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Homo habilis -- an educated guess (Wikimedia Commons)
4.3 million YA (Years Ago) In what today is Ethiopia, creatures labeled Ardipithecus ramidus lived, represented today by the nickname created by scientists: "Ardi". Her species was either directly ancestral to humans or closely related to a species ancestral to humans. She was 1.2 meters (4 feet) tall. She walked on two feet -- not knuckle-walking as gorillas and chimps do, but did not have arched feet like us, indicating that she could not walk or run for long distances. She had opposable great toes and she a pelvis that allowed her to negotiate tree branches well.
3.2 million YA In what today is Ethiopia, members of the biological family Hominidae lived, represented today by the nickname "Lucy." The angle of her knee joint indicates that she walked upright. She was 1.1 meters (3 feet 8 inches) tall. Walking upright improves the ability to run after game and to run from danger.
2.5 million YA Rocks are split into flakes and used as tools.
2.5 to 1.6 million YA A species called Homo habilis lives in what today is Tanzania. It is shorter and has disproportionately long arms compared to modern humans and is using stone tools.
1 million YA (or shorthly thereafter) Creatures using stone tools exist in Eastern England.
300,000 YA Neanderthals exist in Europe.
200,000 YA Give or take thousands of years, humans (homo sapiens) in Africa leave what will be a fossil record of their species.
73,000-68,000 YA The Toba Catastrophe Theory holds that on the island of Sumatra a super-volcanic eruption created a volcanic winter that at extended to Africa and reduced the world's human population there to between 1,000 and 10,000 breeding couples. A mini-ice-age followed, lasting around 1,000 years. Where the eruption occurred a lake developed; Lake Toba.
50,000 YA Humans running from drought have left Africa, taking a coastal route to India and then to Australia.
48,000 YA In Asia, Neanderthals are becoming extinct.
43,000 YA Humans are in an area around 500 kilometers south of what is today Moscow, their presence to be surmised in CE 2007 by archaeologists who have uncovered artifacts at what today is called the Kostenki Site.
40,000 YA Near what today is Beijing, human bones dating to around this year have been found. At least one person to whom these bones belong wore shoes. According to Erik Trinkaus of Washington University in Missouri, evidence also exists of some shoe or sandal wearing among Neanderthals.
38,000 YA Neanderthals in Europe have numbered no more than 10,000 at any one time.
26,000 YA In Europe, Neanderthals are becoming extinct. There will be no traceable genetic markers (along matrilineal lines) that suggest any Neanderthal and human reproduction mixture.
20,000 BCE (Before the Common Era) By now humans are in southern Greece.
20,000 BCE A single Siberian population group moves across the Bering Strait to North America, according to genetic evidence. They will remain in Alaska for thousands of years, blocked from moving south by glacial ice.
18,000 BCE People in what today is Hunan province, in central China near the Yangzi River, are making pottery.
14,500 BCE An ice-free corridor in Canada allows migration from Alaska southward.
14,000 BCE A melting ice sheet begins a rise in sea levels and warming in Europe.
13,000 BCE Rice is being grown in Korea.
11,000 BCE People with a Paleoindian culture, described by archaeologists as Clovis, dominate North and Central America.
10,900 BCE Comet debris smash into North America. According to theory, it reversed the ice age thaw, and the recooling killed mammals such as the saber-toothed tiger, dire wolf, and the wooly mammoth.
10,000 BCE Humans have spread into most of the earth's habitable places. Sparse populations allow for hunting game, gathering food that grows wild and drifting from campsite to campsite. Storytelling and myth are a major pastime.
10,000 BCE In Eurasia and North America, the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), has become extinct.
10,000 BCE People in the Middle East are living as hunter-gatherers and have domesticated goats and dogs. And people are starting to grow their own food.
9,000 BCE In the Jordan Valley, figs are cultivated, while wild barley, oats and acorns are being gathered. (See BBC News, June 1, 2006.)
8000 BCE Hunter-gatherers in Southeast Asia begin growing crops to supplement their food supply. In the Jordan Valley, a walled settlement exists at Jericho.
7600 BCE Hunter-gatherers are living along the Seine River in what is today the city of Paris.
7300 BCE Tribal people in what is today Britain have domesticated dogs.
7200 BCE In what is today Greece, people have domesticated sheep.
7000 BCE In the Fertile Crescent, people are farming and raising animals. Their farms anchor them to one place. Gods are seen as settled into a temple and place.
6700 BCE A man dies in the vicinity of what is now known as the Columbia River. 9300 years later, his bones are found - almost entirely intact and he is referred to as Kennewick Man. A projectile point is found embedded in his pelvis, but bone has grown around it, indicating he survived the wound.
6500 BCE In what today is northwest Turkey, cow herders are producing what will be tentatively considered the world's first dairy.
6000 BCE Growing crops and domesticating animals have begun in southern and eastern Europe, including Greece. Agriculture is developing among hunter-gatherers in southern Mexico. Along the upper Nile, people are growing sorghum, millet and wheat.
5600 BCE Sea levels have been rising, and - according to the disputed "Black Sea Deluge Theory" -- sea water suddenly begins pouring into the Black Sea basin, flooding vast amounts of inhabited land and sending people on new migrations with stories about a great flood.
5500 BCE People in China are planting seeds.
5400-4900 BCE What German archaeologist F. Klopfleisch calls the first true farming communities appear in central Europe.
5000 BCE Near what today is the village of Herxheim, in southwest Germany, as many as 500 men, women and infants were butchered and cannibalized -- perhaps during one of the periodic famines that occurred in agricultural societies.
4500 BCE Farming reappears in Africa south of the Sahara in the Niger Basin in the West. The Sahara at this time is grass and woodland with an abundance of rainfall, rivers, lakes, fish and aquatic life. People there are growing crops and raising sheep, goats and cattle.
Edited: 23 Aug 2010
Copyright © 2003-2009 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.