About the data
Where the events, dates and ages come from, how we pick them, and what to keep in mind.
The events
The timeline shows 318 events from the Big Bang to today. We picked them by hand: the aim is the events you need to find your way through time, not completeness. Each event has a kind (such as inventions or wars) and an importance from 1 to 3. Importance decides what gets a label first when space is short.
On top of that come eight topics, such as Ancient Egypt, the Roman world or the First World War, with 374 more detailed events of their own. They only appear when you open the topic, through the "Topics" button, the search or the strip at the bottom of the timeline. Inside a topic the general events stay visible as a paler background.
For Austria, Germany, the United States, France, the United Kingdom and Russia there are also the heads of state as topics of their own: each term in office is a stretch of one ribbon, and for Austria, Germany and the UK a second ribbon below shows the chancellors and prime ministers. These 429 entries have the short sentence only. Who is in office now reflects the state of our research.
Every general event belongs to a world region (Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, Oceania) or to the whole world. The filter shows one region together with the worldwide events. The Middle East counts as Asia, Egypt as Africa.
The dates come from widely accepted reference works, mainly the German and English Wikipedia and the sources cited there. We wrote the texts about the events with the help of AI and checked them by sampling. If you find a mistake, please tell us (see below).
The "Read on Wikipedia" button opens a search for the event on Wikipedia in your language. Only that click connects you to Wikipedia.
Ages and periods
- Universe
- The age of the universe, 13.787 billion years, from the measurements of the Planck satellite (Planck Collaboration, 2018). The ages before the stars are rough divisions.
- Earth's history
- Eons, eras, periods and epochs, with their colours, from the International Chronostratigraphic Chart of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), 2024 edition.
- Prehistory
- Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Age with the usual dates for central Europe. Elsewhere in the world these ages began earlier or later.
- History
- Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the modern era and so on, as European historiography divides them, with the common boundaries (such as 476 and 1492). Such boundaries are conventions, not sharp breaks.
How we show time
- Uncertain dates are marked "c." or "about". The further back, the coarser: billions of years are rounded to three digits.
- Exact dates show the day or month where they are known, mostly in the topics. You can then zoom in to a few months.
- BC is counted without a year 0, as is usual: 1 BC is followed by AD 1.
- "How long ago" counts from 2026. A human lifetime is taken as 80 years, writing as about 5,300 years old.
- In very long views (over 100,000 years) we leave out events that would fall in the last one percent of the axis. They would all sit on one spot at the right edge. Zoom in and they come back.
- Background colours stand for each age (space, the glowing young Earth, oceans, forests, the ice age, paper for written history). They are design, not measurements.
Limits
Every selection leaves things out. Ours has a European point of view: even with the additions from other parts of the world, Europe is covered most densely, and the names of the periods come from European history. Many early dates are estimates that researchers still debate, and they can change with new finds.
Technology and privacy
The timeline is a static website. There are no cookies, no analytics and no requests to other servers. We serve the fonts Inter and Fraunces (SIL Open Font License) ourselves. The drawing is done with d3 (ISC licence). The only things stored, in your own browser, are whether you chose light or dark, your best score in the game and, if you enter it, your year of birth. None of it leaves your device or goes into shared links.