Short answers, pulled from the story.
Human history, or world history, is the record of humankind from prehistory to the present. It begins with modern humans evolving in Africa around 300,000 years ago and runs through farming, cities, empires, and the modern era starting around 1800 CE.
Homo sapiens evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago from Homo heidelbergensis and became anatomically modern by 125,000 years ago. Humans reached Australia 65,000 years ago, Europe 45,000 years ago, and the Americas 21,000 years ago.
The Neolithic Revolution began around 10,000 BCE and marked the development of agriculture, which fundamentally changed the human lifestyle. Farming arose independently in at least 11 separate centers of origin and created food surpluses that supported the first cities and states.
Early civilizations arose close to rivers, first in Mesopotamia around 3300 BCE, followed by Egypt around 3200 BCE, the Norte Chico in Peru around 3100 BCE, the Indus Valley around 2500 BCE, and China around 2200 BCE. These societies developed central government, complex economies, and systems for keeping records.
The Black Death killed approximately 75 to 200 million people between 1347 and 1350, one of the deadliest pandemics in human history. Starting in Asia, it reached Western Europe in the late 1340s and killed between a quarter and a third of the population in six years.
The modern period began around 1800 CE with the Industrial Revolution, which started in Great Britain around 1770 and used factories, mass production, and mechanization. Over the 20th century the world's population quadrupled to six billion and global life expectancy at birth rose from about 31 years in 1900 to over 66 years in 2000.