| The first farms appear when plants are domesticated (c. 11,000 BCE) | Ancient History |
| Settlement of the first city, Uruk in Mesopotamia (c. 4,500 BCE) | |
| The wheel invented in Eastern Europe/Middle East (c. 3,500 BCE) | |
| Cuneiform, the first writing, invented in Mesopotamia (c. 3,200 BCE) | |
| The Great Pyramid of Giza built for Pharaoh Khufu (c. 2,560 BCE) | |
| First Olympic Games held in Ancient Greece (776 BCE) | Classical Antiquity |
| Rome founded (753 BCE) | |
| The life of the Buddha (c. 563-483 BCE in India) | |
| Alexander the Great, conqueror of the largest empire yet (356-323 BCE) | |
| Julius Caesar creates the Julian calendar (45 BCE) | |
| Rome falls to Germanic tribes (476 CE) | Dark Ages |
| Life of Mohammed, founder of Islam (571-632 CE) | |
| Charlemagne crowned as the first Holy Roman Emperor (800 CE) | |
| Gunpowder first used as a weapon in China (904 CE) | |
| Viking explorers first colonise North America (c. 986 CE) | |
| Battle of Hastings and Norman Conquest (begins 1066) | Middle Ages |
| The first university is founded in Bologna, Italy (1088 ) | |
| Life of Genghis Khan, founder of the Mongol Empire (1162-1227) | |
| King John forced by his barons to sign the Magna Charta (1215) | |
| The Black Death kills one-third of the European population (1347-1348) | |
| Christopher Columbus arrives in the Americas (1492) | Early Modern |
| First slaves taken from Africa to the Americas (1502) | |
| Michelangelo paints the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome (1512) | |
| Protestant Reformation begins with Martin Luthor's 95 Theses (1517) | |
| Magellan’s Expedition Is the first to circumnavigates the globe (1522) | |
| Galileo Galilei announces discoveries made with his telescope (1610) | |
| Taj Mahal built by Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan (1653) | |
| Steam engine invented by Edward Somerset (1663) | |
| Isaac Newton publishes his Principia Mathematica (1687) | |
| Beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Britain (1733) | |
| The American Revolution (1775-1783) | Late Modern |
| The French Revolution (1789-1799) | |
| Invention of the telegraph (1832) | |
| Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species (1859) | |
| Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone (1876) | |
| Invention of radio (1879) | |
| Invention of the aeroplane (1903) | |
| Albert Einstein publishes his Special Theory of Relativity (1905) | |
| World War I (1914-1918) | |
| The invention of television (1925) | |
| The Great Depression after US Stock Market crash (1929-1939) | Contemporary History |
| World War II (1939-1945) | |
| United Nations formed (1945) | |
| India becomes independent from the UK (1947) | |
| Double helical structure of DNA discovered (1953) | |
| Russian, Yuri Gagarin, becomes the first man in space (1961) | |
| U.S. President John F. Kennedy is assassinated (1963) | |
| The World Wide Web invented by Tim Berners-Lee (1989) | |
| The Cold War ends with the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991) | |
| Terrorists attack and destroy the World Trade Towers (2001) | |
