Human history

• 1. Introduction

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  Human history begins with a jawbone. The earliest record of the genus Homo is a 2.8 million-year-old jawbone from Ethiopia, a fragment that anchors the long climb from great apes to modern people. Modern humans evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago and first lived as hunter-gatherers. They migrated out of Africa during the Last Ice Age, reaching every continent except Antarctica by its end, 12,000 years ago. From that scattering of nomads grew farms, then cities, then empires that ruled tens of millions. How did a single African primate come to fill the globe? Why did humans abandon foraging for fields and permanent settlements? What links a cuneiform tablet in Mesopotamia to a smartphone in the 2010s? The answers run through fire and writing, through gunpowder and printing, through two world wars and a population that quadrupled to six billion in a single century.

• 2. From Jawbone To Sapiens

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  Hominins arose 7 to 5 million years ago and, unlike other primates, developed bipedalism, the ability to walk on two legs. Hominins began using rudimentary stone tools around 3.3 million years ago, marking the advent of the Paleolithic era. Early hominin evolution coincided with climatic changes that made Africa drier, colder, and less forested. A cycle of alternating glacial and interglacial periods that began 3.2 million years ago may have driven much of what followed.

  The genus Homo evolved from Australopithecus, and the earliest named species, Homo habilis, appeared by 2.3 million years ago. Its most important difference from Australopithecus was a 50 percent increase in brain size. Homo erectus evolved about 2 million years ago and became the first hominin to leave Africa, dispersing across Eurasia. Perhaps as early as 1.5 million years ago, but certainly by 400,000 years ago, hominins began using fire for heat and cooking.

  Beginning about 600,000 years ago, Homo diversified into several new species, first Homo heidelbergensis in Africa and Europe, then the Neanderthals in Europe and the Denisovans in Siberia. This was not a tidy branching tree. Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo sapiens, and other unidentified hominins all interbred and hybridized with one another.

  Homo sapiens evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago from Homo heidelbergensis and became anatomically modern by 125,000 years ago. By 100,000 years ago these people buried their dead, wore jewelry, and adorned the body with red ochre. The earliest known musical instruments besides the human voice are bone flutes from the Swabian Jura in Germany, dated around 40,000 years old. Cave paintings from this world suggest a spirituality often interpreted as animism or shamanism. Humans reached Australia 65,000 years ago, Europe 45,000 years ago, and the Americas 21,000 years ago, and their expansion coincided with both the Quaternary extinction event and the Neanderthal extinction.

• 3. The Turn To Farming

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  Around 10,000 BCE, the Neolithic Revolution changed the human lifestyle at its foundation. Agriculture began independently in at least 11 separate centers of origin, spanning a diverse range of taxa. Cereal cultivation and animal domestication had occurred in Mesopotamia by at least 8500 BCE, in the form of wheat, barley, sheep, and goats.

  The Yangtze River Valley in China domesticated rice around 8000 to 7000 BCE, while the Yellow River Valley may have cultivated millet by 7000 BCE, with pigs the most important domesticated animal in early China. People in Africa's Sahara cultivated sorghum and other crops between 8000 and 5000 BCE, with further centers in the Ethiopian Highlands and the West African rainforests. In the Indus River Valley, crops were grown by 7000 BCE and cattle domesticated by 6500 BCE. In the Americas, squash was cultivated by at least 8500 BCE in South America, and the potato was first grown in the Andes, where the llama was also domesticated. It is likely that women played a central role in plant domestication throughout these developments.

  The transition to agriculture created food surpluses that could support people not directly engaged in producing food. This permitted far denser populations and the first cities and states. Cities became centers of trade, manufacturing, and political power, exchanging manufactured goods for the agricultural products of surrounding countrysides.

  Not everyone settled. Pastoral societies based on nomadic animal herding developed in dry areas unsuited to plant cultivation, such as the Eurasian Steppe and the African Sahel. Conflict between nomadic herders and sedentary farmers was frequent and became a recurring theme in world history. Metalworking arrived too: copper tools and ornaments appeared around 6400 BCE, and the first signs of bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, date to around 4500 BCE.

• 4. Cradles Of Civilization

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  The Bronze Age built the first cities beside rivers. Civilization arose first in Mesopotamia around 3300 BCE along the Tigris and Euphrates, followed by Egypt along the Nile around 3200 BCE, the Norte Chico in coastal Peru around 3100 BCE, the Indus Valley civilization around 2500 BCE, and Chinese civilization along the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers around 2200 BCE. These societies shared central government, complex economies, and systems for keeping records.

  Writing may have developed independently in at least four civilizations: Mesopotamia around 3300 BCE, Egypt around 3250 BCE, China around 1200 BCE, and lowland Mesoamerica by 650 BCE. The earliest system was Mesopotamian cuneiform, which began as pictographs that grew simpler and more abstract over time. In China, writing was first used during the Shang dynasty, which ran from 1766 to 1045 BCE.

  Trade reached astonishing distances. Bronze production in Southwest Asia required the import of tin from as far away as England, creating vast commercial networks and the beginnings of archaic globalization. Around 2600 BCE, the Indus Valley civilization built major cities at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, while Egypt was unified around 3100 BCE.

  Civilizations spread far beyond these first cradles. In Crete, the Minoan civilization emerged by 2000 BCE and is regarded as Europe's first. The Lapita culture emerged in the Bismarck Archipelago around 1500 BCE and colonized islands of Remote Oceania, reaching Samoa by 700 BCE. In the Americas, the Norte Chico built monumental architecture at Caral, dated 2627 to 1977 BCE, and the Olmecs of Mesoamerica, developing by about 1200 BCE, carved colossal stone heads from basalt and devised a calendar later used by the Maya and Teotihuacan.

• 5. The Axial Age

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  From 800 to 200 BCE, the Axial Age produced transformative philosophical and religious ideas in many places, mostly independent of one another. Chinese Confucianism, Indian Buddhism and Jainism, and Jewish monotheism all arose in this period, while Persian Zoroastrianism began earlier, perhaps around 1000 BCE, and was institutionalized by the Achaemenid Empire. New philosophies took hold in Greece during the 5th century BCE, epitomized by thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle.

  The first Olympic Games were held in 776 BCE, marking the start of classical antiquity. In 508 BCE, the world's first democratic system of government was instituted in Athens. The Confucian tradition looked for political morality not to the force of law but to the power and example of tradition, and it would later spread to Korea and Japan.

  Buddhism reached China around the 1st century CE and spread widely, with 30,000 Buddhist temples in northern China alone by the 7th century CE. It became the main religion across much of South, Southeast, and East Asia. The Greek philosophical tradition diffused throughout the Mediterranean and as far as India, starting in the 4th century BCE after the conquests of Alexander the Great of Macedon. Both Christianity and Islam later developed from the beliefs of Judaism.

• 6. Empires Of The Classical World

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  The millennium from 500 BCE to 500 CE produced empires of unprecedented size, some ruling tens of millions of subjects through professional armies, unifying ideologies, and advanced bureaucracies. Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, was sacked by the Medes in 612 BCE. The Median Empire gave way to successive Iranian states: the Achaemenid from 550 to 330 BCE, the Parthian from 247 BCE to 224 CE, and the Sasanian from 224 to 651 CE.

  Alexander the Great, who lived from 356 to 323 BCE, founded an empire stretching from present-day Greece to India before it split into successor states. The Hellenistic period lasted from his death in 323 BCE until 31 BCE, when Ptolemaic Egypt fell to Rome. The Roman Republic, founded in the 6th century BCE, became an empire that peaked under Trajan, who lived from 53 to 117 CE and controlled land from England to Mesopotamia. The two centuries that followed were the Pax Romana. Christianity was legalized by Constantine I in 313 CE and became the empire's sole official religion in 380 CE.

  In South Asia, Chandragupta Maurya founded the Maurya Empire, lasting from 320 to 185 BCE, which flourished under Ashoka the Great, while the later Gupta Empire oversaw ancient India's golden age. In China, Qin Shi Huang ended the Warring States period by uniting the country under the Qin dynasty from 221 to 206 BCE, displacing the hereditary aristocracy with officials appointed by merit. The Han dynasty that followed, from 202 BCE to 220 CE, combined Legalist bureaucracy with Confucian ideals and invented the compass, one of China's Four Great Inventions.

  Africa and the Americas built empires of their own. The Kingdom of Kush ruled Egypt as the Twenty-fifth Dynasty from 712 to 650 BCE and later traded from the city of Meroe. The Kingdom of Aksum minted its own currency and carved enormous monolithic stelae to mark its emperors' graves. In central Mexico, the city of Teotihuacan peaked around 450 CE, when its 125,000 to 150,000 inhabitants made it one of the world's largest cities, while Greek engineering reached its height with devices such as the Antikythera mechanism.

• 7. Faiths, Plagues, And Khans

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  The post-classical period, roughly 500 to 1500 CE, was shaped by the rise and spread of major religions and intensifying trade. Gunpowder, guns, and printing all originated in China during this era. Muhammad, the founder of Islam, initiated the early Muslim conquests in the 7th century, and the subsequent Abbasid Caliphate oversaw the Islamic Golden Age of learning, science, and invention.

  Arab domination of the Middle East ended in the mid-11th century with the arrival of the Seljuk Turks, who were later challenged by Europe during the Crusades. The Turks founded the Ottoman Empire in modern-day Turkey around 1299. In Mongolia, Genghis Khan united Mongol and Turkic tribes under one banner in 1206, building the largest contiguous empire in history. After Mongke Khan died in 1259, it divided into four successor states, including the Yuan Dynasty in China and the Golden Horde in Eastern Europe and Russia.

  Disaster arrived in the 14th century. 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 the Mediterranean and Western Europe during the late 1340s and killed between a quarter and a third of the population in six years.

  This age built lasting cultures across the world. In West Africa the Mali and Songhai Empires rose and dominated the trans-Saharan trade, while Swahili city-states such as the Kilwa Sultanate thrived on Indian Ocean commerce from the 10th century. In Japan, Murasaki Shikibu penned The Tale of Genji during the Heian period, sometimes considered the world's first novel. At Angkor, the Khmer capital was the most extensive city in the world before the industrial age and contained Angkor Wat, the world's largest religious monument. In South America, the Inca Empire, capital at Cusco, spanned the entire Andes as the most extensive pre-Columbian civilization.

• 8. Discovery, Industry, And War

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  Christopher Columbus first arrived in the Americas in 1492, opening the first substantial exchange between the Old World and the New. The resulting Columbian exchange moved plants, animals, foods, human populations including slaves, diseases, and culture between the hemispheres. Diseases introduced by Europeans devastated American societies, killing 60 to 90 million people by 1600 and reducing the population by 90 to 95 percent. Between 1515 and 1800, 8 million Africans were exported in the Atlantic slave trade.

  Europe's early modern era was one of intense intellectual ferment. The Renaissance began in Italy in the 14th century, producing Petrarch's poetry, Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron, and the work of Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Durer. Johannes Gutenberg's invention of movable type printing in 1440 helped spread new ideas, which ran on through the Reformation started in Germany by Martin Luther, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment of thinkers such as John Locke and Immanuel Kant. The English East India Company, founded in 1600 and often described as the first multinational corporation, was followed by the Dutch East India Company in 1602.

  The French Revolution, starting in 1789, overthrew monarchy and led to the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain around 1770, using the factory, mass production, and mechanization to make goods faster with less labor. Globalization advanced on railroads and steamships. The Taiping Rebellion, history's bloodiest civil war, killed 20 to 30 million people between 1850 and 1864, while between 1828 and 1926 democratic institutions were established in 33 countries.

  The 20th century opened with Europe at an apex of wealth, then turned to catastrophe. World War I, from 1914 to 1918, had an estimated death toll of 10 to 22.5 million and collapsed four empires. The Spanish flu killed at least 25 million people from 1918 to 1920. World War II followed, with Germany killing 6 million Jews and millions of non-Jews, and total casualties estimated at 55 to 80 million. After 1945 the United Nations was founded, adopting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, and the Cold War became a 45-year stand-off that ended peacefully in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. Across the 20th century the world's population quadrupled to six billion, life expectancy at birth rose from about 31 years in 1900 to over 66 years in 2000, and by the early 2020s artificial intelligence systems improved to the point of outperforming humans at many circumscribed tasks.