The Human Timeline

The story of the human family begins here — in the forests and savannahs of Africa, where a series of bipedal apes evolved over millions of years into increasingly large-brained toolmakers. The Oldowan and Acheulean stone-tool traditions mark the earliest evidence of technology, and the first great dispersal of Homo erectus out of Africa brought hominins to Eurasia nearly two million years ago.

Anatomically modern Homo sapiens emerged in Africa around 300,000 years ago and spread across the world, encountering and eventually replacing related species including Neanderthals and Denisovans. By 12,000 BCE humans had reached every habitable continent — including the Americas via the Siberian land bridge — and developed a rich diversity of Ice Age cultures from the Aurignacian cave artists of Europe to the Clovis hunters of North America.

The end of the Ice Age triggered a revolution in human society: farming emerged independently in the Levant, China, and the Americas, and farming populations then expanded outward, replacing or absorbing hunter-gatherers across vast territories. The Yamnaya pastoralists of the Pontic-Caspian steppe delivered Indo-European languages to Europe and South Asia in one of prehistory's most consequential migrations, while Austronesian sailors began their extraordinary colonisation of the Pacific from Taiwan.

The Iron Age saw the rise of the classical civilisations — Greek, Roman, Persian, Indian, Chinese — and the first truly intercontinental networks of trade and diaspora. Phoenician and Greek colonists carried urban culture across the Mediterranean; the Babylonian exile and later Roman dispersal scattered Jewish communities across three continents; Celtic Iron Age cultures spread from Central Europe to the British Isles and Iberia; and Austronesian seafarers completed the colonisation of the Pacific and reached Madagascar.

The medieval millennium was shaped by movements of faith and conquest. Islam spread from the Arabian Peninsula with extraordinary speed, reaching the Iberian Peninsula and Central Asia within a century of the Prophet's death. Turkic pastoral federations reshaped Central Asia and Anatolia, the Vikings carved trade routes from Newfoundland to Byzantium, Romani communities migrated westward from South Asia, and the Mongol conquests produced the largest contiguous land empire in history — and catastrophic demographic disruption across Eurasia.

European maritime empires transformed the demographic map of the world after 1492, as conquest and colonisation destroyed or displaced Indigenous civilisations in the Americas and forced approximately 12 million Africans across the Atlantic in history's largest forced migration. The Caribbean, the Americas, and southern Africa were permanently reshaped by the intermingling of European settlers, enslaved Africans, and surviving Indigenous peoples.

Industrialisation, empire, and catastrophe drove the mass migrations of the modern age. Steamships and railways enabled tens of millions of Europeans to emigrate to the Americas and Australasia; the partition of colonial territories in India and Palestine created refugee crises that remain unresolved; the Chinese and South Asian diasporas shaped the economies of Southeast Asia and the Gulf; and decolonisation generated a Caribbean and South Asian presence in Britain that permanently changed its culture.