Time's Tables

WHO AND WHAT have had the biggest impacts on shaping the destiny of the planet, life and people? Is it the earth itself, other life or people who are most in control of events historically, today and in the future?

Peak events puncture history’s horizon, each one making its own unique but interconnected contribution to the unfolding story of planet, life and people. The following tables feature only the most significant events as discovered on my own personal journey through the saga of What on Earth Happened?

	Page	Event	Date (years ago)	Why?
1	6	Collision of the earth and Theia that created our moon	4.49 billion	The ultimate collision between two early planets that resulted in the formation of our moon, and the earth’s magnetic shield that protects life against solar radiation.
2	40	Creation of Pangaea	300 million	This single super-continent challenged plants and animals to find ways of living inland – leading to the evolution of seed-bearing trees and hard-shelled eggs.
3	41	Volcano that erupted for over a million years creating the Siberian Traps	252 million	The Siberian Traps were formed by this huge volcanic event that also contributed to the Permian Mass Extinction – the largest ever in pre-history.
4	50	Indian volcano that created the Deccan Traps	65.5 million	Huge quantities of carbon dioxide from this eruption, possibly triggered by part of the meteorite impact that also struck Mexico at this time, caused climate temperatures to see-saw out of control, contributing to a devastating mass extinction.
5	50	Asteroid that smashed into Mexico 65.5 million years ago	65.5 million	A six-mile-wide asteroid smashed into the Yucatán Peninsula (Mexico) with a force 10,000 times greater than all nuclear warheads in existence today, triggering a mass extinction of species, including the dinosaurs.
	Page	Event	Date (years ago)	Why?
6	62	Crashing of Indian plate into Asia that created the Himalayas	40 million	This mountain range is thought largely responsible for a dramatic cooling of the earth over the last forty million years, as water vapour cooled by the peaks created monsoon rains that dissolved large volumes of carbon dioxide from the air.
7	64	Great American Interchange connecting North and South America	3 million	As a result of this land-merger, animals from two continents were able to mingle, and a new ocean current, the Gulf Stream, spluttered into life, warming Europe and the Middle East, eventually helping the establishment of human civilizations.
8	79	Toba eruption in Indonesia	75,000	This volcano may have nearly wiped out the species Homo sapiens, but in the end reduced populations to between 1,000 and 10,000 individuals, creating unusual genetic similarity within our species.
9	95	Younger Dryas	12,700	Sudden cooling of the climate followed by a rapid warming led to the first human experiments with agriculture and animal domestication – the advent of farming.
10	112, 118	Eruption of Thera	3,635	Tsunamis triggered by this volcanic eruption devastated several advanced early Mediterranean civilizations such as the Minoans in Crete and the Egyptians, giving violent horse and chariot invaders such as Hyksos and Mycenaeans a chance to establish themselves.

	Page	Person	Date	Why?
1	92	Hammurabi	1810–1750 BC	A King of Babylon who wrote one of the earliest comprehensive legal codes, establishing the principle that an accused is innocent until proven guilty.
2	139	Ashoka	304–232 BC	An Indian king who spread the ideals of Buddhism throughout Asia. He was the first ruler to put animal and human rights on an equal footing.
3	160	Jesus Christ	2 BC–36 AD	The pacifist son of a Jewish carpenter whose miraculous powers helped his followers believe he was the son of God. Jesus’s death on a cross ultimately led to the establishment of what is now the world’s biggest religion, Christianity, adopted as a state creed by the Roman Empire in 391 AD.
4	187	Mohammed	570–632 AD	An Arabic trader who revealed a series of divine messages that led to the establishment of Islam, now the world’s second largest religion. The rise and spread of Islamic political and trading empires helped to connect Eastern and Western cultures.
5	235	Hernán Cortés	1485–1547	A Spanish mercenary and conquistador who masterminded the destruction of the Aztec empire of Mexico through a mixture of luck and cunning. Amongst his company was an African slave who brought deadly smallpox to the Americas.
6	260	Richard Trevithick	1771–1833	A Cornish inventor who, with the assistance of a neighbour (William Murdoch), was the first successfully to build a high-pressure steam engine that could provide power without the assistance of atmospheric pressure. This invention gave humanity its first mobile power source and ushered in a new age of industrialization.
	Page	Person	Date	Why?
7	263	Friedrich Wöhler	1800–82	A German chemist who artificially manufactured the first organic chemical, urea. Before this time people believed all chemicals produced by living things could not be made by man. His discoveries led to the birth of organic chemistry from which derive everything from plastics and synthesized drugs to explosives and artificial fertilizer.
8	16, 255, 296–7	Charles Darwin	1809–82	An English naturalist who developed a new theory on the origins of life, published in 1859. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection suggested that species can become extinct. It provided powerful evidence to support the view that the earth was billions of years old and that all living creatures are ultimately related to a common ancestor, including humans, who, he claimed, were descended from apes.
9	271, 282	Karl Marx	1818–83	A Jewish German political philosopher who predicted the eventual demise of Capitalism. His Communist Manifesto inspired a number of revolutionaries, leading to an epic ideological struggle between modern civilizations.
10	277	Adolf Hitler	1889–1945	An Austrian veteran of the First World War who so despised Western powers for their part in Germany’s humiliating surrender in 1918 that he became obsessed with restoring all life on earth to a ‘natural order’. Hitler attempted to re-create a master human race that could eventually breed ‘impure’ stock out of existence. Hitler’s ideas led to a second global war that stimulated the invention of atomic energy and rocket technology.

	Page	Item	Date	Why?
1	122	Rice	7000 BC in China and Korea	Today’s massive human population owes as much to the cultivation of rice as it does to artificial fertilizers. This plant can feed more humans per hectare than any other crop.
2	92	Wheat	7000 BC in Middle East	Today’s artificially cultivated varieties only began to be farmed by humans following the cold Younger Dryas period c.12,700 years ago. Their labours produced a domesticated crop with large seeds that held firmly to the stalk (this made grinding and harvesting easier).
3	172	Maize	5000 BC onwards in Central America	Painstakingly bred from wild teosinte by early Central American farmers, maize eventually became the staple crop for all indigenous American peoples. By the sixteenth century European explorers had spread maize around the world.
4	272	Poppies	4000 BC onwards in Asia, the Middle East and Europe	The medicinal use of opium goes back to the first early Neolithic farmers but by the nineteenth century opium extracted from poppy seeds had become a major international commodity. Morphine, another derivative, is still one of the world’s most popular painkillers.
5	245	Potatoes	3000 BC in South America but 1600 onwards in Europe	Hundreds of varieties of this highly nutritious vegetable were selectively cultivated by South American natives, although only four were exported by sixteenth-century European settlers to Europe. A lack of diversity led to devastating blights in nineteenth- century Europe and mass emigrations to the Americas and Australia.
	Page	Item	Date	Why?
6	193	Sugarcane	3000 BC in South-East Asia	Deforestation to clear ground for sugar plantations in the New World led to dramatic changes in the landscape and ushered in a new era of slavery, which eventually spilled out into armed conflict in the American Civil War.
7	124, 199	Mulberry trees	2500 BC in China	Leizu, a Chinese queen, is said to have discovered how threads from the cocoon of a moth larva could be woven into silk. Later a new paper-making process was discovered that used the bark of mulberry trees. Paper is a major contributor to economic growth and global deforestation.
8	272	Tea	Cultivated in China from before c.1000 BC	This camellia leaf was used medicinally by Chinese rulers and by Buddhist monks to keep them awake for prayers. The British became addicted to tea by the nineteenth century – so much so that its supply from China was secured by the illegal exchange of opium, grown in Bengal, which provoked international conflict.
9	148	Olives	700 BC in Mediterranean	An energy-rich crop that grows in craggy soil and requires no hard labour to cultivate. Wealth from olives provided ancient Greek cities with enough time and leisure to pursue scientific investigations and new experimental societies including democracy and republicanism.
10	269	Quinine	c.1600 in South AmericaAmerica	This extract from the bark of the cinchona tree provided European settlers with their first effective protection against the deadly disease malaria, spread by mosquitoes. It therefore became a passport to the successful European colonization of Africa, eventually cultivating the conditions for creating what is now known as the Third World.

	Page	Creature	Date (years ago)	Why?
1	18	Corals	540 million	These tiny sea creatures have built some of the sea’s most vibrant habitats. Coral islands are the skeletal remains of countless numbers of these marine organisms which have substantially reduced atmospheric CO2 levels with their reef-building antics.
2	19	Jellyfish	530 million	These were the first sea creatures to develop cell tissues with specialized functions that later evolved in other species into separate organs. The deadly sting of some jellyfish provoked other creatures to defend themselves by making large protective shells.
3	20	Sea squirts	500 million	These animals are rooted to the sea bed and feed off microsopic food by filtering water through their bodies. Baby sea squirt larvae swim using a primitive chord that beats the water. In their descendants these chords evolved into backbones, from which the family of vertebrates (called chordate) and eventually humans emerged.
4	22	Lungfish	420 million	The first vertebrate fish whose ancestors experimented with escaping the terror of the high seas by using a primitive air-breathing lung adapted from one of their gills. It also learned to walk across muddy river estuaries using its fins, precursors to the tetrapods, the world’s first four-legged animals.
5	32	Velvet worms	420 million	Ancestors of today’s velvet worms developed stubby legs that helped them move faster across the sea floor to seek food, making them ideally suited to experiment with life on land where they re-nourish the soil. Eventually the velvet worm’s many legs and segmented bodies evolved into insects.
	Page	Creature	Date (years ago)	Why?
6	32	Dragonflies	350 million	These creatures adapted slits once used for breathing underwater into flaps that helped them fly from place to place. Dragonflies were also the first creatures to gain a view of life on land through an ingenious system of compound eyes. Increased levels of oxygen in the air meant they once grew as large as seagulls are today.
7	35	Honeybees	150 million	Descended from wasps, these flying insects developed a taste for nectar and pollen, a fancy that stimulated plants and trees all over the world to cover the land in blossom. Social behaviour that evolved in bees’ nests signalled nature’s ability to construct complex civilizations out of large communities of living creatures.
8	47	Termites	200 million	These insects evolved from cockroaches and beetles and were part of nature’s proving ground for creatures whose lives depended on social behaviour (like humans). Their collective intelligence, exhibited through language, rulers, teamwork, agriculture, education and sacrifice, later became hallmarks of civilized human society.
9	57	Gorillas	7 million	Ancestors of today’s gorillas were the first members of the great ape family to experiment with living on the ground instead of up in the trees. As the climate dried out during the Ice Ages and grasslands replaced much of the world’s forests, it was from the mild-mannered, vegetarian gorilla that humanity’s most direct ancestor evolved.
10	96	Grey wolves	300,000	Today’s domestic dogs are directly descended (as a sub-species) from the grey wolf that evolved during the Ice Ages. Without the help of dogs, early farmers would have struggled to keep control of their flocks of animals on which their sustenance depended.

	Page	Creature	Date (years ago)	Why?
1	16	Trilobite	530 million	These were the first living creatures thought to have been able to see using compound eyes (sight later re-evolved on land in dragonflies).
2	38	Tiktaalik	375 million	This four-legged animal adapted to living on land by being the first creature to use a neck to lift and swivel its head from side to side, helping it to hunt for food and better detect danger.
3	39	Ichthyostega	350 million	Young offspring of these sea creatures colonized the land to protect themselves from predators in the sea. Their descendants evolved into the world’s first dedicated land animals, the amphibians.
4	39	Hylonomus	315 million	This was the first creature known to have developed a hard-shelled egg, allowing it to breed inland, beginning the domination of life on land by reptiles, the family to which all dinosaurs belonged.
5	39	Dimetrodon	260 million	A mammal-like reptile whose ingenious back-mounted sail allowed it to warm up its blood to hunt early in the day when other reptiles were still too cold. Warm-bloodedness later allowed mammals to hunt at night when they were safer from dinosaur attack.
6	41	Lystrosaurus	230 million	A warm-blooded mammal-like reptile that somehow survived the Permian Mass Extinction (252 million years ago) and therefore preserved a vital evolutionary link between mammal-like reptiles and their descendants, the mammals.
	Page	Creature	Date (years ago)	Why?
7	47	Sinosauropteryx	140 million	A dinosaur that developed the use of feathers as a means of insulation. These were later adapted by birds for flight, showing that birds are living descendants of the dinosaurs.
8	55	Hyracotherium	35 million	A dog-like creature that roamed the forests of North America which evolved into the horse. Horses then migrated across the Alaskan land-bridge into Asia where they were eventually domesticated by man 7,000 years ago, dramatically altering the course of human history by providing a new source of transportation as well as military and agricultural power.
9	68	Australo-pithecus	3 million	The earliest known ape that walked on two feet, freeing its hands to be able to carry food and make tools. Motor skills to control intricate hand-movements stimulated the growth of brain size, which required more food, which required better tools for hunting – provoking an evolutionary spiral that led to the development of human brains which are four times larger than those of our closest genetic relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees.
10	237	Variola Major	Declared extinct in 1979	A deadly virus that spread to humans following the domestication of animals after the last Ice Age melt 12,000 years ago. In the twentieth century alone the virus was responsible for as many as 500 million human deaths. Before then, it accounted for the decimation of indigenous American and Australian populations when European settlers spread the disease. The virus was the first to have been completely eradicated from nature by man.

	Page	Threat	Why?
1	51	Meteorite strike	That’s what finished off the dinosaurs 65.5 million years ago and at some point experts say another boulder of a similar size or bigger is bound to collide into the fragile earth, causing another mass extinction of species. So dark are many of these objects in space that there may not be too much warning, either.
2	289	Man-made pollution	The entire manufacturing output of all plastics made since the early 1900s will exist for thousands of years to come because none of it biodegrades. CFCs from fridges and aerosols continue to wreak havoc with the ozone layer. Nuclear waste from the world’s 441 nuclear power plants will stay highly toxic for tens of thousands of years.
3	62, 256	Climate change	Melting ice-caps, shifting rainfall patterns, floods, droughts and extreme weather events that destroy harvests are some of the predicted consequences of the continuing increase in atmospheric CO2 from 284 ppm (parts per million) in 1832 to 383 ppm today. The rise is down to modern humans pumping out fossil fuel pollution into the atmosphere, like a massive global volcano.
4	256, 265	Over-population	For tens of thousands of years human populations stayed at a roughly stable level of around five million. Then, with the birth of agriculture after the last Ice Age melt, settled civilizations piled on the population pressure. By the time of Jesus Christ numbers had soared to c.200 million. By 1804 the total rocketed past the one billion mark to become nearly seven billion today, tipping the world’s living systems into ecological imbalance.
5	179, 216, 290	Deforestation	The itch to settle led humans to abandon living in forests because farming required felling trees for fields, turning lands once lush with vegetation into desert and scrub. Deforestation is a big cause of the current mass extinction of species and is also damaging the earth’s natural capacity to soak up climate-changing carbon dioxide.
	Page	Threat	Why?
6	244, 256	Shrinking biodiversity	As living things get transported by humans from one habitat to another in the modern globalized world, species become exposed to new predators, and without time to adapt to survive, many become extinct. Loss of trees, sterilization of the soil through over-farming and the use of pesticides and over-fishing are giving rise to concerns that humans are increasingly vulnerable in a world that has lost its ecological balance.
7	293	Inequality	Farming gave rise to permanent human settlements in which some people controlled supplies of stored food while others became dependent. Domesticated horses gave others military superiority, reinforced by bronze weapons and chariots. Roughly a third of the modern human population is overfed whilst another third is malnourished, giving rise to social grievances and international terrorism.
8	237	Disease	Living in close proximity to farm animals spawned diseases that have plagued humans ever since they began to live in towns and cities. Smallpox, a virus which originated c.12,000 years ago and jumped to humans from cows, is human history’s biggest killer. Today viruses such as HIV Aids (originated in monkeys), avian influenza (from birds) and ebola (from fruit bats) could be just as lethal.
9	293	Famine	Genetically modified foods that are disease and drought resistant offer the hope of salvation from death by famine for some people. However, the deliberate manipulation of nature’s operating systems is fiercely opposed by those who believe humans are not adequately equipped to take over from nature as custodians of the earth’s living systems.
10	284	Global war	The potential for humans to wipe out most living things as well as themselves has only existed since the dawn of the bio-engineering and nuclear ages in the mid-twentieth century. Proliferation has recently increased the risk that such an outcome could take place through a state-sponsored global war over natural resources (e.g. oil) or by maverick groups of disaffected individuals.

	Page	Item	Date	Why?
1	4	The Big Bang	13.7 billion years ago	Echoes from this monumental, universe shattering event were unexpectedly detected in 1964 by American scientists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson using a home-made space radio-telescope
2	41	Lystrosaurus fossils	250 million years ago	This mammal-like reptile, looking like a cross between a hippopotamus and a pig, somehow survived the biggest mass extinction of species on earth 252 million years ago. Its fossils, found on every continent, help prove that Alfred Wegener’s theory of plate tectonics is correct.
3	51	Iridium layer	65.5 million years ago	High concentrations of a rare type of the metal iridium, not naturally occurring on the earth, were found in a layer of clay just at the moment when dinosaur relics disappear from the fossil record. First discovered in the early 1970s, the same tell-tale sign of a massive meteorite impact has since been found in rocks all over the world.
4	81	Altamira caves	20,000 years ago	Eight-year-old Spanish child Maria Sautuola couldn’t believe her eyes when she noticed paintings of huge bison on the ceiling of a cave in Spain. They turned out to be among the oldest expressions of human art ever known, painted by hunter-gathering people more than 20,000 years ago.
5	127	Oracle bones	c.1600 BC	Ancient writing that resembles Chinese today was etched on oracle bones and turtle shells discovered near the Royal Tombs of Yin where Shang rulers buried their dead. More than 20,000 have been discovered, revealing questions put by kings to the gods in their capacity as intermediaries between earth and heaven.
	Page	Item	Date	Why?
6	104	Nineveh tablets	c.600 BC	A staggering 20,000 tablets of cuneiform writing, unearthed in the 1840s, have transformed our historical understanding of ancient Sumerian, Assyrian and Babylonian civilizations. The Royal Library of King Ashurbanipal contained everything from king lists and epic histories (Gilgamesh) to complex mathematical treatises.
7	145	Cyrus cylinder	539 BC	Discovered in 1879 under the walls of Babylon, this inscribed cylinder details what is hailed as the first charter of human rights. Tolerant Persian King Cyrus abolished slavery and even paid for the reconstruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem after it was destroyed by Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar.
8	140	Ashoka pillars	c.264 BC	Indian King Ashoka was so dismayed at the horrific casualties of the Battle of Kalinga that he converted to Buddhism and vowed to dedicate his reign to restoring peace on earth for all living things. His achievements were recorded on a series of pillars, one of which still stands outside the city of Sarnath, near Varanasi, in India.
9	177	Sacred Cenote of Chichen Itza	300 BC–800 AD	In 1897 American archaeologist Edward Thompson dredged a small lake that contained sacrificial knives, plates and other artefacts revealing the grim business of Central and South American human sacrifice. Desperate rulers believed these practices would encourage the gods to bring them good fortune and rain to water their crops.
10	201	Caves of the Thousand Buddhas	900 AD	Early twentieth-century Hungarian archaeologist Aurel Stein discovered a trove of more than 40,000 perfectly preserved Buddhist texts, many hand-written by monks, which included the oldest dated printed document ever found, the Diamond Sutra (868 AD).

	Page	Item	Why?
1	4	What happened before the Big Bang?	Is our universe just the next in a long line of bangs and crunches? Is it one of many parallel universes, each one spurred into existence by other big bangs with their own different laws of fundamental physics, creating a kind of multiverse? Or, is there some form of superior intelligence that created our universe and life on earth?
2	6	What triggered life on Earth?	Amino acids delivered on meteorites from outer space? A chemical soup concocted at the mouth of sea-floor volcanic vents? A chance spark of life accidentally triggered by a primordial lightning storm? An alien or divine architect?
3	34	What caused the first flowers to bloom?	Charles Darwin called it an ‘abominable mystery’, and even today experts have no clear idea. Was it the presence of pollinators such as bees, or did bees emerge only after flowers were there to provide a diet of pollen and nectar?
4	58	Who was the missing common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees?	Modern genetics show that the split between chimps and humans occurred no more than about four to seven million years ago. But what was this creature like?
5	66	What caused Australopithecus to swivel on to two feet?	Walking on two feet has as many advantages as disadvantages to apes who came down from trees to live in grassland savannahs. With brains no larger than those of a chimpanzee it wasn’t simply intelligence that provoked human ancestors to rise up on two feet. So what was it?
6	72	When did humans learn to talk?	Guesstimates range from between 50,000 and 110,000 years ago, but no one can be sure. Language gave humans a big advantage in being able to organize themselves to hunt more efficiently.
	Page	Item	Why?
7	89	What caused the Pleistocene extinctions in the Americas and Australia?	Large animals (megafauna) rapidly disappeared once Homo sapiens populated Australia 40,000 years ago and then the Americas 12,000 years ago. Was it overhunting, climate change, a mixture of the two, or something else, such as disease, that caused such devastation?
8	155	What happened to the tomb of Alexander the Great?	Once the most popular tourist attraction of the Roman world, all records of the location of Alexander’s golden tomb have since disappeared from history, not yet recovered by archaeologists.
9	180	How did the ancient Nazca people construct their giant geoglyphs?	Fashioned sometime between 300 BC and 800 AD, these people made more than 70 geometric and natural shapes, some as long as 270 metres, by brushing arid desert grit to one side into a pattern of paths. But how could they have made such intricate shapes when the only way of seeing what they had done was from hundreds of feet up in the air?
10	134, 160	Is there such a thing as life after death?	From the animistic beliefs of hunter-gathering man to the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and from Hindu reincarnation to the Buddhist nirvana, human history is one long record of the belief in a force beyond earthly existence. But is it just a delusion as some modern scientists claim?