Timeline of historic inventions

The timeline of historic inventions is a chronological list of particularly significant technological inventions and their inventors, where known. This page lists nonincremental inventions that are widely recognized by reliable sources as having had a direct impact on the course of history that was profound, global, and enduring. The dates in this article make frequent use of the units mya and kya, which refer to millions and thousands of years ago, respectively.
The dates listed in this section refer to the earliest evidence of an invention found and dated by archaeologists (or in a few cases, suggested by indirect evidence). Dates are often approximate and change as more research is done, reported and seen. Older examples of any given technology are often found. The locations listed are for the site where the earliest solid evidence has been found, but especially for the earlier inventions, there is little certainty how close that may be to where the invention took place.
The Lower Paleolithic period lasted over 3 million years, during which there many human-like species evolved including toward the end of this period, Homo sapiens. The original divergence between humans and chimpanzees occurred 13 (Mya), however interbreeding continued until as recently as 4 Ma, with the first species clearly belonging to the human (and not chimpanzee) lineage being Australopithecus anamensis. Some species are controversial among paleoanthropologists, who disagree whether they are species on their own or not. Here Homo ergaster is included under Homo erectus, while Homo rhodesiensis is included under Homo heidelbergensis.
During this period the Quaternary glaciation began (about 2.58 million years ago), and continues to today. It has been an ice age, with cycles of 40–100,000 years alternating between long, cold, more glaciated periods, and shorter warmer periods – interglacial episodes.
The dawn of Homo sapiens around 300 kya coincides with the start of the Middle Paleolithic period. During this 250,000-year period, archaic humans such as Neanderthals and Denisovans began to spread out of Africa, joined later by Homo sapiens. Late in the period we see evidence of increasingly long-distance trade, religious rites, and other behavior associated with Behavioral modernity.
50 kya was long regarded as the beginning of behavioral modernity, which defined the Upper Paleolithic period. The Upper Paleolithic lasted nearly 40,000 years, while research continues to push the beginnings of behavioral modernity earlier into the Middle Paleolithic. Behavioral modernity is characterized by the widespread observation of religious rites, artistic expression and the appearance of tools made for purely intellectual or artistic pursuits.
The end of the Last Glacial Period ("ice age") and the beginning of the Holocene around 11.7 ka coincide with the Agricultural Revolution, marking the beginning of the agricultural era, which persisted there until the industrial revolution.
During the Neolithic period, lasting 8400 years, stone began to be used for construction, and remained a predominant hard material for toolmaking. Copper and arsenic bronze were developed towards the end of this period, and of course the use of many softer materials such as wood, bone, and fibers continued. Domestication spread both in the sense of how many species were domesticated, and how widespread the practice became.
The beginning of bronze-smelting coincides with the emergence of the first cities and of writing in the Ancient Near East and the Indus Valley. The Bronze Age starting in Eurasia in the 4th millennia BC and ended, in Eurasia, c.1200 BC.
The Late Bronze Age collapse occurs around 1200 BC, extinguishing most Bronze-Age Near Eastern cultures, and significantly weakening the rest. This is coincident with the complete collapse of the Indus Valley Civilisation. This event is followed by the beginning of the Iron Age. We define the Iron Age as ending in 510 BC for the purposes of this article, even though the typical definition is region-dependent (e.g. 510 BC in Greece, 322 BC in India, 200 BC in China), thus being an 800-year period.