World history

Some time ago I posted the history of the world in terms of the sequence of the various empires which had ruled important chunks of world, ending as I recall with the US for the 20th century and China for the 21st. Annoyingly, despite diligent search, I cannot now find this post - although, unhelpfully, I have the notion that the all important search terms are hidden in a picture of part of an Excel worksheet. But perhaps it will come back to me.

In the meantime, prompted by some chance findings over the last couple of days, I offer a logarithmic history in terms of inventions.

We started to come down from the trees of Africa about 4,000,000 years ago.

Then 400,000 years ago saw the invention of cooking, as attested by finds in an important wood near Bury St. Edmunds.

40,000 years ago saw the invention of music, somewhere on the Danube, as attested by the picture above.

4,000 years ago saw the invention of writing, somewhere in the Middle East.

400 years ago saw the invention of science as we know it, somewhere in Western Europe. With God catching an ultimately fatal disease at about the same time.

40 years ago saw the invention of the personal computer.

And four years ago (very roughly) saw the invention of social life with Facebook and Twitter.

PS: having now spent quality time on the search, the missing post has been traced to reference 1. It looks like a Powerpoint slide, so wrong about the worksheet. But right that all the words which might have helped the search along were inside the picture, searching pictures for words not yet being part of the google offering, at least not in this context. In the end, it was a crude, sledgehammer search for 'history' which did the business. 'Empire' not in it at all, not even in the picture. And I was never going to remember about the Jutes. Searching the monthly backups did not do the business, despite the Word search feature being quite good for this sort of thing. Months are too big to be an appropriate target for a search, with even quite obscure words cropping up often enough in the course of a month to give one lots of false positives.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=angles+jutes+saxons.