From the first stone tools 3.3 million years ago to today's AI agents
More than 99% of human history falls in this era. It took millions of years to go from chipping stone into an edge to taming fire, sewing clothes with needles and shooting arrows.
Striking stone to make an edge.
At Lomekwi in Kenya, archaeologists found stone tools 3.3 million years old, older than the genus Homo itself. Sharp flakes knocked off one stone by another were used to cut meat and crack bones. Tools had begun doing what hands alone could not.
Carving an image in the mind into stone.
Symmetrical, two-sided Acheulean hand axes were made in nearly the same shape across Africa, Europe and Asia for more than a million years. Their makers pictured the finished form before they began, which is why they are seen as the first trace of design.
Cooking food, lighting the night, keeping predators away.
Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa holds traces of fire use from about a million years ago. Cooked food is easier to digest and supplied the energy to grow larger brains, and the fireside became a place where people gathered and talked. Pottery, metal and eventually the steam engine would all be born over a fire.
Hunting from a distance.
Arrowheads more than 60,000 years old have been found in South Africa. A bow stores energy in its spring and releases it all at once, making it one of the first machines humans built. In the same era, people sewed clothes with bone needles and spread into colder lands.
Baking clay into vessels.
Pottery about 20,000 years old has been found in Xianrendong Cave in China, nearly 10,000 years before farming. Using fire to change the nature of a material itself was the starting point for metal, glass and eventually chemistry.
As the Ice Age ended, people in several parts of the world independently began growing plants and taming animals. They settled down, villages grew into cities, and metal and the wheel appeared.
Growing food instead of finding it.
People in the Fertile Crescent began growing wheat and barley, and farming arose independently in China (rice, millet), Mesoamerica (maize) and the Andes (potatoes). The same land could now feed far more people, and with that came settled villages, surplus food, social classes and states.
Borrowing animals' strength, milk and wool.
Goats, sheep, cattle and pigs were tamed one after another, later joined by horses and camels. Ox-drawn plows and horse-drawn carts became the first power beyond human muscle.
Drawing metal out of stone.
In the Balkans and on the Iranian plateau, people began melting ore to extract copper. Unlike stone, metal can be melted and cast into any shape, and resharpened when it grows dull.
A rolling circle, and the potter's wheel.
Wheeled carts appeared at roughly the same time in Mesopotamia and north of the Black Sea. Some think the wheel was first used for throwing pots. It seems an obvious invention, yet the civilizations of the Americas used wheels only on toys, never for transport.
Letting the wind push the boat.
Sailboats appeared on the Nile and in Mesopotamia. It was among the first uses of a natural force rather than human effort as power, and for thousands of years long-distance trade and exploration would depend on the wind.
Writing took memory out of the body, and bronze and iron changed tools and weapons. Monumental buildings show that people had also mastered the technology of organizing large numbers of workers.
Storing memory outside the body.
Mesopotamian cuneiform began as accounting records of the grain and livestock held by temples. Writing also arose independently in Egypt, China and Mesoamerica. Speech fades but writing remains, and knowledge began to accumulate across generations.
Mixing tin into copper.
Adding tin to copper makes much harder bronze. Tin was rare and had to come from far away, so Bronze Age civilizations depended on wide trade networks.
The technology of organizing tens of thousands.
The Great Pyramid of Giza stacks more than 2.3 million blocks to within a few centimeters. It required precise surveying, and just as much the administrative skill to feed, organize and keep records for a vast workforce.
A common metal becomes everyone's.
Iron ore is found almost everywhere, but smelting it takes far higher temperatures. As ironworking spread from Anatolia, metal tools and weapons that had belonged to the elite reached farmers and soldiers.
Every word from a couple dozen letters.
The Phoenicians matched one letter to each sound. Unlike cuneiform or hieroglyphs, with their hundreds of signs, an alphabet could be learned by anyone, and through Greek and Latin it became the ancestor of most of the world's scripts.
Greece explained machines with mathematics, Rome bound its empire together with roads, aqueducts and concrete, and China invented paper.
The infrastructure that held an empire together.
In the same year Rome began the Appian Way and its first aqueduct. Hundreds of thousands of kilometers of roads followed, along with aqueducts bringing water to city after city. Roman concrete mixed with volcanic ash still holds up the dome of the Pantheon nearly 2,000 years later.
Give me a place to stand and I will move the Earth.
Archimedes explained the lever and the pulley mathematically and built a screw pump to lift water. In the same era, water wheels appeared in Greece and China, and water began turning millstones in place of people and animals.
An analog computer from 2,000 years ago.
Recovered from a Greek shipwreck, this bronze gearwork calculated the positions of the sun and moon and predicted eclipses. Nothing with gears this precise would appear again for more than a thousand years.
A cheap, light medium for writing.
Cai Lun of the Han dynasty presented the emperor with a method for making paper from bark, rags and fishing nets. Cheaper than silk and lighter than bamboo, paper traveled through the Islamic world to Europe and became the basis for printing.
China produced gunpowder, the compass and movable type, while water mills, windmills and mechanical clocks spread across Europe. Together these inventions set the modern world in motion.
An explosion found while searching for immortality.
Tang dynasty alchemists trying to make an elixir of life discovered gunpowder, a mix of saltpeter, sulfur and charcoal. At first it was used for fireworks and fire arrows. Centuries later, as cannons and guns, it ended the age of castle walls and knights.
Making characters one by one and arranging them.
Bi Sheng of the Song dynasty made type from baked clay. Because Chinese needs tens of thousands of characters, woodblock printing remained dominant in China, but the idea of movable type began here.
Finding direction at sea.
Shen Kuo of the Song dynasty recorded that a magnetized needle points north and south, and it was soon used for navigation. Knowing your heading even when the stars were hidden opened the way to open-ocean sailing.
Machine power in every village.
By the 11th century England already had thousands of water mills, and windmills spread in the late 12th century. Starting with grinding grain and moving on to fulling cloth and working iron, machine power became part of everyday life in medieval Europe.
Dividing time into equal pieces.
Mechanical clocks driven by weights and an escapement appeared in European monasteries and cathedrals. Hours that had stretched and shrunk with the sun and the seasons became equal units, and work and daily life began to follow the clock. Eyeglasses were invented in Italy at about the same time.
The printing press spread knowledge explosively, and telescopes and microscopes revealed worlds invisible to the naked eye. Ocean voyages tied the continents together.
Knowledge explodes.
Gutenberg combined metal type, oil-based ink and a press adapted from wine making. Within 50 years around 20 million books had been printed in Europe, and it is hard to imagine the Reformation or the Scientific Revolution without them.
The continents are joined.
With the compass, better sailing ships and celestial navigation, Columbus crossed the Atlantic, Vasco da Gama soon reached India and Magellan's fleet sailed around the world. Crops, animals, diseases and silver began moving between continents, and globalization began.
The world beyond the naked eye.
Dutch spectacle makers stacked lenses to make telescopes and microscopes. Galileo turned a telescope on Jupiter's moons, while Hooke and Leeuwenhoek used microscopes to see cells and microbes. An era began in which tools led science.
From 15 minutes a day to 15 seconds.
Huygens built a clock regulated by the steady swing of a pendulum, making timekeeping dozens of times more accurate. Precise measurement became the backbone of scientific experiment and led on to the problem of finding longitude at sea.
Coal-fired steam engines and factories appeared in Britain. Power that for thousands of years had come from people, animals, water and wind changed, and production moved from hands to machines.
Turning heat into work.
Built to pump water out of mines, Thomas Newcomen's steam engine was the first practical device to turn the heat of fire into mechanical motion. It was less than 1% efficient, but at a coal mine, fuel was never in short supply.
The factory is born.
James Watt's separate condenser made the steam engine far more efficient, and Richard Arkwright built factories around his water-powered spinning frame. As spinning and weaving moved from homes into factories, the Industrial Revolution began.
Preventing smallpox with cowpox.
Edward Jenner protected against smallpox by inoculating people with cowpox. It was the first vaccine. In 1980 smallpox became the first infectious disease ever eradicated from the planet.
The steam engine got wheels and ran on rails, and electricity began carrying messages. For the first time, people, goods and information moved faster than a horse or a ship.
A steady flow of electricity.
Volta stacked zinc and copper plates between cloths soaked in brine and produced a continuous electric current for the first time. Scientists who had only worked with brief sparks of static could now experiment with electricity, leading to electrolysis, electromagnetism and eventually the telegraph and the electric motor.
Faster than a horse, on a timetable.
The Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened, the first line to carry passengers and freight on a regular schedule with steam locomotives. Within 20 years railways covered Britain, Europe and the US, and railway timetables replaced local times with standard time.
Drawing with light.
Daguerre announced the daguerreotype. Once a scene could be preserved exactly as the eye saw it, record keeping, journalism and scientific observation changed, and painting, freed from the job of copying, began to look for new paths.
Information outpaces people.
Samuel Morse sent the message "What hath God wrought" from Washington to Baltimore. Once a transatlantic cable was laid in 1866, news that had taken weeks to cross between continents arrived in minutes.
Surgery without pain.
A public operation under ether anesthesia succeeded in Boston. With Lister's antiseptic methods (1867), surgery went from a painful, dangerous last resort to routine treatment.
Cheap steel, oil and electricity drove the Second Industrial Revolution. The telephone, the light bulb and the automobile appeared, and research laboratories began producing inventions systematically.
Steel becomes cheap.
By blowing air through molten iron to burn off impurities, the Bessemer process drove down the price of steel. Railways, bridges, ships and skyscrapers all began to be built of steel.
Black energy from underground.
In Pennsylvania, Edwin Drake drilled the first well to pump oil out of the ground. At first it was refined into kerosene to replace whale oil, but it soon fueled the internal combustion engine and powered the 20th century.
A voice over a wire.
Alexander Graham Bell received a patent for the telephone. Unlike the telegraph, which needed trained operators who knew the code, anyone could simply talk.
Electricity comes to the city.
After his long-lasting light bulb (1879), Edison opened the first commercial power station in New York and began selling electricity to homes and offices. Soon the alternating current of Tesla and Westinghouse became the standard for long-distance transmission. Electricity became the new general-purpose technology after steam.
A horseless carriage.
Karl Benz patented a three-wheeled car powered by a gasoline engine. Smaller and lighter than the steam engine, the internal combustion engine made cars, airplanes and tractors possible.
Putting invisible waves to work.
Marconi demonstrated wireless telegraphy using radio waves, and in the same year Röntgen discovered X-rays, letting doctors see inside the body. Electromagnetic waves became tools for communication and medicine.
Airplanes took to the sky, the assembly line put cars within reach of ordinary families, and fertilizer and antibiotics fed and saved billions. Two world wars gave rise to radar, the atomic bomb and the computer.
12 seconds, 37 meters.
The Wright brothers made the first powered airplane flight. Sixty-six years later, people walked on the moon.
Bread from air.
Fritz Haber found a way to make ammonia from nitrogen in the air, and Carl Bosch scaled it up to industrial production. Synthetic fertilizer vastly increased the number of people the Earth can feed, and close to half of humanity today relies on food grown with it. The same chemistry was also used to make explosives.
The car becomes everyone's.
Henry Ford introduced the moving assembly line and cut the time to build a Model T from 12 hours to about an hour and a half. As prices fell, cars reached the middle class, and mass production became the industrial standard of the 20th century.
One voice reaching millions.
Regular radio broadcasting began in the US. News and music reached every home at once, opening the era of mass media, and television broadcasting followed in the 1930s.
A mold that kills bacteria.
Alexander Fleming discovered that a mold killed bacteria, and when penicillin was mass-produced during World War II it saved countless people who would have died of infection. Together with vaccines and sanitation, it nearly doubled human life expectancy over the 20th century.
Seeing the unseen with radio waves.
Britain developed radar, which detects aircraft by the reflection of radio waves, and it guarded British skies in World War II. Radar research later led to the microwave oven, radio astronomy and air traffic control.
The power of the atom and electronic computation.
The Manhattan Project's atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in the same year ENIAC, an electronic computer built to calculate artillery tables, was completed. It marked the age of big science, when science, the state and enormous projects joined forces, and the starting point of two technologies: nuclear power and the computer.
Transistors and integrated circuits made electronics small and cheap, nuclear reactors generated electricity, and rockets carried people to the moon. Shipping containers and the Green Revolution transformed world trade and food.
A tiny switch that replaced the vacuum tube.
Invented at Bell Labs, the transistor became the basic building block of all electronics. A single smartphone chip today contains tens of billions of them.
A reactor makes electricity.
At Obninsk in the Soviet Union, the first power plant to feed electricity from a nuclear reactor into the grid went online. Nuclear power was hailed as cheap, limitless energy, but accidents and waste later put it at the center of controversy.
Identical boxes create globalization.
Malcom McLean launched the first cargo ship loaded with standardized containers. The cost and time of loading and unloading ships fell dramatically, and goods made anywhere in the world could be shipped cheaply.
A satellite circles the Earth.
The Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite. A startled United States created NASA and the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), and the space race began. Satellites later became the foundation for communications, weather forecasting and GPS.
A whole circuit on one chip.
Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce invented the integrated circuit, building many components on a single piece of semiconductor. The number of transistors on a chip went on to double roughly every two years (Moore's law).
Light that travels in a straight, narrow beam.
Theodore Maiman built the first laser. It was jokingly called "a solution looking for a problem," but today it is everywhere, from fiber-optic communication and barcodes to surgery and chip manufacturing.
Overturning predictions of famine.
High-yield wheat and rice, chemical fertilizer and irrigation spread through Asia and Latin America, and grain production soared. Predicted mass famines did not come, though the gains came at a cost in water use, chemicals and lost biodiversity.
Humans on the moon, and computers connected.
In July, people set foot on the moon for the first time. That October, computers at UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute exchanged their first message, and ARPANET, the ancestor of the internet, was born.
The computer shrank onto a single chip and moved onto the desk, the internet connected the world, and scientists learned to cut and paste genes. Mobile phones and GPS began to enter everyday life.
A computer's brain on one chip.
Intel's 4004, made for a calculator, put an entire central processing unit on a single chip. From then on computers moved from refrigerator-sized machines onto desks, into pockets and inside every kind of machine.
Cutting and pasting the blueprint of life.
Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer succeeded in inserting a gene from one organism into another. Soon a biotechnology industry was making human insulin in bacteria.
A phone that follows the person.
Motorola's Martin Cooper made the first call on a handheld mobile phone on a New York street. It was a brick weighing over a kilogram, but it began an era when a phone number belonged to a person rather than a place.
The computer comes home.
The Apple II, Commodore PET and TRS-80 went on sale as ready-made personal computers, and in 1981 the IBM PC set the standard. Computers that had belonged to companies and labs became personal tools.
A network of networks.
ARPANET switched to TCP/IP, establishing the basic structure of today's internet, which links different networks into one. The same year, the satellite positioning system GPS was opened to civilian use.
Documents connected by links.
Tim Berners-Lee at CERN released the web. Now anyone could create pages on the internet and connect them with links, and a tool for researchers became a space for everyone.
The internet arrived in everyone's pocket, the cost of reading and editing genomes collapsed, rockets came back to fly again, and machines began to talk and to work.
Reading the blueprint of life.
The Human Genome Project finished after 13 years and about 3 billion dollars. Sequencing costs have since fallen so fast that a person's genome can now be read for a few hundred dollars.
A computer in your pocket.
The iPhone merged a phone, a music player and an internet device, and Android and the App Store followed the next year. Today most of the world's population goes online through a smartphone.
Machines that learn, genes that can be edited.
A neural network trained on GPUs won an image-recognition contest by a wide margin, opening the era of deep learning. The same year, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier published CRISPR, a precise way to cut and edit genes. Revolutions began at once in intelligence and in life.
A rocket comes back and flies again.
The first stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 landed upright on the ground after launch. Reusing rockets that had been thrown away after one flight cut launch costs sharply and opened the era of launching thousands of internet satellites.
A vaccine in a year.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, mRNA vaccines, which use genetic instructions to have the body make a viral protein, were developed and approved in less than a year. Vaccine development that had taken a decade or more suddenly moved at a new speed.
Machines that write and draw.
ChatGPT passed 100 million users in two months, opening the era of generative AI. AI that produces text, images, video and code moved rapidly into daily life and work.
From AI that answers to AI that works.
AI began making its own plans and using tools to fix code, browse the web and get work done. Tools that 3.3 million years ago stood in for the hand now share in the work of thinking.