 of them for libraries.
Image 9071 July 1997
At midnight Britain returned Hong Kong to China after 156 years, ending its last major colony under a promise of one country, two systems for 50 years.
Image 9084 July 1997
Mars Pathfinder bounced to a stop on airbags in Ares Vallis on 4 July 1997. The next day the 10.6-kilogram Sojourner rover drove down a ramp.
Image 90911 May 1998
India detonated three nuclear devices at Pokhran, then two more on 13 May, and declared itself a nuclear weapons state; Pakistan tested within weeks.
Image 9101998
Two teams measuring distant Type Ia supernovae found them 10 to 15 percent fainter than expected, showing the universe's expansion is accelerating.
1998 to 2001about 3 years
Image 9114 September 1998
Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporated Google on 4 September 1998. Their search ranked pages by the number and quality of links pointing at them.
Image 91220 November 1998
The Russian-built Zarya module launched from Baikonur on 20 November 1998. People have lived aboard without a break since 2 November 2000.
Image 91315 January 2001
Wikipedia began on 15 January 2001 as a side project to a peer-reviewed encyclopedia. It now holds over 65 million articles in more than 300 languages.
Image 91420 July 2001
Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away opened in Japan on 20 July 2001, became the highest-grossing film in Japanese history and won the Academy Award for animation.
Image 91511 September 2001
Nineteen al-Qaeda hijackers took four airliners on the morning of 11 September 2001. 2,977 people died, from more than 90 countries.
2002 to 2003about a year
Image 91616 November 2002
The first known case of SARS fell ill in Guangdong on 16 November 2002; the coronavirus infected 8,422 people, killing 11 percent, before it was stopped in 2003.
Image 9171 February 2003
Space Shuttle Columbia broke apart on reentry over Texas on 1 February 2003; all seven of the STS-107 crew died, including Kalpana Chawla.
Image 91820 March 2003
A US-led coalition invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein; no stockpiles of the weapons of mass destruction cited as justification were ever found.
Image 91914 April 2003
The Human Genome Project declared an essentially complete sequence on 14 April 2003, after thirteen years and roughly $3 billion.
Image 92015 October 2003
Yang Liwei orbited the Earth 14 times in Shenzhou 5 on 15 October 2003, making China the third country to launch a person into space on its own.
2003 to 2005about a year
Image 9214 February 2004
Mark Zuckerberg launched TheFacebook from Harvard on 4 February 2004; by December 2023 it had about 3.07 billion monthly users.
Image 9221 July 2004
Cassini entered orbit around Saturn on 1 July 2004, the first spacecraft to do so, and circled the planet for thirteen years.
Image 92326 December 2004
A magnitude 9.2 to 9.3 earthquake off Sumatra raised waves up to 30 metres that killed an estimated 227,898 people in 14 countries.
Image 92414 January 2005
ESA's Huygens probe descended through Titan's haze on 14 January 2005 and transmitted from the surface for at least 72 minutes.
Image 92523 April 2005
Jawed Karim uploaded a 19-second clip filmed at San Diego Zoo on 23 April 2005. Hundreds of hours of video are now uploaded every minute.
2005 to 2007about 2 years
Image 92629 August 2005
Katrina's surge broke more than 50 levees around New Orleans and flooded about 80 percent of the city, killing 1,392 people.
Image 9272006
In 2006 Shinya Yamanaka and Kazutoshi Takahashi at Kyoto University turned adult mouse skin cells back into stem cells with just four genes.
Image 92824 August 2006
The International Astronomical Union voted a definition of planet requiring a cleared orbit, leaving eight planets and making Pluto a dwarf planet.
Image 929March 2007
Safaricom and Vodafone launched M-Pesa in Kenya in March 2007, letting people send money by text message; about 17 million accounts had been opened by 2012.
Image 93029 June 2007
Steve Jobs announced the iPhone on 9 January 2007 and it went on sale on 29 June at $499, with a multi-touch screen and no physical keyboard.
2008about 5 months
Image 93110 September 2008
On 10 September 2008 CERN steered the first proton beam all the way round the Large Hadron Collider's 26.7-kilometre ring, at 10:28 local time.
Image 93215 September 2008
Lehman Brothers filed the largest bankruptcy in American history, over 600 billion dollars in assets, and the global financial crisis broke.
Image 93323 September 2008
Google introduced Android with the HTC Dream, the T-Mobile G1, at a New York subway station press conference on 23 September 2008.
Image 93422 October 2008
ISRO launched India's first lunar probe on 22 October 2008. NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper aboard it found water molecules across the surface.
Image 9353 January 2009
Satoshi Nakamoto mined the first block of the bitcoin chain on 3 January 2009, embedding that day's Times headline about a second bank bailout.
2010 to 2011about 2 years
Image 93613 June 2010
Japan's Hayabusa returned grains from the asteroid Itokawa to Earth on 13 June 2010, the first sample ever brought back from an asteroid.
Image 937September 2010
India issued the first Aadhaar number in September 2010; by May 2023 more than 99.9 percent of adults held the twelve-digit biometric identity.
Image 93817 December 2010
A Tunisian street vendor's self-immolation set off uprisings that toppled the rulers of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen and began Syria's civil war.
Image 93911 March 2011
A magnitude 9.0 to 9.1 earthquake raised a tsunami up to 40 metres high that killed nearly 20,000 people and caused three reactor meltdowns at Fukushima.
Image 94018 November 2011
Mojang released Minecraft version 1.0.0 on 18 November 2011; it later sold more than 400 million copies, the most of any video game.
2012about 5 months
Image 941June 2012
Jennifer Doudna, Emmanuelle Charpentier and colleagues showed in June 2012 that a bacterial defence system could be aimed at any chosen DNA sequence.
Image 94222 June 2012
Tesla showed the first production Model S to employees, customers and press at its Fremont factory on 22 June 2012, an electric car with 426 km of range.
Image 9434 July 2012
The ATLAS and CMS detectors at the Large Hadron Collider both reported a new boson near 125 GeV on 4 July 2012.
Image 9446 August 2012
A rocket-powered sky crane lowered the 899-kilogram Curiosity rover into Gale Crater on 6 August 2012. It worked at the first attempt.
Image 94530 September 2012
A deep convolutional network with 60 million parameters won the ImageNet challenge with a top-5 error rate of 15.3 per cent, over 10 points ahead of the runner-up.
2012 to 2014about 2 years
Image 94615 February 2013
An undetected 18-metre asteroid exploded about 30 kilometres above the Urals with the force of roughly 500 kilotons, injuring 1,491 people, mostly by shattered glass.
Image 94713 March 2013
On 13 March 2013 the conclave elected Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, the first Jesuit pope and the first from the Americas; he took the name Francis.
Image 948December 2013
An Ebola outbreak that began with a child's death in Meliandou, Guinea, in December 2013 became the largest ever, with 28,616 cases and 11,310 deaths by 2016.
Image 94924 September 2014
India's Mars Orbiter Mission entered Mars orbit on 24 September 2014, at the first attempt, for about 4.5 billion rupees.
Image 95012 November 2014
Rosetta released the Philae lander onto comet 67P on 12 November 2014. Its harpoons failed and it bounced twice before settling in shadow.
2015 to 2016about 10 months
Image 95114 July 2015
New Horizons flew past Pluto on 14 July 2015 at 13.8 kilometres per second, after a journey of nearly five billion kilometres.
Image 95214 September 2015
Both LIGO detectors registered a 0.2-second chirp on 14 September 2015, from two black holes merging 1.3 billion light years away.
Image 95312 December 2015
Adopted at the end of COP21 on 12 December 2015. Each of the 196 parties writes its own targets and must strengthen them every five years.
Image 95421 December 2015
A Falcon 9 first stage flew back from an orbital launch and landed upright on a pad at Cape Canaveral, the first attempt on solid ground to succeed.
Image 955March 2016
DeepMind's AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol four games to one at Go in Seoul in March 2016, in front of perhaps 100 million viewers.
2016 to 2017about 2 years
Image 95611 April 2016
The National Payments Corporation of India launched the Unified Payments Interface on 11 April 2016; by August 2025 it handled 20 billion transactions a month.
Image 95723 June 2016
British voters chose by 51.9 percent to leave the European Union, the first state ever to do so; David Cameron resigned the next morning.
Image 958February 2017
Michaël Gillon's team announced seven Earth-sized planets circling a cool red dwarf about 40 light-years away, up to four of them in the habitable zone.
Image 95912 June 2017
Eight Google researchers published the transformer architecture; the paper has since been cited more than 250,000 times.
Image 96017 August 2017
LIGO and Virgo caught a 100-second chirp from merging neutron stars, and 70 observatories then watched the kilonova in the galaxy NGC 4993.
2017 to 2019about 2 years
Image 96119 October 2017
Robert Weryk found a reddish, elongated object with the Pan-STARRS telescope that was leaving the Solar System on a path from between the stars.
Image 9623 January 2019
China landed Chang'e 4 in Von Kármán crater on 3 January 2019, using the Queqiao relay satellite to communicate with Earth.
Image 96310 April 2019
The Event Horizon Telescope released an image of the black hole at the centre of M87 on 10 April 2019, from eight linked observatories.
Image 96424 May 2019
SpaceX launched the first 60 Starlink satellites on a Falcon 9 on 24 May 2019, the start of a constellation with 12 million subscribers by June 2026.
Image 96523 October 2019
On 23 October 2019 Google published in Nature that its 53-qubit Sycamore chip did in 200 seconds a task it said would take a supercomputer 10,000 years.
2019 to 2020about 5 months
Image 9669 February 2020
Bong Joon Ho's Parasite won Best Picture at the 92nd Academy Awards, the first film not in English to do so.
Image 96711 March 2020
The WHO declared a pandemic on 11 March 2020. It estimates 14.9 million excess deaths in 2020 and 2021.
Image 96825 May 2020
A Minneapolis police officer knelt on George Floyd's neck for over nine minutes; the filmed killing set off protests in more than 2,000 cities worldwide.
Image 96928 May 2020
OpenAI described GPT-3, a language model with 175 billion parameters, in an arXiv preprint by 31 researchers on 28 May 2020.
Image 97030 May 2020
Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken rode a SpaceX Crew Dragon to the space station on 30 May 2020, the first crew launched by a private company.
2020 to 2021about 7 months
Image 971October 2020
In October 2020 Waymo became the first company to carry the public in cars with no safety driver, in the Phoenix area.
Image 9728 December 2020
BioNTech's team designed a vaccine in January 2020 from the published genome. Margaret Keenan received the first shot in Coventry on 8 December 2020.
Image 97316 December 2020
Chang'e 5 brought 1,731 grams of lunar soil back to Earth on 16 December 2020, the first Moon samples returned since 1976.
Image 97418 February 2021
NASA's Perseverance rover landed in Jezero Crater on 18 February 2021 to hunt for signs of ancient life and cache rock for return to Earth.
Image 97519 April 2021
Ingenuity rose three metres above Jezero Crater on 19 April 2021 and hovered for 39.1 seconds. It later made 72 flights.
2021about 10 months
Image 97629 April 2021
The Tianhe core module launched on 29 April 2021, the start of Tiangong, China's permanent space station and the third modular station after Mir and the ISS.
Image 977July 2021
DeepMind published and open-sourced its protein structure prediction method in July 2021. By July 2022 the database held over 200 million predicted structures.
Image 97815 August 2021
The Taliban entered Kabul as President Ghani fled, ending the twenty-year war; more than 123,000 people were airlifted out in the following fortnight.
Image 97925 December 2021
Webb launched on an Ariane 5 from French Guiana on 25 December 2021. Its mirror and sunshield unfolded through 344 single-point failures, all of which worked.
Image 9807 January 2022
Surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center put a genetically modified pig heart into David Bennett Sr., 57, who lived 60 more days.
2021 to 2022about 8 months
Image 98115 January 2022
A submarine volcano produced the largest atmospheric explosion ever recorded by instruments, a plume 57 kilometres high and a tsunami across the Pacific.
Image 98224 February 2022
Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the largest and deadliest war in Europe since 1945, driving 6 to 7 million people from the country.
Image 98312 May 2022
The Event Horizon Telescope released the first image of Sagittarius A*, the four-million-solar-mass black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.
Image 98422 August 2022
Stable Diffusion, a text-to-image model from LMU Munich's CompVis group, Runway and Stability AI, was released with open weights on 22 August 2022.
Image 98525 August 2022
Monsoon rains and glacier melt after record heat left a third of Pakistan under water, killed 1,739 people and affected 33 million.
2022about 4 months
Image 9868 September 2022
Elizabeth II died at Balmoral aged 96 after 70 years and 214 days on the throne, the longest reign of any British monarch; Charles III succeeded her.
Image 98726 September 2022
NASA's DART spacecraft hit the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos at 23,000 km/h on 26 September 2022 and shortened its orbit by 32 minutes.
Image 98815 November 2022
The United Nations designated 15 November 2022 as the Day of Eight Billion. World population passed one billion around 1804 and seven billion in 2011.
Image 98916 November 2022
The Space Launch System lifted off at 1:47 am on 16 November 2022. An uncrewed Orion capsule reached 432,210 kilometres from Earth and returned after 25 days.
Image 99030 November 2022
OpenAI released ChatGPT on 30 November 2022 as a research preview. It reached an estimated 100 million monthly users within about two months.
2022 to 2023about 5 months
Image 9915 December 2022
At the National Ignition Facility on 5 December 2022, 192 lasers delivered 2.05 megajoules to a fuel capsule and 3.15 megajoules came back.
Image 9926 February 2023
Two earthquakes of magnitude 7.8 and 7.7 nine hours apart killed 53,537 people in Turkey and thousands more in Syria.
Image 99312 March 2023
Naatu Naatu from RRR, composed by M. M. Keeravani with lyrics by Chandrabose, became the first Indian song to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song.
Image 99414 March 2023
OpenAI released GPT-4 on 14 March 2023, a multimodal model that could take images as well as text as input.
Image 99517 March 2023
Taylor Swift's Eras Tour opened in Glendale, Arizona, on 17 March 2023 and ran 149 shows to December 2024, the first tour to gross over 2 billion dollars.
2023about 4 months
Image 99620 April 2023
A 121-metre rocket with 33 engines lifted off on 20 April 2023 and was destroyed four minutes in. The booster was caught by the tower in October 2024.
Image 9973 May 2023
The FDA approved GSK's Arexvy for adults aged 60 and over, the first vaccine against respiratory syncytial virus after six decades of failed attempts.
Image 9985 May 2023
The World Health Organization declared that COVID-19 no longer constituted a public health emergency of international concern, after 13.3 billion vaccine doses had been given.
Image 999c. 1 July 2023
United Nations estimates put India's population at just over 1.428 billion in mid-2023, passing China for the first time since modern population estimates began.
Image 1,0006 July 2023
The FDA granted full approval to lecanemab, the first antibody shown in a large trial to slow early Alzheimer's decline, by 0.45 points on an 18-point scale.
2023about 2 months
Image 1,00123 August 2023
Vikram touched down at about 69 degrees south at 12:33 UTC on 23 August 2023. India became the fourth country to land softly on the Moon.
Image 1,0022 September 2023
India's first solar observatory launched from Sriharikota on 2 September 2023 and entered a halo orbit around the Sun-Earth L1 point on 6 January 2024.
Image 1,00324 September 2023
OSIRIS-REx dropped a capsule holding 121.6 grams of the asteroid Bennu into the Utah desert on 24 September 2023, the largest asteroid sample ever returned.
Image 1,0042 October 2023
WHO recommended R21/Matrix-M, made by the Serum Institute of India, as a second malaria vaccine for children, with 75 percent efficacy in seasonal transmission areas.
Image 1,0057 October 2023
Hamas-led fighters broke through the Gaza barrier and killed 1,195 people, taking 251 hostages; the war in Gaza that followed continued for two years.
2023 to 2024about 7 months
Image 1,00613 October 2023
ImmunoACT announced that India's drug regulator had approved NexCAR19, a CD19 CAR-T cell therapy developed at IIT Bombay and Tata Memorial Centre, for blood cancers.
Image 1,00711 November 2023
The SELECT trial of 17,604 people with obesity but no diabetes found weekly semaglutide reduced cardiovascular death, heart attack and stroke from 8.0 to 6.5 percent.
Image 1,00816 November 2023
Britain's MHRA approved Casgevy on 16 November 2023 for sickle cell disease and beta thalassaemia. The United States FDA followed on 8 December.
Image 1,009March 2024
After 15 years of debate, geologists voted 12 to 4 against making the Anthropocene a formal epoch, leaving the Holocene in place.
Image 1,01016 March 2024
Massachusetts General Hospital transplanted a pig kidney carrying 69 genomic edits into Richard Slayman, 62, the first living person to receive one.
2024about 7 months
Image 1,01125 June 2024
Chang'e 6 landed in the South Pole-Aitken basin on 1 June 2024 and returned 1,935 grams to Earth on 25 June, the first far side samples.
Image 1,01214 August 2024
WHO declared mpox a public health emergency of international concern for the second time, after a new clade Ib strain spread from eastern Congo to four neighbours.
Image 1,01310 September 2024
Polaris Dawn launched on 10 September 2024; on its third day the crew depressurised their Crew Dragon and Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis stepped into space.
Image 1,01413 October 2024
On 13 October 2024 a Super Heavy booster flew back to its launch tower and was caught in mid-air by two mechanical arms, a first for any rocket.
Image 1,0158 December 2024
Opposition forces took Damascus and Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia, ending 53 years of Assad family rule after nearly fourteen years of civil war.
2024about 2 months
Image 1,01624 December 2024
The probe passed about 6.1 million kilometres above the Sun's visible surface on 24 December 2024, at roughly 692,000 kilometres per hour.
Image 1,01710 January 2025
On 10 January 2025, the European Union's Copernicus service reported that 2024 was the warmest year in the instrumental record and the first above 1.5 °C.
Image 1,01816 January 2025
Blue Origin's reusable heavy-lift rocket flew to orbit on its first attempt; the booster landed at sea in November 2025.
Image 1,01920 January 2025
DeepSeek released the R1 reasoning model on 20 January 2025 with its weights free to download. Nvidia's market value fell by close to $600 billion a week later.
Image 1,02020 January 2025
Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th president inside the Capitol rotunda, the first man since Grover Cleveland to return to the office after losing it.
2024 to 2025about 5 months
Image 1,0212 March 2025
Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost landed upright in Mare Crisium on 2 March 2025. It was the first fully successful commercial lunar landing.
Image 1,022c. 7 April 2025
Colossal Biosciences announced three gene-edited grey wolf pups, Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi, and called them the first de-extincted dire wolves.
Image 1,0238 May 2025
A conclave of 133 cardinals elected Robert Prevost of Chicago on the fourth ballot on 8 May 2025. He took the name Leo XIV.
Image 1,02415 May 2025
Doctors reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that infant KJ Muldoon received a base-editing therapy developed in six months for his specific mutation.
Image 1,02518 June 2025
The FDA approved six-monthly lenacapavir injections as Yeztugo; none of 2,134 women receiving it in the PURPOSE 1 trial acquired HIV.
2025about 8 months
Image 1,02623 June 2025
The observatory in Chile released its first images on 23 June 2025. They contained about 2,000 previously uncatalogued asteroids.
Image 1,02725 June 2025
Shubhanshu Shukla flew as pilot of Axiom Mission 4 to the space station on 25 June 2025. He was the first Indian in space in 41 years.
Image 1,028c. 1 July 2025
Astronomers detected 3I/ATLAS on 1 July 2025 and found its orbit was hyperbolic. It is the third object confirmed to have entered the Solar System from outside.
Image 1,02930 July 2025
NISAR launched from Sriharikota on 30 July 2025. Built by NASA and ISRO for about $1.5 billion, it is the first imaging radar satellite carrying two frequencies.
Image 1,0303 January 2026
American forces bombed Venezuelan air defences and captured President Nicolás Maduro in Caracas, flying him to New York to face drug charges.
2025 to 2026about 5 months
Image 1,03128 January 2026
Sarah Mullally, formerly chief nursing officer for England, became the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury and the first woman to lead the Church of England.
Image 1,0325 February 2026
The treaty capping American and Russian deployed strategic nuclear warheads at 1,550 each expired on 5 February 2026 with nothing agreed to replace it.
Image 1,03328 February 2026
American and Israeli strikes killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei during nuclear talks, starting a war in which Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and struck across the Gulf.
Image 1,0341-10 April 2026
Four astronauts flew around the Moon and back between 1 and 10 April 2026. They were the first people beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972.
Image 1,035c. 17 May 2026
WHO declared the Bundibugyo-virus epidemic in eastern Congo and Uganda an international health emergency; by August it was the second-largest recorded Ebola epidemic.
2026about 3 months
Image 1,03610 June 2026
The Tower of Jesus Christ reached its full height of 172.5 metres in February 2026. Pope Leo XIV blessed it on 10 June, a century after Gaudí's death.
Image 1,03711 June - 19 July 2026
Forty-eight teams played 104 matches in sixteen cities across three countries. Spain beat Argentina 1-0 in extra time at MetLife Stadium.
Image 1,03812 August 2026
The Moon's shadow crossed Siberia, the Arctic, Iceland and northern Spain on 12 August 2026. Totality lasted 2 minutes 18 seconds at its longest.
Image 1,03919 August 2026
Merck and Moderna said their 1,137-patient phase 3 trial of intismeran autogene with pembrolizumab for resected melanoma met its recurrence-free survival endpoint.
Image 1,04030 August 2026
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched on 30 August 2026. Its 2.4-metre mirror covers a field about a hundred times wider than Hubble's.
Your lifetimeone dot represents one year
Your lifetime
approximate seconds lived
1.07 bn
of a million-year dot
1/29,412
From your birth year 150 milestones
Image 89123 April 1992your birth year
NASA's COBE satellite mapped faint cosmic microwave background temperature variations, the primordial unevenness from which galaxies formed.
Image 8923 June 1992your birth year
108 heads of state met in Rio de Janeiro and opened the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, signed there by 154 states.
Image 89323 January 1993you were 1 year old
Marc Andreessen announced the first release of NCSA Mosaic on 23 January 1993, the browser that showed images inline with text and made the web popular.
Image 89423 June 1993you were 1 year old
On 23 June 1993 Andrew Wiles ended a Cambridge lecture by proving Fermat's Last Theorem, claimed in a margin in 1637; a gap took two years to close.
Image 8957 April 1994you were 2 years old
Over about 100 days Hutu militias killed between 500,000 and 662,000 Tutsi, often neighbour by neighbour, while the world declined to intervene.
Image 89627 April 1994you were 2 years old
Close to 20 million people voted in the first non-racial election on 27 April 1994. Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as president on 10 May.
Image 89716 July 1994you were 2 years old
Fragments of a comet torn apart by Jupiter's tides struck the planet at 60 kilometres a second, leaving dark scars larger than the Great Red Spot.
Image 89812 January 1995you were 3 years old
Eight grey wolves captured near Jasper, Alberta, arrived in Yellowstone on 12 January 1995, 69 years after park rangers killed the last two pups.
Image 8995 June 1995you were 3 years old
On 5 June 1995 Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman cooled about two thousand rubidium atoms to 170 billionths of a degree above zero, into one quantum state.
Image 90016 July 1995you were 3 years old
Jeff Bezos's online bookstore Amazon.com launched on 16 July 1995, a year after he founded the company as Cadabra in Bellevue, Washington.
Image 9016 October 1995you were 3 years old
Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz announced a planet at least half Jupiter's mass circling 51 Pegasi every four days, found by the star's tiny wobble.
Image 9027 December 1995you were 3 years old
Galileo arrived at Jupiter on 7 December 1995, the first spacecraft to orbit an outer planet, after six years of gravity assists past Venus and Earth.
Image 90318 December 1995you were 3 years old
Hubble stared for ten days at a patch of sky the size of a tennis ball 100 metres away and found about 3,000 galaxies in it.
Image 9045 July 1996you were 4 years old
Dolly was born at the Roslin Institute on 5 July 1996, from a mammary cell of an adult ewe. She was the single success from 277 attempts.
Image 905May 1997you were 5 years old
An IBM supercomputer evaluating 200 million chess positions a second won a six-game rematch against the reigning world champion, three and a half to two and a half.
Image 90626 June 1997you were 5 years old
Bloomsbury published J. K. Rowling's first Harry Potter novel on 26 June 1997 in a print run of 500 hardbacks, 300 of them for libraries.
Image 9071 July 1997you were 5 years old
At midnight Britain returned Hong Kong to China after 156 years, ending its last major colony under a promise of one country, two systems for 50 years.
Image 9084 July 1997you were 5 years old
Mars Pathfinder bounced to a stop on airbags in Ares Vallis on 4 July 1997. The next day the 10.6-kilogram Sojourner rover drove down a ramp.
Image 90911 May 1998you were 6 years old
India detonated three nuclear devices at Pokhran, then two more on 13 May, and declared itself a nuclear weapons state; Pakistan tested within weeks.
Image 9101998you were 6 years old
Two teams measuring distant Type Ia supernovae found them 10 to 15 percent fainter than expected, showing the universe's expansion is accelerating.
Image 9114 September 1998you were 6 years old
Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporated Google on 4 September 1998. Their search ranked pages by the number and quality of links pointing at them.
Image 91220 November 1998you were 6 years old
The Russian-built Zarya module launched from Baikonur on 20 November 1998. People have lived aboard without a break since 2 November 2000.
Image 91315 January 2001you were 9 years old
Wikipedia began on 15 January 2001 as a side project to a peer-reviewed encyclopedia. It now holds over 65 million articles in more than 300 languages.
Image 91420 July 2001you were 9 years old
Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away opened in Japan on 20 July 2001, became the highest-grossing film in Japanese history and won the Academy Award for animation.
Image 91511 September 2001you were 9 years old
Nineteen al-Qaeda hijackers took four airliners on the morning of 11 September 2001. 2,977 people died, from more than 90 countries.
Image 91616 November 2002you were 10 years old
The first known case of SARS fell ill in Guangdong on 16 November 2002; the coronavirus infected 8,422 people, killing 11 percent, before it was stopped in 2003.
Image 9171 February 2003you were 11 years old
Space Shuttle Columbia broke apart on reentry over Texas on 1 February 2003; all seven of the STS-107 crew died, including Kalpana Chawla.
Image 91820 March 2003you were 11 years old
A US-led coalition invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein; no stockpiles of the weapons of mass destruction cited as justification were ever found.
Image 91914 April 2003you were 11 years old
The Human Genome Project declared an essentially complete sequence on 14 April 2003, after thirteen years and roughly $3 billion.
Image 92015 October 2003you were 11 years old
Yang Liwei orbited the Earth 14 times in Shenzhou 5 on 15 October 2003, making China the third country to launch a person into space on its own.
Image 9214 February 2004you were 12 years old
Mark Zuckerberg launched TheFacebook from Harvard on 4 February 2004; by December 2023 it had about 3.07 billion monthly users.
Image 9221 July 2004you were 12 years old
Cassini entered orbit around Saturn on 1 July 2004, the first spacecraft to do so, and circled the planet for thirteen years.
Image 92326 December 2004you were 12 years old
A magnitude 9.2 to 9.3 earthquake off Sumatra raised waves up to 30 metres that killed an estimated 227,898 people in 14 countries.
Image 92414 January 2005you were 13 years old
ESA's Huygens probe descended through Titan's haze on 14 January 2005 and transmitted from the surface for at least 72 minutes.
Image 92523 April 2005you were 13 years old
Jawed Karim uploaded a 19-second clip filmed at San Diego Zoo on 23 April 2005. Hundreds of hours of video are now uploaded every minute.
Image 92629 August 2005you were 13 years old
Katrina's surge broke more than 50 levees around New Orleans and flooded about 80 percent of the city, killing 1,392 people.
Image 9272006you were 14 years old
In 2006 Shinya Yamanaka and Kazutoshi Takahashi at Kyoto University turned adult mouse skin cells back into stem cells with just four genes.
Image 92824 August 2006you were 14 years old
The International Astronomical Union voted a definition of planet requiring a cleared orbit, leaving eight planets and making Pluto a dwarf planet.
Image 929March 2007you were 15 years old
Safaricom and Vodafone launched M-Pesa in Kenya in March 2007, letting people send money by text message; about 17 million accounts had been opened by 2012.
Image 93029 June 2007you were 15 years old
Steve Jobs announced the iPhone on 9 January 2007 and it went on sale on 29 June at $499, with a multi-touch screen and no physical keyboard.
Image 93110 September 2008you were 16 years old
On 10 September 2008 CERN steered the first proton beam all the way round the Large Hadron Collider's 26.7-kilometre ring, at 10:28 local time.
Image 93215 September 2008you were 16 years old
Lehman Brothers filed the largest bankruptcy in American history, over 600 billion dollars in assets, and the global financial crisis broke.
Image 93323 September 2008you were 16 years old
Google introduced Android with the HTC Dream, the T-Mobile G1, at a New York subway station press conference on 23 September 2008.
Image 93422 October 2008you were 16 years old
ISRO launched India's first lunar probe on 22 October 2008. NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper aboard it found water molecules across the surface.
Image 9353 January 2009you were 17 years old
Satoshi Nakamoto mined the first block of the bitcoin chain on 3 January 2009, embedding that day's Times headline about a second bank bailout.
Image 93613 June 2010you were 18 years old
Japan's Hayabusa returned grains from the asteroid Itokawa to Earth on 13 June 2010, the first sample ever brought back from an asteroid.
Image 937September 2010you were 18 years old
India issued the first Aadhaar number in September 2010; by May 2023 more than 99.9 percent of adults held the twelve-digit biometric identity.
Image 93817 December 2010you were 18 years old
A Tunisian street vendor's self-immolation set off uprisings that toppled the rulers of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen and began Syria's civil war.
Image 93911 March 2011you were 19 years old
A magnitude 9.0 to 9.1 earthquake raised a tsunami up to 40 metres high that killed nearly 20,000 people and caused three reactor meltdowns at Fukushima.
Image 94018 November 2011you were 19 years old
Mojang released Minecraft version 1.0.0 on 18 November 2011; it later sold more than 400 million copies, the most of any video game.
Image 941June 2012you were 20 years old
Jennifer Doudna, Emmanuelle Charpentier and colleagues showed in June 2012 that a bacterial defence system could be aimed at any chosen DNA sequence.
Image 94222 June 2012you were 20 years old
Tesla showed the first production Model S to employees, customers and press at its Fremont factory on 22 June 2012, an electric car with 426 km of range.
Image 9434 July 2012you were 20 years old
The ATLAS and CMS detectors at the Large Hadron Collider both reported a new boson near 125 GeV on 4 July 2012.
Image 9446 August 2012you were 20 years old
A rocket-powered sky crane lowered the 899-kilogram Curiosity rover into Gale Crater on 6 August 2012. It worked at the first attempt.
Image 94530 September 2012you were 20 years old
A deep convolutional network with 60 million parameters won the ImageNet challenge with a top-5 error rate of 15.3 per cent, over 10 points ahead of the runner-up.
Image 94615 February 2013you were 21 years old
An undetected 18-metre asteroid exploded about 30 kilometres above the Urals with the force of roughly 500 kilotons, injuring 1,491 people, mostly by shattered glass.
Image 94713 March 2013you were 21 years old
On 13 March 2013 the conclave elected Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, the first Jesuit pope and the first from the Americas; he took the name Francis.
Image 948December 2013you were 21 years old
An Ebola outbreak that began with a child's death in Meliandou, Guinea, in December 2013 became the largest ever, with 28,616 cases and 11,310 deaths by 2016.
Image 94924 September 2014you were 22 years old
India's Mars Orbiter Mission entered Mars orbit on 24 September 2014, at the first attempt, for about 4.5 billion rupees.
Image 95012 November 2014you were 22 years old
Rosetta released the Philae lander onto comet 67P on 12 November 2014. Its harpoons failed and it bounced twice before settling in shadow.
Image 95114 July 2015you were 23 years old
New Horizons flew past Pluto on 14 July 2015 at 13.8 kilometres per second, after a journey of nearly five billion kilometres.
Image 95214 September 2015you were 23 years old
Both LIGO detectors registered a 0.2-second chirp on 14 September 2015, from two black holes merging 1.3 billion light years away.
Image 95312 December 2015you were 23 years old
Adopted at the end of COP21 on 12 December 2015. Each of the 196 parties writes its own targets and must strengthen them every five years.
Image 95421 December 2015you were 23 years old
A Falcon 9 first stage flew back from an orbital launch and landed upright on a pad at Cape Canaveral, the first attempt on solid ground to succeed.
Image 955March 2016you were 24 years old
DeepMind's AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol four games to one at Go in Seoul in March 2016, in front of perhaps 100 million viewers.
Image 95611 April 2016you were 24 years old
The National Payments Corporation of India launched the Unified Payments Interface on 11 April 2016; by August 2025 it handled 20 billion transactions a month.
Image 95723 June 2016you were 24 years old
British voters chose by 51.9 percent to leave the European Union, the first state ever to do so; David Cameron resigned the next morning.
Image 958February 2017you were 25 years old
Michaël Gillon's team announced seven Earth-sized planets circling a cool red dwarf about 40 light-years away, up to four of them in the habitable zone.
Image 95912 June 2017you were 25 years old
Eight Google researchers published the transformer architecture; the paper has since been cited more than 250,000 times.
Image 96017 August 2017you were 25 years old
LIGO and Virgo caught a 100-second chirp from merging neutron stars, and 70 observatories then watched the kilonova in the galaxy NGC 4993.
Image 96119 October 2017you were 25 years old
Robert Weryk found a reddish, elongated object with the Pan-STARRS telescope that was leaving the Solar System on a path from between the stars.
Image 9623 January 2019you were 27 years old
China landed Chang'e 4 in Von Kármán crater on 3 January 2019, using the Queqiao relay satellite to communicate with Earth.
Image 96310 April 2019you were 27 years old
The Event Horizon Telescope released an image of the black hole at the centre of M87 on 10 April 2019, from eight linked observatories.
Image 96424 May 2019you were 27 years old
SpaceX launched the first 60 Starlink satellites on a Falcon 9 on 24 May 2019, the start of a constellation with 12 million subscribers by June 2026.
Image 96523 October 2019you were 27 years old
On 23 October 2019 Google published in Nature that its 53-qubit Sycamore chip did in 200 seconds a task it said would take a supercomputer 10,000 years.
Image 9669 February 2020you were 28 years old
Bong Joon Ho's Parasite won Best Picture at the 92nd Academy Awards, the first film not in English to do so.
Image 96711 March 2020you were 28 years old
The WHO declared a pandemic on 11 March 2020. It estimates 14.9 million excess deaths in 2020 and 2021.
Image 96825 May 2020you were 28 years old
A Minneapolis police officer knelt on George Floyd's neck for over nine minutes; the filmed killing set off protests in more than 2,000 cities worldwide.
Image 96928 May 2020you were 28 years old
OpenAI described GPT-3, a language model with 175 billion parameters, in an arXiv preprint by 31 researchers on 28 May 2020.
Image 97030 May 2020you were 28 years old
Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken rode a SpaceX Crew Dragon to the space station on 30 May 2020, the first crew launched by a private company.
Image 971October 2020you were 28 years old
In October 2020 Waymo became the first company to carry the public in cars with no safety driver, in the Phoenix area.
Image 9728 December 2020you were 28 years old
BioNTech's team designed a vaccine in January 2020 from the published genome. Margaret Keenan received the first shot in Coventry on 8 December 2020.
Image 97316 December 2020you were 28 years old
Chang'e 5 brought 1,731 grams of lunar soil back to Earth on 16 December 2020, the first Moon samples returned since 1976.
Image 97418 February 2021you were 29 years old
NASA's Perseverance rover landed in Jezero Crater on 18 February 2021 to hunt for signs of ancient life and cache rock for return to Earth.
Image 97519 April 2021you were 29 years old
Ingenuity rose three metres above Jezero Crater on 19 April 2021 and hovered for 39.1 seconds. It later made 72 flights.
Image 97629 April 2021you were 29 years old
The Tianhe core module launched on 29 April 2021, the start of Tiangong, China's permanent space station and the third modular station after Mir and the ISS.
Image 977July 2021you were 29 years old
DeepMind published and open-sourced its protein structure prediction method in July 2021. By July 2022 the database held over 200 million predicted structures.
Image 97815 August 2021you were 29 years old
The Taliban entered Kabul as President Ghani fled, ending the twenty-year war; more than 123,000 people were airlifted out in the following fortnight.
Image 97925 December 2021you were 29 years old
Webb launched on an Ariane 5 from French Guiana on 25 December 2021. Its mirror and sunshield unfolded through 344 single-point failures, all of which worked.
Image 9807 January 2022you were 30 years old
Surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center put a genetically modified pig heart into David Bennett Sr., 57, who lived 60 more days.
Image 98115 January 2022you were 30 years old
A submarine volcano produced the largest atmospheric explosion ever recorded by instruments, a plume 57 kilometres high and a tsunami across the Pacific.
Image 98224 February 2022you were 30 years old
Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the largest and deadliest war in Europe since 1945, driving 6 to 7 million people from the country.
Image 98312 May 2022you were 30 years old
The Event Horizon Telescope released the first image of Sagittarius A*, the four-million-solar-mass black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.
Image 98422 August 2022you were 30 years old
Stable Diffusion, a text-to-image model from LMU Munich's CompVis group, Runway and Stability AI, was released with open weights on 22 August 2022.
Image 98525 August 2022you were 30 years old
Monsoon rains and glacier melt after record heat left a third of Pakistan under water, killed 1,739 people and affected 33 million.
Image 9868 September 2022you were 30 years old
Elizabeth II died at Balmoral aged 96 after 70 years and 214 days on the throne, the longest reign of any British monarch; Charles III succeeded her.
Image 98726 September 2022you were 30 years old
NASA's DART spacecraft hit the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos at 23,000 km/h on 26 September 2022 and shortened its orbit by 32 minutes.
Image 98815 November 2022you were 30 years old
The United Nations designated 15 November 2022 as the Day of Eight Billion. World population passed one billion around 1804 and seven billion in 2011.
Image 98916 November 2022you were 30 years old
The Space Launch System lifted off at 1:47 am on 16 November 2022. An uncrewed Orion capsule reached 432,210 kilometres from Earth and returned after 25 days.
Image 99030 November 2022you were 30 years old
OpenAI released ChatGPT on 30 November 2022 as a research preview. It reached an estimated 100 million monthly users within about two months.
Image 9915 December 2022you were 30 years old
At the National Ignition Facility on 5 December 2022, 192 lasers delivered 2.05 megajoules to a fuel capsule and 3.15 megajoules came back.
Image 9926 February 2023you were 31 years old
Two earthquakes of magnitude 7.8 and 7.7 nine hours apart killed 53,537 people in Turkey and thousands more in Syria.
Image 99312 March 2023you were 31 years old
Naatu Naatu from RRR, composed by M. M. Keeravani with lyrics by Chandrabose, became the first Indian song to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song.
Image 99414 March 2023you were 31 years old
OpenAI released GPT-4 on 14 March 2023, a multimodal model that could take images as well as text as input.
Image 99517 March 2023you were 31 years old
Taylor Swift's Eras Tour opened in Glendale, Arizona, on 17 March 2023 and ran 149 shows to December 2024, the first tour to gross over 2 billion dollars.
Image 99620 April 2023you were 31 years old
A 121-metre rocket with 33 engines lifted off on 20 April 2023 and was destroyed four minutes in. The booster was caught by the tower in October 2024.
Image 9973 May 2023you were 31 years old
The FDA approved GSK's Arexvy for adults aged 60 and over, the first vaccine against respiratory syncytial virus after six decades of failed attempts.
Image 9985 May 2023you were 31 years old
The World Health Organization declared that COVID-19 no longer constituted a public health emergency of international concern, after 13.3 billion vaccine doses had been given.
Image 999c. 1 July 2023you were 31 years old
United Nations estimates put India's population at just over 1.428 billion in mid-2023, passing China for the first time since modern population estimates began.
Image 1,0006 July 2023you were 31 years old
The FDA granted full approval to lecanemab, the first antibody shown in a large trial to slow early Alzheimer's decline, by 0.45 points on an 18-point scale.
Image 1,00123 August 2023you were 31 years old
Vikram touched down at about 69 degrees south at 12:33 UTC on 23 August 2023. India became the fourth country to land softly on the Moon.
Image 1,0022 September 2023you were 31 years old
India's first solar observatory launched from Sriharikota on 2 September 2023 and entered a halo orbit around the Sun-Earth L1 point on 6 January 2024.
Image 1,00324 September 2023you were 31 years old
OSIRIS-REx dropped a capsule holding 121.6 grams of the asteroid Bennu into the Utah desert on 24 September 2023, the largest asteroid sample ever returned.
Image 1,0042 October 2023you were 31 years old
WHO recommended R21/Matrix-M, made by the Serum Institute of India, as a second malaria vaccine for children, with 75 percent efficacy in seasonal transmission areas.
Image 1,0057 October 2023you were 31 years old
Hamas-led fighters broke through the Gaza barrier and killed 1,195 people, taking 251 hostages; the war in Gaza that followed continued for two years.
Image 1,00613 October 2023you were 31 years old
ImmunoACT announced that India's drug regulator had approved NexCAR19, a CD19 CAR-T cell therapy developed at IIT Bombay and Tata Memorial Centre, for blood cancers.
Image 1,00711 November 2023you were 31 years old
The SELECT trial of 17,604 people with obesity but no diabetes found weekly semaglutide reduced cardiovascular death, heart attack and stroke from 8.0 to 6.5 percent.
Image 1,00816 November 2023you were 31 years old
Britain's MHRA approved Casgevy on 16 November 2023 for sickle cell disease and beta thalassaemia. The United States FDA followed on 8 December.
Image 1,009March 2024you were 32 years old
After 15 years of debate, geologists voted 12 to 4 against making the Anthropocene a formal epoch, leaving the Holocene in place.
Image 1,01016 March 2024you were 32 years old
Massachusetts General Hospital transplanted a pig kidney carrying 69 genomic edits into Richard Slayman, 62, the first living person to receive one.
Image 1,01125 June 2024you were 32 years old
Chang'e 6 landed in the South Pole-Aitken basin on 1 June 2024 and returned 1,935 grams to Earth on 25 June, the first far side samples.
Image 1,01214 August 2024you were 32 years old
WHO declared mpox a public health emergency of international concern for the second time, after a new clade Ib strain spread from eastern Congo to four neighbours.
Image 1,01310 September 2024you were 32 years old
Polaris Dawn launched on 10 September 2024; on its third day the crew depressurised their Crew Dragon and Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis stepped into space.
Image 1,01413 October 2024you were 32 years old
On 13 October 2024 a Super Heavy booster flew back to its launch tower and was caught in mid-air by two mechanical arms, a first for any rocket.
Image 1,0158 December 2024you were 32 years old
Opposition forces took Damascus and Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia, ending 53 years of Assad family rule after nearly fourteen years of civil war.
Image 1,01624 December 2024you were 32 years old
The probe passed about 6.1 million kilometres above the Sun's visible surface on 24 December 2024, at roughly 692,000 kilometres per hour.
Image 1,01710 January 2025you were 33 years old
On 10 January 2025, the European Union's Copernicus service reported that 2024 was the warmest year in the instrumental record and the first above 1.5 °C.
Image 1,01816 January 2025you were 33 years old
Blue Origin's reusable heavy-lift rocket flew to orbit on its first attempt; the booster landed at sea in November 2025.
Image 1,01920 January 2025you were 33 years old
DeepSeek released the R1 reasoning model on 20 January 2025 with its weights free to download. Nvidia's market value fell by close to $600 billion a week later.
Image 1,02020 January 2025you were 33 years old
Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th president inside the Capitol rotunda, the first man since Grover Cleveland to return to the office after losing it.
Image 1,0212 March 2025you were 33 years old
Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost landed upright in Mare Crisium on 2 March 2025. It was the first fully successful commercial lunar landing.
Image 1,022c. 7 April 2025you were 33 years old
Colossal Biosciences announced three gene-edited grey wolf pups, Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi, and called them the first de-extincted dire wolves.
Image 1,0238 May 2025you were 33 years old
A conclave of 133 cardinals elected Robert Prevost of Chicago on the fourth ballot on 8 May 2025. He took the name Leo XIV.
Image 1,02415 May 2025you were 33 years old
Doctors reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that infant KJ Muldoon received a base-editing therapy developed in six months for his specific mutation.
Image 1,02518 June 2025you were 33 years old
The FDA approved six-monthly lenacapavir injections as Yeztugo; none of 2,134 women receiving it in the PURPOSE 1 trial acquired HIV.
Image 1,02623 June 2025you were 33 years old
The observatory in Chile released its first images on 23 June 2025. They contained about 2,000 previously uncatalogued asteroids.
Image 1,02725 June 2025you were 33 years old
Shubhanshu Shukla flew as pilot of Axiom Mission 4 to the space station on 25 June 2025. He was the first Indian in space in 41 years.
Image 1,028c. 1 July 2025you were 33 years old
Astronomers detected 3I/ATLAS on 1 July 2025 and found its orbit was hyperbolic. It is the third object confirmed to have entered the Solar System from outside.
Image 1,02930 July 2025you were 33 years old
NISAR launched from Sriharikota on 30 July 2025. Built by NASA and ISRO for about $1.5 billion, it is the first imaging radar satellite carrying two frequencies.
Image 1,0303 January 2026you were 34 years old
American forces bombed Venezuelan air defences and captured President Nicolás Maduro in Caracas, flying him to New York to face drug charges.
Image 1,03128 January 2026you were 34 years old
Sarah Mullally, formerly chief nursing officer for England, became the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury and the first woman to lead the Church of England.
Image 1,0325 February 2026you were 34 years old
The treaty capping American and Russian deployed strategic nuclear warheads at 1,550 each expired on 5 February 2026 with nothing agreed to replace it.
Image 1,03328 February 2026you were 34 years old
American and Israeli strikes killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei during nuclear talks, starting a war in which Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and struck across the Gulf.
Image 1,0341-10 April 2026you were 34 years old
Four astronauts flew around the Moon and back between 1 and 10 April 2026. They were the first people beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972.
Image 1,035c. 17 May 2026you were 34 years old
WHO declared the Bundibugyo-virus epidemic in eastern Congo and Uganda an international health emergency; by August it was the second-largest recorded Ebola epidemic.
Image 1,03610 June 2026you were 34 years old
The Tower of Jesus Christ reached its full height of 172.5 metres in February 2026. Pope Leo XIV blessed it on 10 June, a century after Gaudí's death.
Image 1,03711 June - 19 July 2026you were 34 years old
Forty-eight teams played 104 matches in sixteen cities across three countries. Spain beat Argentina 1-0 in extra time at MetLife Stadium.
Image 1,03812 August 2026you were 34 years old
The Moon's shadow crossed Siberia, the Arctic, Iceland and northern Spain on 12 August 2026. Totality lasted 2 minutes 18 seconds at its longest.
Image 1,03919 August 2026you were 34 years old
Merck and Moderna said their 1,137-patient phase 3 trial of intismeran autogene with pembrolizumab for resected melanoma met its recurrence-free survival endpoint.
Image 1,04030 August 2026you were 34 years old
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched on 30 August 2026. Its 2.4-metre mirror covers a field about a hundred times wider than Hubble's.
Compare the scales
Each bar represents one section. The coloured segment shows how much time the next bar covers. The first two segments are enlarged so they remain visible. Your lifetime is the final bar.
Your life so far covers about 1/29,412 of a million-year dot. Homo sapiens appears only in the final dot.
The rest of time
Stars will keep forming for about 100 trillion years. The 13.8 billion years on this page are the first 0.014% of that. Adams and Laughlin, 1997