Appendix F: Timeline of Human Knowledge (40,000 BCE

Sarvarthapedia

Below is the of Appendix F: Timeline of Human Knowledge (40,000 BCE – Present) for the Sarvarthapedia Subject Guide for Human Understanding.

APPENDIX F: TIMELINE OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE

40,000 BCE – Present

PART 1: DEEP TIME & ORAL KNOWLEDGE (c. 40,000 – 3500 BCE)

Before writing. Knowledge stored in memory, song, ritual, and stone.

Date	Event	Significance	See Also
c. 40,000 BCE	First known figurative art (Lion-man of Hohlenstein-Stadel, Germany)	Abstract thinking and symbolic representation emerge; the cognitive revolution.	Appendix C: Oral traditions
c. 35,000 BCE	Oldest known musical instruments (bone flutes, Germany)	Humans organize sound into patterns — mathematics before writing.	Appendix E: None directly
c. 30,000 BCE	Venus figurines (Willendorf, Dolní Věstonice)	Fertility, body representation, and possible early religious or social symbolism.	Appendix C: None
c. 15,000 BCE	Lascaux cave paintings (France)	Narrative visual storytelling; deep time knowledge of animals and hunting.
c. 10,000 BCE	Neolithic Revolution (agriculture begins, Fertile Crescent)	The most consequential shift in human history — farming leads to cities, specialization, hierarchy, and writing.
c. 8,000 BCE	Oldest known city (Çatalhöyük, Turkey)	Large-scale cohabitation without centralized government for 2,000 years.
c. 5,000 BCE	Invention of the wheel (Mesopotamia)	Transport, pottery, and eventually mechanical thought.

PART 2: THE AXIAL AGE & CLASSICAL FOUNDATIONS (c. 3500 BCE – 500 CE)

Writing, law, philosophy, and the great spiritual traditions.

Date	Event	Significance	See Also
c. 4500 BCE	Rigveda Samhita Oral Tradition	Best ever Oratory and Poetry was created
c. 3400 BCE	Invention of writing (Sumerian cuneiform)	Knowledge becomes external, portable, and debatable. History begins.	Canon: #1 (Gilgamesh)
c. 2700 BCE	Imhotep designs the Step Pyramid (Egypt)	First named architect in history; later deified as god of medicine.
c. 2100 BCE	Epic of Gilgamesh composed	First great literary epic: friendship, grief, and the quest for immortality.	Canon: #1
c. 1792–1750 BCE	Code of Hammurabi (Babylon)	“An eye for an eye” — law as written, public, and class-stratified.
c. 1500–1200 BCE	Rigveda Sakal Samhita Came into Present Form	Hinduism’s oldest text; cosmic order (rta) and speculative creation hymns.	Canon: #3
c. 1200–1050 BCE	Bronze Age Collapse	Civilizations across Eastern Mediterranean vanish; knowledge lost for centuries.
c. 1000–800 BCE	I Ching (China) composed	Divination as philosophy; change as the only constant.	Canon: #87
c. 8th century BCE	Homeric epics (Iliad, Odyssey) written down	Foundation of Greek (and Western) literature; heroism, rage, and cunning.	Canon: #5
c. 770–476 BCE	Spring and Autumn period (China)	Hundred Schools of Thought: Confucius, Laozi, Sun Tzu.	Canon: #6, #7, #11
c. 600–500 BCE	Upanishads composed (India)	Shift from ritual to inner knowledge (atman, brahman); foundation of Hindu philosophy.
c. 585 BCE	Thales predicts solar eclipse	Often called “first philosopher” — natural explanation, not myth.
c. 563–483 BCE	Life of the Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama)	Four Noble Truths, Eightfold Path — a systematic psychology of suffering and liberation.	Canon: #10
c. 551–479 BCE	Life of Confucius	Ethics of family, ritual, and governance shapes East Asia for 2,500 years.	Canon: #6
c. 500 BCE	Axial Age (Jaspers)	Simultaneous emergence of philosophy in Greece, India, China, and the Near East — without contact.
499–449 BCE	Greco-Persian Wars	“West vs. East” framing that shapes European identity for millennia.
c. 470–399 BCE	Life of Socrates	Socratic method: questioning as philosophy. Wrote nothing.	Canon: #8 (Plato)
c. 428–348 BCE	Life of Plato	Theory of Forms; the Academy (first Western university).	Canon: #8
c. 384–322 BCE	Life of Aristotle	Systematic logic, ethics, politics, biology — the first encyclopedia.	Canon: #9
c. 330 BCE	Library of Alexandria founded	The ancient world’s greatest archive — later burned (multiple times).
c. 300 BCE	Euclid’s Elements	Geometry as axiomatic system; unchanged for 2,000 years.
c. 280–220 BCE	Septuagint translation (Hebrew Bible → Greek)	First major translation project; makes Jewish scripture accessible to the Mediterranean.
c. 250 BCE	Archimedes discovers buoyancy (“Eureka!”)	Mathematics applied to physics; almost invented calculus 1,800 years early.
c. 3rd century BCE – 3rd century CE	Mahayana Buddhism develops (India → China)	Bodhisattva ideal; Buddhism becomes a universal, not monastic, religion.
c. 50–150 CE	New Testament composed	Central Christian scriptures: parables, crucifixion, resurrection, and early church.	Canon: #13
313 CE	Edict of Milan (Christianity legalized in Roman Empire)	From persecuted sect to imperial religion — reshaping Europe.
354–430 CE	Life of Augustine	Confessions (first autobiography) and City of God (Christian political theology).	Canon: #15
476 CE	Fall of the Western Roman Empire	Conventional marker of the “Dark Ages” — knowledge moves east and into monasteries.

PART 3: MEDIEVAL & ISLAMIC GOLDEN AGE (c. 500 – 1450)

Preservation, translation, and new syntheses.

Date	Event	Significance	See Also
c. 529	Justinian closes Plato’s Academy (Athens)	End of pagan philosophy as an institution in Europe.
c. 600–1000	Monastic scriptoria (Europe)	Monks copy and preserve classical texts — often by hand, one at a time.
609–632	Revelation of the Qur’an to Muhammad	Islam’s founding text: divine unity (tawhid), justice, mercy.	Canon: #14
c. 800	Charlemagne crowned Holy Roman Emperor	Carolingian Renaissance: revival of learning in Western Europe.
c. 800–1200	Islamic Golden Age (Baghdad, Cordoba, Cairo)	Translation of Greek texts into Arabic; advances in algebra (al-Khwarizmi), optics (Ibn al-Haytham), medicine (Ibn Sina).	Canon: #18 (Khayyám), #19 (Ibn Battuta)
c. 1000	The Tale of Genji (Murasaki Shikibu, Japan)	The world’s first novel.	Canon: #17
1054	Great Schism (Eastern Orthodox vs. Roman Catholic)	Split between Greek East and Latin West — still not healed.
1088	University of Bologna founded (Europe’s first)	Universities as self-governing guilds of teachers and students.
c. 1150	University of Paris founded	Scholasticism: Abelard, Aquinas — faith seeking understanding.	Appendix E: Abelard
c. 1200	Epic of Son-Jara (Mali Empire, oral)	West Africa’s foundational epic; the sorcerer-king and the heroic outcast.	Canon: #23
1265–1321	Life of Dante Alighieri	Divine Comedy: synthesis of medieval theology, politics, and poetry.	Canon: #20
1325–1354	Ibn Battuta’s travels (75,000 miles)	Pre-modern world’s greatest traveler; window into 14th-century global Islam.	Canon: #19
c. 1390	Canterbury Tales (Chaucer)	English vernacular literature comes of age.	Canon: #22
c. 1450	Gutenberg invents movable type (printing press)	The most important technology for knowledge since writing itself. Mass production of texts; Reformation, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment follow.

PART 4: RENAISSANCE, REFORMATION & SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION (1450 – 1700)

New worlds, new heavens, and the birth of modern science.

Date	Event	Significance	See Also
1453	Fall of Constantinople (to Ottoman Turks)	Greek scholars flee to Italy with manuscripts — fuels Renaissance.
1472	First printed edition of Ptolemy’s Geography	Ancient geography meets new technology; enables European expansion.
1492	Columbus reaches the Americas	The Columbian Exchange: crops, animals, disease, and knowledge across the Atlantic — and genocide.
1511	Erasmus, The Praise of Folly	Humanist satire of church and society.	Canon: #27
1517	Luther’s 95 Theses	Protestant Reformation: authority of scripture over church, printing press as accelerant.
1532	Machiavelli, The Prince (published posthumously)	“Effective truth” over moral ideals — political realism.	Canon: #26
1543	Copernicus, On the Revolutions	Earth moves. The book that launched the Scientific Revolution.	Canon: #28
1543	Vesalius, On the Fabric of the Human Body	Modern anatomy based on dissection, not ancient texts.
1580	Montaigne, Essays	Invention of the personal essay; “What do I know?”	Canon: #29
1600	Bruno burned at the stake (for heresy, including Copernicanism)	The cost of new cosmology.
1605	Bacon, The Advancement of Learning	Empiricism as method; critique of the “idols of the mind.”	Canon: #32
1609–1619	Kepler’s laws of planetary motion	Planets move in ellipses, not circles — physical astronomy begins.
1610	Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger)	Moons of Jupiter, mountains on the moon — evidence against perfection of heavens.	Canon: #97
1620	Pilgrims land at Plymouth (Mayflower Compact)	Self-government and religious freedom as American founding myth.
1628	Harvey, On the Motion of the Heart and Blood	Circulation of blood — physiology becomes mechanical.
1633	Galileo tried by the Inquisition	Science vs. church authority; Galileo recants (“And yet it moves” — probably apocryphal).
1637	Descartes, Discourse on Method	“I think, therefore I am.” Mind-body dualism.	Canon: #33
1651	Hobbes, Leviathan	Social contract theory; life in nature is “nasty, brutish, and short.”	Canon: #34
1656	Pascal, Pensées (published posthumously)	Pascal’s Wager; the heart has reasons reason does not know.	Appendix E: Pascal
1665	First scientific journals (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society)	Peer review, priority disputes, and the acceleration of scientific communication.
1687	Newton, Principia Mathematica	Laws of motion, universal gravitation — physics as a predictive mathematical system.	Canon: #37
1689	Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration	Religious toleration as a political (not theological) virtue.
1690	Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding	Mind as blank slate (tabula rasa); empiricism.

PART 5: ENLIGHTENMENT & REVOLUTION (1700 – 1815)

Reason, rights, and the secularization of knowledge.

Date	Event	Significance	See Also
1710	Berkeley, Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge	“To be is to be perceived” — idealism.	Appendix E: Berkeley
1739–40	Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature	Skeptical empiricism: causation is habit, self is a bundle, reason is slave to passions.	Canon: #39
1748	Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws	Separation of powers; comparative political theory.	Canon: #38
1751–1772	Diderot’s Encyclopédie (28 volumes)	The Enlightenment’s great knowledge project — banned, burned, and epochal.	Appendix E: Diderot
1762	Rousseau, The Social Contract	“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” General will.	Canon: #40
1764	Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments	Against torture and death penalty; foundation of modern criminology.
1776	Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations	Invisible hand, division of labor — classical economics.	Canon: #41
1776	American Declaration of Independence	“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” — natural rights in practice.	Canon: #43
1781	Kant, Critique of Pure Reason	“Copernican revolution” in philosophy: objects conform to our mind.	Canon: #42
1785	Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation	Utilitarianism: greatest happiness for the greatest number.
1789	French Revolution begins	Liberty, equality, fraternity — and terror. Modern politics born.
1791	Olympe de Gouges, Declaration of the Rights of Woman	First explicit feminist declaration; she was executed for it.	Canon: #44
1792	Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman	Founding text of feminist philosophy.	Canon: #45
1798	Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population	Population grows geometrically, food arithmetically — later influences Darwin.
1808	Goethe, Faust, Part One	The modern myth of the striving, dissatisfied soul.	Canon: #46
1807	Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit	Master-slave dialectic; history as the unfolding of Spirit.	Canon: #47

PART 6: 19TH CENTURY – INDUSTRY, EMPIRE & DOUBT (1815 – 1900)

Class, evolution, and the death of God.

Date	Event	Significance	See Also
1815	Congress of Vienna	Post-Napoleonic order; conservatism and the Holy Alliance.
1822	Rosetta Stone deciphered (Champollion)	Egyptian hieroglyphs unlocked — Egyptology begins.
1830	Auguste Comte, Course of Positive Philosophy	Sociology as a science; law of three stages (theological, metaphysical, positive).
1835–1840	Tocqueville, Democracy in America	Most insightful analysis of American culture.	Canon: #48
1844	First telegraph message (“What hath God wrought?”)	Near-instant communication across continents — knowledge speeds up.
1848	Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto	“A spectre is haunting Europe.” Class struggle as engine of history.	Canon: #49
1854	Thoreau, Walden	Simplicity, nature, and civil disobedience.	Appendix E: Thoreau
1859	Darwin, On the Origin of Species	Evolution by natural selection — humans not specially created.	Canon: #51
1859	Mill, On Liberty	Harm principle; freedom of speech; experiments in living.	Canon: #50
1863	Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address	“Government of the people, by the people, for the people” — democracy as unfinished project.
1865	American Civil War ends; slavery abolished (13th Amendment)	The great American contradiction partially resolved — and violently contested.
1869	Tolstoy, War and Peace	Does history make great men, or do great men make history?	Canon: #53
1871	Darwin, The Descent of Man	Humans evolved from apes — the controversy intensifies.
1872	Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy	Apollonian vs. Dionysian; art as the only justification for existence.
1879	Edison invents practical light bulb	Night becomes productive — work and leisure extended.
1882	Nietzsche: “God is dead” (The Gay Science)	The loss of transcendent meaning as the modern condition.
1885	Benz builds first practical automobile	Mobility transformed; the age of oil begins.
1887	Michelson-Morley experiment	No evidence of “luminiferous ether” — leads to relativity.
1895	First motion picture (Lumière brothers)	Moving images as art, documentation, and propaganda.
1895	Röntgen discovers X-rays	Vision beyond the visible — diagnostic medicine transformed.
1896	First modern Olympic Games (Athens)	Internationalism, athleticism, and nationalism combined.
1899	Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams	The unconscious as structured language; psychoanalysis begins.	Canon: #56
1900	Planck introduces quantum theory	Energy is quantized (discrete packets) — the quantum revolution begins.

PART 7: 20TH CENTURY – MODERNISM, WORLD WARS & THEORY (1900 – 1970)

Fragmentation, crisis, and the linguistic turn.

Date	Event	Significance	See Also
1903	Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk	Double consciousness; the problem of the color line.	Canon: #58
1905	Einstein’s “miracle year” (Special Relativity, E=mc², Brownian motion)	Space and time are relative; mass and energy equivalent.	Canon: #60
1915	Einstein, General Relativity	Gravity as curvature of spacetime.
1916	Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (published posthumously)	Structural linguistics: signifier/signified, langue/parole.	Appendix E: Saussure
1916	First issue of The Masses (U.S. socialist magazine)	Muckraking, art, and radical politics — early alternative media.
1917	Russian Revolution	First communist state; socialism becomes a global project and threat.
1921	Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle	Death drive (Thanatos) alongside eros.
1922	Joyce, Ulysses	Stream of consciousness; the novel as encyclopedia.	Canon: #63
1922	Eliot, The Waste Land	Modernist poetry’s shattered masterpiece.	Canon: #62
1922	Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus	“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”	Appendix E: Wittgenstein
1925	Scopes “Monkey” Trial (Tennessee)	Evolution vs. creationism in American public schools — still not settled.
1927	Heidegger, Being and Time	The question of Being; Dasein, being-toward-death.	Canon: #64
1927	Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle	You cannot know both position and momentum precisely.	Appendix E: Heisenberg
1928	Fleming discovers penicillin	Antibiotics — the end of routine death from infection.
1929–1933	Great Depression	Capitalism’s crisis leads to Keynesianism and the New Deal.
1933	Nazi book burnings (Berlin)	“Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people” (Heine, 1821).
1936	Turing, “On Computable Numbers”	Turing machine — theoretical foundation of computer science.	Appendix E: Turing
1939–1945	World War II	70–85 million dead; the Holocaust; atomic bombs; the end of European dominance.
1945	Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki	Humanity gains the power to destroy itself.
1945	Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism	Analysis of Nazism and Stalinism as novel political forms.
1945	UN founded; Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)	International order based on rights, not just power (aspirationally).
1947	Partition of India and Pakistan	Largest mass migration in history; Hindu-Muslim violence; still unresolved.
1949	Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four	Newspeak, Big Brother, doublethink — the surveillance state imagined.	Canon: #66
1949	Beauvoir, The Second Sex	“One is not born, but becomes, a woman” — second-wave feminism.	Canon: #65
1951	Watson and Crick discover DNA structure (using Franklin’s data)	The mechanism of heredity; molecular biology begins.	Canon: #99
1953	First successful polio vaccine (Salk)	Public health triumph; mass vaccination as normal.
1957	Sputnik launches (Soviet Union)	Space Age begins; U.S. panics and funds science education massively.
1960	First oral contraceptive pill approved (U.S.)	Women’s control over reproduction transforms family, work, and sexuality.
1962	Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions	Paradigms, normal science, and incommensurability.	Canon: #69
1963	Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique	Second-wave feminism in the U.S.	Canon: #71
1964	Civil Rights Act (U.S.)	Outlaws segregation; the legal victory of the Civil Rights Movement.
1967	García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude	Magical realism as the mode of Latin American history.	Canon: #70
1968	Student protests (Paris, Chicago, Mexico City, Prague)	Global uprising against authority, war, and capitalism — largely failed but culturally transformative.
1969	Apollo 11 moon landing	“One small step for man” — humanity leaves its home planet.
1969	Stonewall riots (New York)	Modern LGBTQ+ rights movement begins.

PART 8: CONTEMPORARY – DIGITAL, CLIMATE & FRAGMENTATION (1970 – PRESENT)

The network, the Anthropocene, and the crisis of truth.

Date	Event	Significance	See Also
1970	First Earth Day	Environmental movement goes mainstream.
1971	Greenpeace founded	Direct action environmentalism.
1971	First email sent (Ray Tomlinson)	Digital communication begins; the @ symbol becomes everyday.
1972	Limits to Growth (Club of Rome report)	Computer modeling shows ecological collapse if growth continues — ignored for 50 years.
1973	Roe v. Wade (U.S. Supreme Court)	Constitutional right to abortion — overturned 2022.
1975	End of Vietnam War	First televised war; U.S. military defeat and loss of confidence.
1978	Said, Orientalism	Founding text of postcolonial studies.	Canon: #73
1979	First test-tube baby (Louise Brown)	Reproductive technology challenges assumptions about parenthood and nature.
1980	CNN launches (24-hour cable news)	The news cycle never stops — and never sleeps.
1981	First AIDS cases reported	Pandemic that changed sexuality, medicine, and activism.
1981	Moraga & Anzaldúa, This Bridge Called My Back	Women of color feminism; intersectionality in practice.	Canon: #84
1983	First mobile phone (Motorola DynaTAC)	$4,000, 30 minutes of talk, 10 hours to charge — the first brick.
1985	Gorbachev becomes Soviet leader (Perestroika, Glasnost)	Opens the USSR to reform — and leads to its collapse.
1989	Fall of the Berlin Wall	End of the Cold War; “The End of History” (Fukuyama) proclaimed.	Canon: #79
1990	World Wide Web invented (Tim Berners-Lee)	Hypertext, URLs, browsers — the internet becomes the web.
1991	First Iraq War (Gulf War)	24/7 CNN coverage; smart bombs and the “new military.”
1992	Rio Earth Summit (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change)	Global climate governance begins — too slowly.
1993	Butler, Bodies That Matter	Performativity, materiality, and queer theory.	Canon: #81
1995	Amazon.com opens (sells books online)	The beginning of e-commerce as we know it.
1996	First cloned mammal (Dolly the sheep)	Life can be copied from an adult cell — ethical and biological rupture.
1998	Google founded	Search as the interface to knowledge; “I’ll just Google it” replaces memory.
1999	WTO protests (Seattle)	Anti-globalization movement goes mainstream.
2001	September 11 attacks	War on Terror; surveillance state expands; Islamophobia globalized.
2001	Wikipedia launched	The encyclopedia anyone can edit — for better and worse.	This project
2004	Facebook launched (public 2006)	Social media as the dominant form of public discourse.
2007	First iPhone	The smartphone — the internet in your pocket. The death of patience.	Appendix J
2009	Bitcoin launched (Satoshi Nakamoto)	Decentralized currency; blockchain beyond money.
2012	Higgs boson discovered (CERN)	The last missing piece of the Standard Model (so far).
2015	Paris Climate Agreement	Nearly universal commitment to limit warming to 2°C (1.5°C aspirational) — implementation failing.
2016	Brexit; Trump elected	Populist backlash against globalization, immigration, and elites — the post-truth era named.
2017	#MeToo goes viral	Global reckoning with sexual harassment and assault.
2018	CRISPR babies announced (He Jiankui, China)	Heritable human genome editing — condemned, but the genie is out.
2020	COVID-19 pandemic	Global lockdowns; mRNA vaccines developed in under a year; trust in science fractures.
2022	ChatGPT launched (OpenAI)	Generative AI: machines that write, code, and create. The end of the essay as we knew it.
2023	First UN report on AI governance	Global recognition that AI alignment and regulation are urgent — no consensus yet.
2024	[Event not yet written]	You are here. The timeline continues.

AFTERWORD: THE SHAPE OF THE TIMELINE

If you scan this timeline from top to bottom, notice:

Era	Dominant Form of Knowledge	Pace of Change
Deep Time (40,000–3500 BCE)	Oral, embodied, ritual	Extremely slow (millennia)
Classical (3500 BCE–500 CE)	Written, hierarchical, authoritative	Slow (centuries)
Medieval (500–1450)	Preserved, theological, monastic	Slow to moderate
Renaissance/Reformation (1450–1700)	Printed, contested, individual	Moderate (decades)
Scientific Revolution (1543–1687)	Empirical, mathematical, experimental	Accelerating
Enlightenment (1700–1815)	Secular, critical, public	Decades
19th Century (1815–1900)	Industrial, evolutionary, ideological	Years to decades
20th Century (1900–1970)	Theoretical, mass-mediated, global	Years
Contemporary (1970–present)	Digital, networked, algorithmic	Days to weeks