History is usually taught one region at a time, which makes it hard to see what was happening elsewhere at the same moment. While the pyramids were going up in Egypt, the Indus Valley cities were flourishing and people at Caral in Peru were building the oldest cities in the Americas.

So I built a timeline that lines the continents up side by side, from the end of the last Ice Age around 8000 BCE to the present. Each row is a date, and each column is a continent.

Open the interactive timeline →

A few notes:

  • The rows follow the order of events, not a proportional time scale. Centuries can pass between two neighbouring rows in the early periods.
  • Dates marked "c." are approximate. For prehistory, they're scholarly estimates that can be off by centuries.
  • You can hide or show continents with the buttons at the top.
  • It includes about 40 cultural milestones (art, music, literature, and ideas), tagged "Culture", and about 45 buildings, palaces, and wonders of the world, tagged "Building", including all Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. You can switch either group off.
  • It's a selective list of about 250 events, a starting point rather than a complete record.