Prehistoric Timeline

Sahelanthropus tchadensis, a species identified from a skull unearthed in Chad, may rank among the earliest kin of humans. Ardipithecus ramidus is represented by Ardi, a partial skeleton that combined upright walking with life in the trees. Another upright walker was Lucy, an Australopithecus afarensis from c. 3.2 million years ago. Stone tools from beside Kenya's Lake Turkana go back to c. 3.3 million years ago. Ethiopia yielded a lower jaw, the earliest Homo fossil known, from c. 2.8 million years ago.

The Oldowan toolkit, among the earliest stone tool industries, featured hammerstones and simple stone cores. Homo habilis took the name "handy man", and simple stone tools turned up with its fossils. Homo erectus, the first human species with body proportions like ours, could walk far, and early humans spread out of Africa. Fossils from Dmanisi, in Georgia, offered some of the oldest evidence for early humans beyond Africa. Homo erectus also became the first human species to craft Acheulean handaxes, a major step forward for stone tools. Its fossils include finds on Java, in Indonesia, and Peking Man, from China.

Among the earliest signs that human ancestors used fire is wood ash found at Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa, dating to c. 1 million years ago. Populations of Homo erectus most likely evolved into later species such as Homo heidelbergensis, a hunter that butchered large animals, including horses and rhinos. Fire-making left its oldest clear traces at Barnham, England, c. 400 thousand years ago, where probably early Neanderthals were at work. From Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, c. 315 thousand years ago, come the earliest known remains thought to be Homo sapiens. Homo heidelbergensis is seen by many researchers as the shared ancestor of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, with the step to Homo sapiens taken in Africa.

At Schöningen in Germany, archaeologists uncovered the earliest complete wooden hunting weapons that anyone knows of. A jawbone from Misliya Cave in Israel shows some Homo sapiens had already left Africa far sooner than scholars once thought. On Flores in Indonesia lived Homo floresiensis, a tiny species nicknamed the 'hobbit'. In Morocco, shell beads from Bizmoune Cave were likely worn as identity markers, and someone at Blombos Cave in South Africa drew a cross-hatched pattern in red ochre, the oldest drawing known.

The oldest known rock art is a hand stencil from a cave on Muna Island, Indonesia, and its makers likely belonged to the modern human population that later reached Australia. A drying climate may have helped drive modern humans out of Africa. Earlier groups that left had little lasting success, and nearly all people outside the continent descend from a later wave. A cave painting at Leang Karampuang on Sulawesi is the oldest known art to tell a story. As modern humans spread beyond Africa, they interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans.

In Bulgaria, Bacho Kiro Cave held remains and ornaments of some of the earliest modern humans known in Europe. All had recent Neanderthal ancestors. In Australia, Mungo Man was buried at Lake Mungo, red ochre on his body. The Neanderthals died out soon after modern humans reached Europe. A German cave yielded the Venus of Hohle Fels, a woman carved from mammoth ivory. At Chauvet Cave in France, most painted animals were formidable: lions, rhinoceroses and bears.

Footprints at White Sands, New Mexico, were among the oldest signs of people in the Americas, earlier than once thought. Later, cave art at Lascaux in France showed mostly bison, horses, deer, aurochs and ibex. Xianrendong Cave in China yielded the oldest known pottery. Hunter-gatherers in East Asia made pottery thousands of years before farming took hold there, and at Ohalo II in Israel, people were already using wheat and barley grains long before crops were cultivated. Then, after the last Ice Age, people adapted these ways of life to new environments, a stage known as the Mesolithic.

The last Ice Age ended; some scholars think the changing climate helped bring about farming. In North America, Clovis people made fluted spear points, hunting mammoths and other big game. A recent study argues southern Chile's Monte Verde is far younger than long thought. Natufian foragers of the Levant relied on wild cereals but likely did not yet farm. In the Middle East, farming first began c. 10,000 BCE, as people learned to cultivate crops and keep livestock. Hunter-gatherers had already built Göbekli Tepe, a monumental ritual site, challenging old ideas about the rise of complex societies.

Settlers at Jericho built a large stone tower and surrounded their settlement with a large stone wall. Farming began in China too, where people domesticated millet and rice first. Farming led many people into permanent communities and away from the hunter-gatherer life. At Çatalhöyük, houses were packed so tightly that people entered through roof openings. By the period's end, farming and permanent villages were firmly established across the Middle East, and from there farming, along with herd animals such as goats, began to spread into Europe.

Farming reached Europe's southeast first, its centre and north thousands of years later. Farmers of the Linear Pottery culture covered much of central Europe. In Mexico, teosinte, a wild grass of the Balsas River valley, was domesticated into maize. Indigenous farmers in the Andes domesticated the potato, a staple food of South America. South Asia's northwest saw its earliest known farming evidence at Mehrgarh, in Balochistan, Pakistan. In the New Guinea highlands, farming arose independently, based on bananas, taro and yam at Kuk Swamp and other sites.

By c. 5000 BCE, people in southeastern Europe were smelting copper from ore, perhaps inventing the technique independently; the earliest known smelting site lay in Serbia. At Varna in Bulgaria, a few graves held gold and other lavish goods, early evidence of social hierarchy. Malta's megalithic temples, including Ġgantija on Gozo, ranked among the world's oldest free-standing stone buildings. Altars and animal bones found there suggest rituals that likely included animal sacrifice. This Chalcolithic stage of copper working led toward the Bronze Age, when copper was combined with tin to make bronze. In southern Mesopotamia, Uruk grew into a true city, the largest in the region.

In Mesopotamia, bronze began replacing copper for tools and weapons. The same age produced the wheel. Writing appeared c. 3200 BCE in Mesopotamia, and Uruk is known as its birthplace. It grew from accounting: the need to track goods and payments brought records on clay tablets. Because names were hard to render with picture signs, writers used signs for sounds. Egypt's earliest known writing, hieroglyphs on seals and on small labels, comes from Abydos.

In the Alps, an arrow struck a man now called Ötzi, who probably bled to death. At Newgrange in Ireland, solstice sunlight still travels the tomb's passage into its inner chamber. Skara Brae's Orkney villagers built stone houses and stone furniture. The Americas' oldest known civilisation built Caral in Peru's Supe Valley. Stonehenge, built and rebuilt in stages over many centuries, tracks society's move from the New Stone Age into the Bronze Age. Writing made written history possible; before it, people left objects and other remains rather than written records of their lives.