World History Timeline

It all began in Africa, where our species, Homo sapiens, evolved. Later, modern humans spread beyond Africa, reaching Asia, Australia and Europe. Prehistoric artists at Chauvet Cave, France, painted and engraved animals, with lions, rhinos and bears among the most common. At White Sands, New Mexico, fossil footprints show people lived in the Americas at an earlier date than many scientists had thought.

Hunter-gatherers who had not yet started farming built Göbekli Tepe, a temple site, and it challenged older assumptions about early societies. People first took up farming c. 10,000 BCE in the Middle East, starting the Neolithic Revolution. Farming led many people out of hunting and gathering and into permanent settlements. As farming communities produced more food, some people turned to specialized work, such as crafts. More food supported more people, and farming villages grew over time into towns and then cities.

In the Sumerian city of Uruk, people began recording goods on clay tablets, the start of cuneiform. According to tradition, King Menes made Upper and Lower Egypt one kingdom, founding the First Dynasty. At Giza, the Great Pyramid rose under Khufu, a 4th Dynasty king. In Indus Valley cities like Mohenjo-daro, drains served houses and streets. Caral, in Peru, was a centre of the Americas' oldest known civilisation.

Hammurabi, king of Babylon, issued 282 legal rulings covering family life, trade and similar matters. Under the Shang dynasty, Chinese writing developed, carved onto animal bones and turtle shells. Then came the Late Bronze Age collapse, which brought down great powers, the Hittite Empire among them. Blame once fell on the Sea Peoples; scholars now see several causes. Once the collapse ran its course, iron became the main metal of the Middle East and the Mediterranean, replacing bronze.

Under the Olmec, Mesoamerica gained its first great civilisation, thought to have shaped patterns its later peoples followed. Buddhism was founded in India by Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha. Alexander the Great of Macedon toppled the Achaemenid Persian Empire, then extended his conquests into India. After the suffering of his Kalinga conquest, the Mauryan emperor Ashoka renounced war, then embraced Buddhism. China's first empire was founded by the Qin dynasty.

Unlike the Qin, the Han adopted Confucianism as its ideology of government. The Roman Republic then gave way to an empire under Augustus, its first emperor. In 220 CE the Han ended, and China split into three kingdoms. In 476 CE, Odoacer became king of Italy, traditionally the end of the Western Roman Empire. The empire's eastern half survived the west's fall, continuing as the Byzantine Empire.

In 622 CE Muhammad moved from Mecca to Medina, and the Islamic calendar counts its years from this migration, the Hijra. In 750 CE the Abbasids overthrew the Umayyads, taking the caliphate, the Islamic empire's rule. In China, Bi Sheng invented movable type, baked clay pieces for printing. In the First Crusade, crusader armies besieged Jerusalem, captured it, and massacred many of its inhabitants. In 1206 CE Genghis Khan became leader of a tribal federation and founded the Mongol Empire.

A Mongol army seized Baghdad and executed the caliph, and the Abbasid Caliphate fell. Mansa Musa's pilgrimage to Mecca made Mali renowned for its wealth well beyond Africa, and Europe grew interested in its gold. After the Black Death, Europe lacked workers, and wages rose. The Ottoman state spread from Anatolia into southeastern Europe and took over the Balkans. Johannes Gutenberg invented a new method of printing, and it spread across Europe.

The period opened when Mehmed II, Ottoman sultan, conquered Constantinople and ended the Byzantine Empire. On his first voyage for Spain, Christopher Columbus reached the Caribbean and claimed land for the Spanish crown. The Columbian Exchange then moved plants, animals and diseases both ways, linking the Americas with Europe and Africa. Helped by superior weapons and European diseases, Spanish forces under Hernán Cortés conquered the Aztec Empire. As sugar plantations spread across the Caribbean, demand for enslaved Africans to labor on them rose sharply.

The Protestant Reformation was later traced back to Martin Luther's Ninety-five Theses. The Mughal Empire, which had controlled the bulk of the Indian subcontinent, was declining by the 18th century. At Plassey, an East India Company force under Robert Clive defeated the Nawab of Bengal, opening Britain's rise to power in India. The Industrial Revolution began in Britain, bringing new machines and new ways of working, and spread to other countries. On 4 July 1776 CE, the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, announcing the separation of the American colonies from Great Britain.

The French Revolution toppled France's monarchy and ended with Napoleon Bonaparte taking power. While the revolution unfolded, Saint-Domingue's free population split into rival camps, and the colony's enslaved people rebelled. That rebellion became the Haitian Revolution, which freed the colony's slaves and won Haiti its independence from French colonial rule. After Napoleon took control of Spain, Spain's colonies in the Americas began their wars of independence.

Britain defeated Qing China in the First Opium War and forced concessions from it. The Indian Rebellion then ended the East India Company; the British government took India over directly. China's defeat warned Japan's leaders of danger and pushed them to strengthen their country, and the Meiji Restoration of 1868 toppled the Tokugawa shogunate and carried Japan into the modern era. The Scramble for Africa gave European powers nearly the whole continent; only Ethiopia and Liberia stayed independent. Gandhi's nonviolent resistance began in South Africa; he later carried it to India.

In World War I, the Allies, including Britain, France and Russia, fought the Central Powers, including Germany and Austria-Hungary. In 1917 CE, revolution toppled Russia's tsar, and the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin seized power. The war destabilized Europe, laying the ground for World War II. The Great Depression's hardships fueled the Nazi Party's rise in Germany. Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland began World War II in Europe. In the Holocaust, Nazi Germany, with its collaborators, systematically murdered six million Jews.

The United States, the Soviet Union and their allies became Cold War rivals after World War II. Amid deadly religious violence, partition divided British India into the independent countries of India and Pakistan. Across eastern Europe, communist governments fell, and the Berlin Wall came down. Tim Berners-Lee conceived the World Wide Web so that researchers could share information.

The Cold War ended as the Soviet Union broke apart. In Rwanda, Hutu extremists waged a planned genocide against the Tutsi minority and those who opposed it, over about 100 days. The genocide ended after the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front took over the country. In South Africa, elections open to every race marked apartheid's official end. Nelson Mandela won election as the country's first Black president.

On 11 September 2001 CE, al-Qaeda terrorists seized four airliners, flying two into New York's World Trade Center. The attacks brought a U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan. A crisis in U.S. housing and mortgages caused the Great Recession, felt worldwide. On 15 September 2008 CE, Lehman Brothers filed the largest bankruptcy the United States had yet seen. Millions lost homes, savings and jobs in the financial crisis and the Great Recession.