Deep time: a timeline of Earth before 10,000 BC
Billions of years before the first cities, the universe, the Earth and life itself took shape. Here is deep time, from the very beginning to the end of the last Ice Age.
64 events, oldest first.
Timeline of Deep time
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c. 13.8 billion years ago
The Big Bang
Its afterglow still reaches us as a faint microwave hiss across the whole sky.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 4.6 billion years ago
The Sun forms
It is roughly halfway through its life.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 4.54 billion years ago
Earth forms
That is roughly a third of the age of the universe.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 4.5 billion years ago
The Moon forms
It probably formed from debris after a Mars-sized body hit the young Earth.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 3.5 billion years ago
Microbes build the first stromatolites
Stromatolites, layered mounds built by microbes, still grow in Western Australia.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 2.4 billion years ago
Oxygen first builds up in the atmosphere
It was produced by cyanobacteria, and it poisoned much of the life that existed then.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 700 million years ago
Ice may cover the whole Earth in 'Snowball Earth'
Ice may have reached all the way to the equator.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 570 million years ago
Strange Ediacaran creatures fill the seas
Some looked like quilted fronds and are hard to link to any animals alive today.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 538 million years ago
The Cambrian explosion of animal life
Most major animal groups appear in the fossil record within a few tens of millions of years.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 508 million years ago
The Burgess Shale animals live
Its bizarre fossils include Opabinia, an animal with five eyes.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 470 million years ago
The first land plants appear
They were tiny, moss-like plants without roots or leaves.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 450 million years ago
The first sharks swim the oceans
Early sharks are known mostly from fossil scales, because cartilage skeletons rarely fossilise.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 430 million years ago
The first jawed fish appear
Jaws evolved from the bony arches that support fish gills.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 385 million years ago
The first trees grow
Early trees like Wattieza reproduced with spores rather than seeds.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 380 million years ago
Dunkleosteus hunts in the seas
This armoured fish had bony blades instead of teeth.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 375 million years ago
Tiktaalik, a fish with limb-like fins, lives
It had a neck, unlike any fish before it, which helped it hunt in shallow water.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 330 million years ago
Swampy forests lay down coal
Much of the world's coal formed from Carboniferous swamp forests.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 312 million years ago
The first reptiles appear
Their tough-shelled eggs let them breed away from water.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 300 million years ago
Giant dragonfly-like insects fly
Meganeura had a wingspan of about 70 cm, helped by oxygen-rich air.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 280 million years ago
Dimetrodon roams the Earth
Despite its sail, it was not a dinosaur - it was more closely related to mammals.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 252 million years ago
The Great Dying mass extinction
Around 90% of marine species vanished in the worst extinction in Earth's history.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 230 million years ago
The first dinosaurs appear
For their first 30 million years, dinosaurs were mostly small and far from dominant.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 225 million years ago
The first mammals appear
Early mammals were mostly small, nocturnal and shrew-like.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 220 million years ago
Pterosaurs take to the air
They were the first animals with backbones to evolve powered flight.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 200 million years ago
The supercontinent Pangaea begins to break up
The Atlantic Ocean it created is still widening by a few centimetres a year.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 154 million years ago
Brachiosaurus roams North America
It held its long neck high, like a giraffe.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 150 million years ago
Archaeopteryx lives
It had feathers and wings, but also teeth and a long bony tail.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 150 million years ago
Stegosaurus roams the Earth
It lived in the Late Jurassic, around 80 million years before T. rex.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 130 million years ago
The first flowering plants bloom
Stegosaurus had died out long before, so it probably never saw a flower.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 95 million years ago
Spinosaurus hunts in North Africa
It may have spent much of its time hunting fish in rivers.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 75 million years ago
Velociraptor roams Mongolia
The real Velociraptor was about the size of a turkey, and feathered.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 70 million years ago
Mosasaurs rule the seas
These giant marine reptiles were related to snakes and monitor lizards.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 68 million years ago
Triceratops roams North America
Triceratops and T. rex lived at the same time, in the same places.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 68 million years ago
Tyrannosaurus rex roams the Earth
T. rex lived closer in time to humans than to Stegosaurus.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 66 million years ago
An asteroid wipes out the dinosaurs
Birds are descended from dinosaurs, so in a sense dinosaurs are still with us.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 55 million years ago
The first horses appear
The earliest horses were only about the size of a fox.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 50 million years ago
Early whale ancestors walk on land
Pakicetus, an early relative of whales, had four legs and lived by the water's edge.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 50 million years ago
The Himalayas begin to rise
India is still pushing north, so Everest grows a few millimetres a year.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 34 million years ago
Antarctica freezes over
Before then, forests grew on the continent.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 25 million years ago
Lake Baikal begins to form
It is the world's oldest and deepest lake.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 6 million years ago
The Grand Canyon begins to form
The canyon is young, but the oldest rocks in its walls are around 1.8 billion years old.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 5.3 million years ago
The Atlantic floods back into the Mediterranean
After drying out, the sea may have refilled in less than two years.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 5 million years ago
The first mammoths appear
The earliest mammoths lived in Africa.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 3.6 million years ago
Megalodon goes extinct
The giant shark was perhaps three times the length of a great white.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 3.3 million years ago
The first stone tools are made
They are older than our own genus, Homo.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 3.2 million years ago
Lucy the Australopithecus lives
Her skeleton was nicknamed after the Beatles song 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds'.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 2.8 million years ago
The Isthmus of Panama joins the Americas
Animals then crossed between North and South America in a 'Great Interchange'.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 2.3 million years ago
Homo habilis makes stone tools
Its name means 'handy man', because of the stone tools found with it.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 2 million years ago
Homo erectus appears
It was the first human species to spread out of Africa.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 1.5 million years ago
Turkana Boy lives in East Africa
His skeleton is one of the most complete early humans ever found.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 640,000 years ago
The Yellowstone supervolcano erupts
The eruption scattered ash over much of North America.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 300,000 years ago
Homo sapiens first appear
The oldest known Homo sapiens fossils were found at Jebel Irhoud in Morocco.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 74,000 years ago
The Toba supervolcano erupts
It was one of the largest volcanic eruptions of the last two million years.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 50,000 years ago
Meteor Crater is formed in Arizona
The crater is more than a kilometre wide.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 45,500 years ago
A warty pig is painted in a Sulawesi cave
The Indonesian painting is one of the oldest known artworks of an animal.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 45,000 years ago
Modern humans reach Europe
They shared the continent with Neanderthals for thousands of years.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 40,000 years ago
Bone flutes are the oldest known instruments
Flutes carved from vulture bone and mammoth ivory were found in German caves.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 40,000 years ago
Neanderthals die out
Most people with non-African ancestry still carry a little Neanderthal DNA.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 36,000 years ago
Animals are painted on the walls of Chauvet Cave
Its walls show lions, rhinos and mammoths, drawn in charcoal and ochre.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 30,000 years ago
The Venus of Willendorf is carved
The 11 cm figure was found in Austria in 1908.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 20,000 years ago
Ice sheets reach their greatest extent
Sea levels were about 120 metres lower than they are today.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 17,000 years ago
Aurochs are painted at Lascaux
The largest painted aurochs at Lascaux is more than 5 metres long.
Natural history & deep time
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c. 14,400 years ago
The oldest known bread is baked
Charred crumbs found in Jordan show bread came thousands of years before farming.
Food & brand history
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c. 11,700 years ago
The last Ice Age ends
It marks the start of the Holocene, the epoch we still live in.
Natural history & deep time
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