Thought Atlasof Human Culture through ChronologyCompiled by Benjamin Kotler

Deep time

Before the record begins

Four million years of the hominin record, ending where the atlas starts. These are fossils, stone-tool industries and inferred events - not works, and no part of the corpus. The lineage is a bush and not a ladder: several of these populations overlapped, some interbred, and where the field is genuinely divided the row says so.

The axis runs from 4 Mya (million years ago) at the top to 5.4 kya (thousand years ago, that is 3400 BC) at the foot, and is logarithmic - equal ratios take equal space, because a linear axis would flatten the last hundred thousand years to nothing.

Hadar - Source of Lucy and the First Family, the largest single sample of the species.Laetoli - Type locality, and the ash bed holding the 3.6-million-year-old bipedal footprint trails.Dikika - The juvenile skeleton that preserves a shoulder and hyoid, rare for this age.Woranso-Mille - Later Afar finds that complicate the question of how many species were present.Taung - Quarry that produced the Taung child, the 1925 find that first placed human origins in Africa.Sterkfontein - Source of most of the sample, including the Little Foot skeleton.Makapansgat - Limeworks deposit that extended the species north into the Limpopo valley.Gona - Afar deposits that anchored the industry at 2.6 million years when published in 1997.Nyayanga - Homa Peninsula site pushing Oldowan tools towards 2.9 million years, alongside Paranthropus teeth.Olduvai Gorge - The gorge that named the industry, where its sequence was first worked out in detail.Swartkrans - Over a hundred specimens of the southern species, with bone tools worn from digging.Olduvai Gorge - Find spot of OH 5, the 1959 cranium that defined the eastern African form.Koobi Fora - Turkana basin deposits where the genus overlaps in time with early Homo.Olduvai Gorge - Type locality; OH 7 was named here in 1964, forcing a redefinition of the genus Homo.Koobi Fora - Turkana basin material that widened the sample and started the Homo rudolfensis argument.Ledi-Geraru - A 2.8-million-year-old jaw assigned to early Homo, older than any secure habilis.Dmanisi - The earliest well-dated hominins outside Africa, at 1.85 to 1.78 million years ago.Nariokotome - West Turkana site of the near-complete adolescent skeleton known as Turkana Boy.Zhoukoudian - The Peking Man caves, the largest East Asian sample; the original fossils were lost in 1941.Sangiran - Javanese dome deposits holding the long Indonesian sequence of the species.Kokiselei - West Turkana locality holding the earliest handaxes, at about 1.76 million years.Olorgesailie - Kenyan basin with handaxe floors spanning 1.2 million to 490,000 years.Ubeidiya - Jordan valley site recording an early Acheulean presence outside Africa.Boxgrove - English site preserving knapping floors and butchery in place around 500,000 years ago.Wonderwerk Cave - Ashed plant matter and burnt bone thirty metres inside the cave, dated near one million years.Gesher Benot Ya'aqov - Repeated burnt clusters read as hearths, at roughly 790,000 years.Zhoukoudian - Long-claimed ash layers whose status as hearths has been argued over for decades.Mauer - Sand quarry that yielded the 1908 type mandible on which the whole taxon rests.Sima de los Huesos - Atapuerca shaft holding some thirty individuals whose nuclear DNA falls on the Neanderthal line.Bodo - Middle Awash cranium bearing cut marks, one of the African fossils often placed here.Kabwe - Broken Hill mine cranium, dated near 299,000 years and often separated as Homo rhodesiensis.Neander Valley - Feldhofer cave, source of the 1856 skeleton that gave the species its name.La Chapelle-aux-Saints - The burial whose arthritic skeleton produced the long-lived stooping caricature.Shanidar - Zagros cave with multiple individuals, including one who survived severe injury for years.Vindija - Croatian cave that supplied bone for the first draft Neanderthal genome.Rising Star Cave - The only site; the Dinaledi and Lesedi chambers hold more than 1,500 specimens.Olorgesailie - Where Middle Stone Age toolmaking and transported pigment appear by about 320,000 years.Le Moustier - Dordogne rock shelter that gave the Mousterian its name in the nineteenth century.Klasies River - Long South African coastal sequence, including the Howiesons Poort phase.Blombos Cave - Middle Stone Age layers with worked bone, shell beads and engraved ochre.Olorgesailie - Pigment carried in from a distance by about 320,000 years, among the oldest such evidence.Blombos Cave - Cross-hatched engravings on ochre from roughly 100,000 years and a drawn pattern at 73,000.Pinnacle Point - Coastal shelters with ochre use and heat-treated stone from around 164,000 years.Jebel Irhoud - Moroccan site whose fossils at roughly 315,000 years are the oldest widely accepted.Omo Kibish - Source of Omo I, redated above 233,000 years by the volcanic ash layer above it.Herto - Middle Awash crania near 160,000 years, close to but not identical with living anatomy.Florisbad - South African cranium near 259,000 years, evidence that the range was continental early.Denisova Cave - Altai cave where a finger bone yielded the genome that defined the population in 2010.Baishiya Karst Cave - Xiahe mandible on the Tibetan Plateau, the first Denisovan identified outside Siberia.Harbin - City where the Homo longi cranium surfaced; the exact 1933 find spot was never recorded.Misliya Cave - Mount Carmel upper jaw dated to about 194,000 to 177,000 years, the oldest firm Levantine sapiens.Qafzeh - Burials of roughly 120,000 to 90,000 years old, an early presence that left no lasting descendants.Apidima Cave - Greek cranial fragment claimed at about 210,000 years; the identification is contested.Liang Bua - The only cave with skeletal remains, including the type specimen LB1.Mata Menge - Older Flores basin fossils, near 700,000 years, that may record an ancestral population.
Excavation sites behind the deep-time record. Select a row to pick out its type sites.

The record

  • Australopithecus afarensis3.85 Mya - 2.95 MyasecureSpecies
  • Australopithecus africanus3.3 Mya - 2.1 MyaprobableSpecies
  • Oldowan industry2.9 Mya - 1.7 MyaprobableStone-tool industry
  • Paranthropus (genus: P. aethiopicus, P. boisei, P. robustus)2.7 Mya - 1 MyacontestedSpecies
  • Homo habilis2.4 Mya - 1.4 MyacontestedSpecies
  • Homo erectus1.89 Mya - 110 kyaprobableSpecies
  • Acheulean industry1.76 Mya - 130 kyasecureStone-tool industry
  • Control of fire1 Mya - 300 kyacontestedEvent
  • Homo heidelbergensis700 kya - 200 kyacontestedSpecies
  • Homo neanderthalensis400 kya - 40 kyasecureSpecies
  • Homo naledi335 kya - 236 kyacontestedSpecies
  • Middle Stone Age and Mousterian320 kya - 30 kyaprobableStone-tool industry
  • Earliest pigment and symbolic marking320 kya - 70 kyacontestedEvent
  • Homo sapiens315 kya - presentsecureSpecies
  • Denisovans (archaic human population)300 kya - 30 kyacontestedSpecies
  • Out of Africa (Homo sapiens dispersals)210 kya - 50 kyacontestedEvent
  • Homo floresiensis100 kya - 50 kyaprobableSpecies

Select a row or a bar to read its range, its type sites and how firmly it is established.

The corpus of recorded thought begins at 3400 BC, where this chart ends.