50,000 Years Ago
The peopling of Australia at around this time suggests that humans had at least s serviceable knowledge of constructing rude watercraft; evidence from Flores, Crete, and elsewhere indicates this skill may predate H. sapiens.
30,000 Years Ago
The first domestication of dogs is thought to have begun about this time; essentially, it is the beginning of the human use of living tools which continues with the Agricultural Revolution and the domestication of plants and other animals- arguably humankind’s greatest invention.
26,000 Years Ago
Construction of the early Homo sapiens settlement of Dolni Vestonice in eastern Europe.
20,000 Years Ago
The ’Ishango Bone’ an engraved baboon fibula, may indicate an early knowledge of mathematics or calendrics or represent numerical notation of some kind.
12,000 Years Ago
First use of metal implements.
10,000 Years Ago
Construction of megalithic architecture and sculptured iconography at the early Neolithic site of Göbekli Tepe.
2,300 B.C
West African chimpanzees in the Ivory Coast begin using rude stone tools of the ‘Ivorian’ technological mode. Latest date for the beginning of the chimpanzee Stone Age.
2,100 B.C.
The appearance of the Sumerian abacus, a simple tabulating machine- essentially, a primitive computer.
400 B.C.
Archytas of Tarentum invents the first ‘drone’- a mechanical, steam-driven ‘dove’ capable of powered flight.
200-100 B.C.
The ’Antikythera Mechanism’- the first analog computer.
