Timeline of Everything (Pinoy version)

9 min readMay 16, 2021

When I was a kid, I was terrible at remembering dates of historical events in my classes at school. I just never understood their significance to my life. Add to that the fact that Philippine history, world history, science, and math were all taught separately as if each happened in a universe of its own. Then eventually I learned that that was not the case. The events in one discipline did not exist in a vacuum. Whatever is happening in one corner of the globe is affecting another corner in one way or another. So I began dreaming to create a complete timeline of events that are relevant or interesting to me, something that will paint a zoomed-out perspective of everything and organize the historical events in my mind.

Based on what we know so far*, I made a timeline of everything from the beginning of time (literally) to the start of life, to our early humanoid ancestors, and then to recorded history. This is an extremely anthropocentric “history of everything”. It is my own humble attempt to tell our story as specks of dust living on this amazing planet. I also added predictions of the future at the end. It proved insightful to plot our own Philippine history juxtaposed to what’s happening in the rest of the world. It’s refreshing to see how our local events fit in the big picture. Philippine-specific events are written in bold font. Genealogy-related notes are italicized.

Presenting a simplified “History of Everything” (skewed towards Philippine and US events):

13.8 billion years ago (bya) — The Big Bang

13.6 bya — Milky Way galaxy formed

4.6 bya — Earth & Sun formed

4.5 bya — Earth’s Moon formed

3.6 bya — Life started

2.5 bya — Multi-cellular life started

540 million years ago (mya) — Animals emerged. Cambrian explosion

400 mya — The fossil fuels we use TODAY were from the algae, bacteria, and plants that lived around this time

240 mya — First dinosaurs

200 mya — Mammals branched out

65 mya — Asteroid hits Earth. Non-avian dinosaurs and ~75% of all species went extinct, including ammonites

60 mya — First Philippine islands started rising from the ocean

32 mya — Palawan & Mindoro started to separate from mainland Asia (while still underwater)

30 mya — Ape-monkey split

6 mya — Human-chimpanzee split. The genus Homo started.

2.6 mya — Paleolithic period started. First evidence of stone tools. Human ancestors left the forest for the savanna. Last Ice Age started.

1.8 mya — Homo erectus migrated out of Africa. Earliest fire use and cooking.

700 thousand years ago (kya) — Philippine rhino fossil butchered by archaic humans

600 kya — Sapiens-Neanderthals split. We stayed in Africa while they went to Asia & Europe.

200 kya — Anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) emerged

160 kya — Mitochondrial Eve, the mother of all living humans, lived here

70 kya — Homo sapiens first wave of migration out of Africa

67 kya — Homo luzonensis “Callao Man” fossils in Cagayan, Philippines

60 kya — Behaviorally modern humans emerged. Art and symbolic language started.

55 kya — Humans reached South East Asia

50 kya — Homo floresiensis “Hobbit” fossils in Indonesia

47 kya — Tabon Man fossils in Palawan, Philippines

45 kya — Humans reached West Europe

40 kya — Oldest known cave paintings

35 kya — Humans reached North Asia. Largest eruption of “modern” Mount Pinatubo (5x the 1991 eruption)

15 kya — Humans reached America via Bering Strait

12 kya — Neolithic period started — the invention of Agriculture. Rice was cultivated in the Yangtze River.

11.7 kya — Last Ice Age ended

10.5 kya — Woolly mammoths & giant sloths were hunted to extinction by humans

10 kya — All other Homo species went extinct

7.4 kya (5.4k BC) — Everyone alive was either an ancestor of all of humanity, or of nobody alive today (the “identical ancestors point”)

6 kya (4k BC) — Human civilizations started independently in different parts of the world (Mesopotamia, etc)

5.5 kya (3.5k BC) — Writing, hence recorded history, started. First evidence of domestication of horses in Eurasian Steppes.

5.2k kya (3.2k BC) — Bronze Age started

5 kya (3k BC) — Ancient Egyptian civilization started. Epic of Gilgamesh, oldest written literature. Pyramids and Stonehenge built. Austronesians’ migration to the Pacific started from Taiwan.

https://blog.23andme.com/ancestry-reports/what-is-austronesian-ancestry/

4 kya (2k BC) — First Chinese dynasty (Xia) started. Hinduism started. Babylonian empire started.

3.5 kya (1.5k BC) — The most recent person from whom everyone alive today is directly descended lived in eastern Asia

3.3k kya (1.3k BC) — Queen Nefertiti of Ancient Egypt lived here

3.2k kya (1.2k BC) — Bronze Age ended

800 BC — Manunggul Jar in Palawan, Philippines

700 BC — Ancient Greek civilization. Odyssey written.

600 BC — First use of coin

500 BC — Ifugao civilization created the Banaue Rice Terraces. Babylonian empire ended. Lives of Confucius and Buddha. Confucianism and Buddhism started.

400 BC — Lives of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Alexander the Great

44 BC — Julius Ceasar assassinated

30 BC — Cleopatra committed suicide

27 BC — Roman Empire started

AD 30 — Death of Christ. Christianity started. 80 generations away from today. A young person’s great (78x) grandparents lived around the same time as Christ.

79 — Pompeii destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius

400 — Middle Ages started

470 — Roman Empire ended

632 — Death of Muhammad. Islam started.

700 — First paper money in Tang Dynasty

793 — Viking Age started

814 — Death of Charlemagne (Entire Western world today is his descendant)

900 — Laguna Copperplate Inscription, the Philippines’ oldest known calendar-dated written document

1000 — 40 generations away from today. A young person’s great (38x) grandparents were born this time.

1066 — Viking Age ended

1227 — Death of Genghis Khan

1300 — Renaissance in Europe

1346 — The Black Plague started

1353 — The Black Plague ended. Up to 200M dead

1400 — 20 generations away from today. A young person’s great (18x) grandparents (~1 million of them) were born this time. There was a person who lived around this time who is an ancestor of ALL living Europeans today.

1431 — Joan of Arc executed

1474 — Death of the First Dalai Lama

1492 — Columbus’ voyage to the New World. European colonization of America started

1500 — Middle Ages ended. Lives of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo.

1521 — Ferdinand Magellan landed in Mactan. Spanish occupation in the Philippines started

1527 — Sack of Rome. Renaissance ended

1532 —Nicolaus Copernicus proposed the Heliocentric model

1572 — First recorded eruption of Taal Volcano

1589 — Tondo Dynasty ended

1595 — William Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet

1600 — Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for heresy, for asserting that the Sun is a star

1602 — First publicly-traded company

1610 — Galileo Galilei discovered Jupiter’s moons and Saturn’s rings

1687 — Isaac Newton published his laws of motion & gravity

1712 — Steam engine invented

1760 — Industrial Revolution started

1775 — American Revolution started. 10 generations away from today. A young person’s great (8x) grandparents (~512 of them) were born this time. (lolo ng lolo ng lolo ng lolo ng lolo mo)

1776 — USA founded. Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations.

1783 — American Revolution ended

1789 — French Revolution started

1791 — Death of Wolfgang Mozart

1793 — King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette guillotined

1799 — French Revolution ended

1804 — Napoléon Bonaparte became the first emperor of France

1814 — Deadliest recorded eruption of Mount Mayon. Beethoven became completely deaf.

1815 — Largest volcanic eruption in recorded history: Indonesia’s Mount Tambora

1816 — “Year Without Summer” caused by the two big volcanic eruptions the years before

1821 —Michael Faraday created the first electric motor

1837 — UK Victorian era started

1840 — Industrial Revolution ended

1859 — Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. First modern commercial oil well.

1861 — US civil war started

1865 — US civil war ended. Abraham Lincoln assassinated

1878 — Light bulb was invented

1884 — Juan Luna’s Spolarium

1886 — Modern car was invented

1896 — Jose Rizal shot at Bagumbayan

1898 — Philippine revolution, Spanish occupation ended

1899 — Philippine-American war started. Emilio Aguinaldo elected president

1900 — Death of Friedrich Nietzsche. 5 generations away from today. A young person’s great-great-great-grandparents (16 of them) were born this time. (lolo ng lolo ng magulang mo)

1901 — UK Victorian era ended

1902 — Philippine-American war ended. American occupation in the Philippines started

1903 — Wright brothers’ first flight

1905 — Albert Einstein published his theory of relativity

1907 — Radioactive dating invented. We could read the distant past now

1912 — Last Chinese Dynasty (Qing) ended. Republic of China started

1914 — World War 1 started

1918 — World War 1 ended

1922 — Soviet Union started. UK founded.

1929 — The Great Depression started

1933 — The Great Depression ended

1935 — Philippine Commonwealth. Manuel Quezon elected president

1939 — World War 2 started. Death of Sigmund Freud.

1941 — Pearl Harbor bombing

1942 — Japanese occupation in the Philippines started

1945 — Hilter committed suicide. Atomic bombing of Japanese cities. WW2 ended, UN created, Japanese occupation ended

1946 — American occupation ended. Manuel Roxas elected president. First computer (ENIAC) was completed.

1947 — Cold War started

1948 — Mahatma Gandhi assassinated

1950 — Korean War started

1953 — Korean War armistice (highest percentage of civilian casualty in a war). Queen Elizabeth II crowned. Double-helix DNA discovered. Modern biotech started.

1954 — US civil rights movement started

1955 — Vietnam War started

1961 — First human in space

1963 — JFK assassinated

1965 — Malcolm X assassinated

1968 — US civil rights movement ended. Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated

1969 — First human on the moon

1972 — Philippine Martial Law declared

1974 — Stephen Hawking showed that black holes can shrink and die

1975 — Vietnam War ended

1977 — Death of Elvis Presley

1980 — Smallpox disease was eradicated

1983 — The Internet was born. Ninoy Aquino assassinated.

1986 — Philippine EDSA Revolution (People Power)

1990 — World Wide Web started. Pale Blue Dot photo taken. Hubble Space Telescope launched. Luzon earthquake magnitude 7.8

1991 — Cold War ended. Soviet Union ended. Mount Pinatubo erupted. Death of Freddie Mercury.

1997 — Car crash of Princess Diana

2001 — 9/11 attacks. 2nd PH People Power

2003 — Iraq War started

2011 — Iraq War ended. Osama Bin Laden assassinated.

2012 — Voyager spacecraft reached interstellar space (outside the Solar System), the farthest human-made object

2013 — Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan), most destructive

2020 — COVID-19 declared as a pandemic. Taal volcano erupted.

*** TODAY ***

2026 — First crewed mission to Mars

2030 — Car companies will begin to stop making gasoline-powered vehicles

2050 — More plastic than fish in the ocean. Entire cities will be erased from the map, including Manila, because of rising sea levels, with millions of people displaced. 100+ countries have pledged carbon neutrality by this time.

2060 — Fossil fuels will run out (with the current rate)

2061 — Halley’s Comet appears again

2066 — Breakthrough Starshot reaches our neighboring star in Alpha Centauri (farthest human-made object by this time)

2178 — Pluto completes its first full orbit since its discovery in 1930

1 million years to go (mytg) — Benham Rise starts to show up as an island east of Luzon

50 mytg — Saturn loses its rings

4 billion years to go (bytg) — Milky Way collides with the Andromeda Galaxy. In addition to a sunrise and a moonrise, Earthlings will now see a galaxy-rise.

5 bytg — Sun turns to a red giant and devours Mercury

100 trillion years to go — The last star in the universe dies

And so on.

Footnotes

*It is almost guaranteed that we will soon find new evidence that will alter some of the dates above but that’s rarely a problem. In fact, that’s the great thing about most of our bodies of knowledge — they are self-correcting.

Although the timeline above demonstrates the chronology of events, it does a poor job of showing the scale of time in between these events. Billions of years are skipped like nothing at the top and bottom ends of the timeline. So here’s a better article for that. The cosmic calendar is also a great tool to visualize the scale of time.

Disclaimer: I am neither a biologist, an astronomer, an anthropologist, nor a historian. If you spot some inaccuracies above, please comment below. This is an ongoing mini-project so it may be incomplete but I will continue to update it as often as I can.

Timeline of Everything (Pinoy version)

Presenting a simplified “History of Everything” (skewed towards Philippine and US events):

Footnotes

Related Links

Written by Miko Santos

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