| Date | Event |
| About 300,000 years ago | Earliest Homo sapiens fossils in Africa |
| About 10,000 years ago | Beginnings of agriculture |
| About 3200 BCE | Early writing in Mesopotamia |
| About 3100 BCE | Unification of Egypt |
| 221 BCE | Qin unification of China |
| 27 BCE | Augustus becomes first Roman emperor |
| 476 CE | Fall of the Western Roman Empire |
| 622 CE | Hijra; start of the Islamic calendar |
| 1206 | Genghis Khan unites the Mongols |
| 1347–1351 | Black Death in Europe |
| 1453 | Ottoman conquest of Constantinople |
| 1492 | Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas |
| 1517 | Start of the Protestant Reformation |
| About 1760–1840 | Industrial Revolution in Britain |
| 1776 | American Declaration of Independence |
| 1789 | French Revolution begins |
| 1804 | Haiti becomes independent |
| 1914–1918 | World War I |
| 1917 | Russian Revolution |
| 1939–1945 | World War II |
| 1945 | United Nations founded |
| 1947 | Independence of India and Pakistan |
| 1989 | Fall of the Berlin Wall |
| 1991 | Dissolution of the Soviet Union |