Prehistory

13.8 BYA-3300 BCE

Timeline

13.8 BYA

Beginning of the Universe

The story of our Universe began around 13.8 billion years ago. Cosmos, then the size of a minuscule dot, contained all the existing matter, making it incredibly dense and hot. In what is known as the Big Bang, the universe began to expand and cool down, and our time began to tick. Over time, matter has coalesced into trillions of stars and an inconceivable number of planets, which have grouped further into billions upon billions of galaxies.

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13 BYA

Milky Way Galaxy forms

Just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, our spectacular galaxy began to form around a supermassive black hole. Over time, the Milky Way has grown to contain over 100 billion stars, if not multiple times more, only a few thousand closest and brightest we can see with our naked eyes from any point on planet Earth.

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4.5 BYA

Solar System forms

Around 4.5 billion years ago, a dense cloud of stardust began to form our planetary system in the outer regions of the Milky Way Galaxy. First came into being our star, the Sun, which amassed more than 99 per cent of the available matter. The remnants clumped into the eight planets, multiple dwarf planets, dozens of moons, and millions of asteroids, comets, and meteoroids.

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4.5 BYA

Birth of Earth and Moon

Earth came into being from leftover matter floating in space around the young Sun. Soon after, a doomsday rock hit our infant planet and blasted so much material into space that our closest celestial neighbour, Moon, was born.

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Underwater scenery with whales, dolphins, and fish.

4.4 BYA

The first seas

Not long after the formation of Earth, water from icy comets and condensing vapours of rampant volcanoes began to fill the planet. The first seas came into being as early as 4.4 billion years ago, but since the high temperatures of early Earth, water may have been nearly or entirely lost more than once during the first few hundred million years. Once the Earth began to cool, oceans covered the entire planet before the first landmasses started to rise from the depths (4 BYA – 2.5 BYA), formed by erupting volcanoes and movements of tectonic plates. Today, oceans and seas cover 71 per cent of Earth’s surface, and hold 95 per cent of the total amount of water on our planet.

3.8 BYA

Life begins on Earth

Once oceans had formed on Earth, molecules began to merge into increasingly sophisticated structures deep in the water. They grouped into countless combinations until one, by sheer chance, formed a cell, the smallest unit of life that could grow and reproduce.

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3.5 BYA

Photosynthesis and the formation of oxygen

The atmosphere of early Earth was filled with nitrogen, greenhouse gases, and hazy vapours, and the temperature on the surface was blistering – hostile for any living being. Yet, simple microbial life was evolving in the oceans, and some of them began using the energy of sunlight to make their food from carbon dioxide and water. As a waste product, oxygen came into being. The colourless and odourless gas began to fill the oceans and the air, eventually enabling life to grow into animals, plants, and fungi.

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1 BYA

Sexual reproduction lays the basis for diverse life

Sexual reproduction has laid the groundwork for ever more diverse life on Earth. With both parents contributing half of their genes to their offspring, the newborn can better adapt to changes in environments, diseases, and other threats. As organisms started to spread from one place to another, separated populations could no longer interbreed and began to evolve in different directions, leading to myriad different animals, plants, and fungi, often quite unlike their common ancestors.

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635 MYA

Snowball Earth

Ice on our planet is more or less uncommon, but once in a while, temperatures on Earth fall low enough, and kilometres of thick glaciers begin to form on its poles. Sometimes, they spread even further and cover more and more of the surface. These periods are called ice ages. The first ice age appeared on Earth more than two billion years ago, but the most severe one occurred hundreds of millions of years later, an episode threatening the birth of all complex life forms.

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600 MYA

Animals evolve

Once the kilometres of thick ice and snow covering our planet finally melted, cells began to team up like never before, and the first animals came into being. For a long, Earth remained an underwater world, but after plants turned the barren ground green and habitable, animals crawled onto dry land and eventually spread their wings up into the air, too.

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359 MYA – 299 MYA

Forests and mountain ranges

During a period known as the Carboniferous (359 MYA – 299 MYA), plants had grown into trees and started to form the first extensive forests. Salamander-like animals took initial steps on four limbs before evolving into amphibians, reptiles, and mammals, and ancestors of spiders, millipedes and scorpions roamed in vegetation alongside giant insects, the first ones to spread their wings up into the air more than 300 million years ago, long before birds and bats. The continents were also sailing towards each other, forming one vast supercontinent called Pangaea. As landmasses were crushing into each other, many mountain ranges began to thrust upwards, including parts of the Appalachians in North America, the Lesser Atlas Mountains in Africa, the Pyrenees in Europe, and the Ural Mountains in Siberia.

200 MYA

From one continent to many

Our planet is restless, constantly changing its face. The crust of the Earth is cracked into large rocky pieces – tectonic plates – floating around on a slowly flowing but solid rock beneath them. Continents laying on tectonic plates get together only to be ripped apart, while new oceans open before shrinking and disappearing all alone.

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66 MYA

Chicxulub Asteroid hits Earth, causes mass extinction

Life on Earth began almost 4 billion years ago and has since evolved into myriads of different forms and sizes. Multiple times, life has also been wiped out for all but a small proportion of living organisms, yet always paving the way for new species. Perhaps the best-known of these mass extinction events was caused by an enormous asteroid that brought to an end the era of dinosaurs.

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8 MYA

Apes take first footsteps towards humanity

Once life recovered after the Chicxulub asteroid, apes began to evolve and live in the trees of thick forests in Africa. Around 8 million years ago, however, the climate began to cool, and the woods thinned out as grass took over the land. Food for apes became patchy and scarce, and some started to take clumsy steps on the ground to reach another fruit tree in the distance.

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2.5 MYA

Humans evolve

Around 2.5 million years ago, the first humans evolved from an earlier genus of apes in Africa. Some remained in their homelands, while others began to migrate to the vast areas of Asia and Europe. Since living conditions varied widely around the world, humans began to evolve in different directions, and many distinct human species came into being.

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315,000 YA

Homo sapiens evolve

The first Homo sapiens appeared in Africa more than 300,000 years ago. They eventually abandoned lives in small groups of hunter-gatherers and built cities, states, and empires inhabited even by hundreds of millions. Moreover, Sapiens invented ever-more complex tools to utilize resources and found means to spread to every corner of the planet Earth and even beyond. But, in the process, Sapiens also became the cause of the ongoing sixth mass extinction.

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130,000 YA

Control of fire

For hundreds of thousands of years, fire has provided humans with light, warmth, protection, and a way to cook food. Early humans probably exploited wildfires caused by lightning strikes and erupting volcanoes, but once they realized its many benefits, humans learned to generate fire even from a spark.

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120,000 YA

The Last Ice Age begins

The Last Ice Age began around 120,000 years ago as Earth travelled a bit farther from the Sun. Perhaps being appropriately skewed, too, fewer and fewer sunrays reached our poles. Summers became colder and could no longer melt the ice. Glaciers began to form and spread. Animals such as lions, rhinos, hippopotamuses, and elephants had to retreat from the North, yet some, including woolly mammoths, sabre-tooth cats, wolves, and humans, could cope with the surrounding cold.

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100,000 YA

Sapiens start to conquer the world

Around 100,000 years ago, Homo sapiens began to spread from Africa across other continents. Meanwhile, the last ice age was advancing, and sea levels fell. Islands, even continents, became connected, opening new pathways for our ancestors to the unknown. While Sapiens spread around the globe, other animals and human species started to fall into oblivion.

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40,000 YA

Modern human behaviour

When did we become how we are today? The first humans evolved around two and a half million years ago, with more human-like body shapes and sizes appearing half a million years later. Our own species, Homo sapiens, began to develop more than 300,000 years ago, and 150,000 years later, they looked just like us. Behaviour, however, is far more difficult to trace than anatomy and look.

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19,000 YA

Dog becomes the first domesticated animal

Tens of thousands of years ago, grey wolves and humans had spread into the northern parts of the globe. As food smells may have attracted wolves closer to human camps, or both may have been interested in the same hunting opportunities, the two began to spend more time close to each other. Probably just tolerating one another at first, the relationship between wolves and humans grew ever closer.

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12,000 YA

Agricultural Revolution begins

For more than two million years, humans lived in small groups and roamed around large areas, hunting animals and gathering wild plants. However, around 12,000 years ago, people started to settle down, farm, and domesticate animals, too. Why we began farming is disputed, but it changed everything in human lives – irreversibly.

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10,700 YA

Working with metals

Humans made tools from stone, wood, and bones for millions of years before discovering metals and finding out that, instead of fracturing when struck, they changed shape and could be hammered into small objects like jewellery and daggers. As metallurgy developed, people could make ever more durable tools, weapons, and armours.

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5,500 YA

Vehicles on wheels

The first wheels are thought to have been used to make pottery. Around 5,500 years ago, however, someone had an idea to turn wheels 90 degrees and attach them to various types of early carts and wagons, allowing people to move supplies and other loads more efficiently than dragging or pushing them along the ground.

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A muscular blacksmith hammering metals at his forge shop.

5,500 YA

Making bronze

As metallurgy developed, ancient metalworkers discovered that combining metals created stronger materials called alloys, which not only made tools more durable but could also be used for weaponry and armour. The first alloy invented was bronze by mixing a small amount of tin into copper. Since both metals were relatively scarce and thus hard to obtain, bronze became mainly the luxury of the elites.