An interactive visualization of 15,000 years of human history — from the retreat of Ice Age glaciers through the rise and fall of civilizations to the present day.
How to navigate
The grid is a map of time. Each small square is one year. Each row is a century (100 years). The full grid spans 151 centuries, from 13,000 BCE to 2026 CE.
- Zoom — scroll wheel, pinch, or the +/− buttons
- Pan — click-drag or touch-drag
- Hover a year to see events, spans, and figures
- Search — type any keyword, year, or name (press /)
What you see
- Colored squares
- Each year's color reflects its epoch and position. Brighter squares contain recorded events.
- Span bars
- Thin colored lines beneath years mark multi-year periods — empires, wars, movements, ages. Examples: Roman Republic and Empire (509 BCE–476 CE), World War II (1939–1945), Atlantic Slave Trade (1526–1867).
- Event dots
- White indicator marks appear on years that contain one or more point events — specific moments like inventions, battles, or discoveries.
The three epochs
- Pleistocene
- 13,000–9,700 BCE. The tail end of the last Ice Age. Humans live as hunter-gatherers; early settlements like the Natufian culture emerge.
- Holocene
- 9,700 BCE–1950 CE. The warm, stable climate epoch. Agriculture, writing, cities, empires, science, and industry all unfold here.
- Anthropocene
- 1950 CE–present. The era of human-scale planetary impact: nuclear technology, mass consumption, climate change, and the digital revolution.
Controls
- Thematic lenses
- Filter events by category — Society, Science/Tech, Earth, Ecology, Culture, Conflicts, or Exploration. Only matching events and spans are shown.
- BCE/CE ↔ HE toggle
- Switch between the conventional calendar (BCE/CE) and the Holocene Era calendar, which adds 10,000 years so that all dates are positive. Year 1 CE = 10,001 HE.
- Birth year
- Enter your birth year to highlight your lifetime on the grid and see it in the context of deep history.
- Color modes
- Switch between three background coloring schemes: Epochs colors each year by its geological epoch (Pleistocene, Holocene, Anthropocene). Temp maps reconstructed global mean temperature anomaly onto a blue-to-red gradient. CO₂ maps atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration onto a purple-to-yellow gradient. The legend bar at the bottom shows the active scale with key reference marks.
Keyboard shortcuts
- / — Focus search
- + / − — Zoom in / out
- 0 — Reset zoom
- Esc — Clear search / close panels
Data
The timeline contains 630 events, 237 historical figures, and 120 multi-year spans across 13 categories. Content aims for global coverage across all epochs, with particular attention to non-Western civilizations, women in history, and environmental milestones.
Climate data sources
- Temperature
- Osman et al. (2021), "Globally resolved surface temperatures since the Last Glacial Maximum", Nature 599, 239–244. Supplemented by HadCRUT5 (Morice et al. 2021) for 1850–2025. Baseline: 1850–1900 mean (pre-industrial reference period, per IPCC AR6). Values are anomalies in °C relative to this baseline.
- CO₂
- Bereiter et al. (2015), "Revision of the EPICA Dome C CO₂ record", Geophysical Research Letters 42, 542–549. Ice core composite covering 800,000 years; interpolated annually for this visualization. Supplemented by Mauna Loa Observatory (NOAA GML) for 1958–2025. Pre-industrial baseline: ~280 ppm (circa 1750 CE).
Both datasets are interpolated to annual resolution for the timeline grid.
Created by Globaïa · Cultivating planetary awareness through science and art
globaia.org
