Time lines of Human (Pre)History
Updated: 09 August 2021
2012-2024 2012-2024 A quick tour through all of human history
200,000 BCE: Archaeologists have discovered 200,000-year-old human skeletons that are identical to those of modern humans. Earlier remains show enough differences to be categorized as something other than "homo sapiens."
50,000 BCE: Archaeology also suggests that a major transformation in our species occurred about 50,000 years ago, when humans achieved "behavioral modernity." Most believe that these new abilities for complex thought and expression are tied to the development of language.
For the vast majority of their existance, humans lived together in small, hunter/gather groups. This has huge implications for our understandings of human community, as a recent study suggests.
Humans spread throughout the world
From the Washington Post. Click to enlarge.
The dawn of mass media
The "Neolithic Revolution" occurred around 8000 years BCE. Humans developed agriculture, and for the first time, therefore, people did not have to live near sources of food. As a result, cities began to develop.
Around 5,000 years later, around 3400 BCE, humans first developed a means of fixing and sharing speech. For thousands of years after that, reading and writing were skills shared only by a tiny minority of the elite.
Only during the last 600 years or so have humans been able to communicate on a mass scale. This began with the invention of the movable type printing press around 1439. Once books could be mass produced, it made sense for larger portion of society to learn how to read.