Every entry, in chronological order
The 151 entries of Sapiens, grouped by the period of our history they belong to, oldest first.
Middle Stone Age28 entries
- The First Faces of Homo sapiens~315,000 years ago
- The Deepest Branch of the Family Treebetween ~350,000 and ~260,000 years ago
- The Oldest Hunting Spears~300,000 years ago
- Florisbad, a Skull of Disputed Age~260,000 years ago
- Small Brains, Deep Chambers~250,000 years ago
- The Omo Fossils Grow Older~233,000 years ago or more
- An Early Foray Into Europe~210,000 years ago
- Grass Beds and Swept Ashes~200,000 years ago
- Mitochondrial Eve~200,000 years ago
- A First Step Out of Africa~185,000 years ago (disputed)
- Dinner from the Sea~164,000 years ago
- The Herto Skulls, Carried and Kept~160,000 to 154,000 years ago
- The First Jewellery~142,000 years ago or more
- Green Corridors Across the Sahara~125,000 years ago
- A Girl with Two Peoplesbetween ~140,000 and ~80,000 years ago
- An Ochre Workshop by the Sea~100,000 years ago
- The Oldest Burials~92,000 years ago
- A Finger Bone Deep in Arabiamore than ~85,000 years ago
- Clothing, Dated by Lice~83,000 years ago or more
- A Child Laid to Rest~78,000 years ago
- Surviving the Great Eruption~74,000 years ago
- Fire Becomes an Engineer's Tool~72,000 years ago
- The Expansion That Peopled the World~70,000–50,000 years ago
- Crossing to Australia~65,000 years ago (disputed)
- Did Neanderthals Paint?~64,800 years ago
- The Bow Is Drawn~64,000 years ago
- Engraved Eggshell Canteens~60,000 years ago
- The Oldest Story Ever Paintedat least ~51,200 years ago
Upper Palaeolithic20 entries
- A Network of Beads~50,000 to 33,000 years ago
- The Hobbits of Flores~100,000 to 50,000 years ago
- When Our Ancestors Met Neanderthals~50,500 to 43,500 years ago
- The Denisovan Inheritance~46,000 years ago
- Homo sapiens Reaches Europe~45,000 years ago
- Notches Before Numbers~43,000 years ago
- The Oldest Instruments~42,000 years ago
- The String Revolution~41,000 years ago or more
- The Oldest Human Figurine~40,000 years ago
- The Last Neanderthals~40,000 years ago
- The Man From Tianyuan Cave~40,000 years ago
- The Lions of Chauvet Cave~37,000–33,500 years ago
- The Fall of the Giants~50,000 to 10,000 years ago
- The Wolf Comes to the Fire~23,000 years ago (debated)
- Footprints Across America~23,000 to 21,000 years ago
- The Coldest Millennia~26,500 to 19,000 years ago
- Clay Learns to Hold Fire~20,000 years ago
- Settling Down Before Farming~14,500 years ago
- A Sudden Return of the Cold~12,900 years ago
- The Wooden Idol of Shigir~12,000 years ago
Neolithic14 entries
- A Temple Before the Harvest~11,500 years ago
- Farming Begins in the Fertile Crescent~11,500 years ago
- The First Herds~10,400 years ago
- Rice Learns to Hold Its Grain~9,400 years ago
- A Town Before Kings~9,100 years ago
- Teosinte Becomes Maize~9,000 years ago
- Farmers Walk Into Europe~8,500 years ago
- The Drowning of Doggerland~8,150 years ago
- Farming's Forgotten Cradle~7,000 years ago
- The First Metal from Fire~6,900 years ago
- Farming's Boom and Bust~8,000 to 4,000 years ago
- Learning to Drink Milk~6,000 years ago
- The Sahara Dries Out~5,500 years ago
- The Wheel~5,400 years ago
Bronze Age14 entries
- The Man in the Ice~5,300 years ago
- The People of the Outrigger~5,200 years ago
- Accounting Becomes Writing~5,200 years ago
- Herders Reshape a Continent~5,000 years ago
- The Sahel's Own Harvest~4,900 years ago
- Plague Before the Pandemics~4,900 years ago
- Mountains Made to Order~2560 BCE
- The Indus Cities Fade~4,500 years ago
- The Bantu Expansion~4,400 years ago
- The Thread of the Moth~4,300 years ago
- The Drought That Named an Age~4,200 years ago
- The Horse Changes Pace~2200 BCE (debated)
- The Last Mammoths~4,000 years ago
- One Sign, One Sound~3,900 years ago
Iron Age1 entry
Antiquity2 entries
Middle Ages20 entries
- The Veiled Sun536 CE
- The First Named Pandemic541 CE
- The Invention of Nothing628 CE
- The Maya Cities Empty~850 CE
- Printing's Eastern Millennium868 CE
- The Fire Drug~900 CE
- The Plough That Opened the North~1000 CE
- Two Oceans Meet on One Island~1000 CE
- A Year Fixed by a Solar Storm1021 CE
- The Mounds of Cahokia~1050 CE
- Angkor, City of Water~1150 CE
- The Last Great Voyages~1200 CE
- The Mongol Moment1206 CE
- The Little Ice Age~1250 CE
- Great Zimbabwe~1300 CE
- The Source of the Black Death1346 CE
- The Statues That Kept Their People~1400 CE
- A Press in Every City~1450 CE
- An Empire Without Writing~1470 CE
- Two Worlds Collide1492 CE
Early Modern5 entries
Contemporary47 entries
- One Billion of Us~1804 CE
- The Year Without a Summer1815 CE
- The Rails Shrink the Land~1830 CE
- Light Learns to Write1839 CE
- The End of Surgical Pain1846 CE
- Clean Water1854 CE
- On the Origin of Species1859 CE
- The Monk Who Counted Peas1866 CE
- Messages Outrun Their Messengers1866 CE
- The Current That Stayed On1882 CE
- Germs Get the Blame1882 CE
- Heavier Than Air1903 CE
- Bread From the Air1908 CE
- The 1918 Influenza1918 CE
- The Mold in the Dish1928 CE
- The Nuclear Age1945 CE
- The Transistor1947 CE
- A Clock Inside Everything That Lived1949 CE
- The Plastic Age~1950 CE
- The Cigarette Century1950 CE
- The Shape of Heredity1953 CE
- The Box That Shrank the Sea1956 CE
- The First Artificial Star1957 CE
- The Rising Curve1958 CE
- The Pill1960 CE
- The Green Revolution~1965 CE
- Footprints on the MoonJuly 20, 1969
- The Great Fertility Decline~1970 CE
- Stitching Genes Together1973 CE
- Lucy Steps Into View1974 CE
- Life Begins in Glass1978 CE
- A Disease Driven Extinct1980 CE
- The Slow Pandemic1981 CE
- The Hole We Repaired1985 CE
- The Molecular Photocopier1985 CE
- The World Wide Web1991 CE
- The Dead Begin to Speak1997 CE
- Reading Our Own Recipe2003 CE
- The Language Gene That Wasn't2007 CE
- A Bank in Every Pocket2007 CE
- The Urban Majority2007 CE
- A Vanished Cousin Speaks2010 CE
- Machines That Learn~2012 CE
- Scissors Found in Bacteria2012 CE
- A Vaccine Written in RNA2020 CE
- Eight Billion, and Slowing2022 CE
- The Machines Start Talking2022 CE