Timeline of historic inventions

Towards the middle of this 250,000-year period, archaic humans such as Neanderthals and Denisovans began to spread out of Africa, joined later by Homo sapiens.

[85] During the Neolithic period, lasting 8400 years, stone began to be used for construction, and remained a predominant hard material for toolmaking.

Copper and arsenic bronze were developed towards the end of this period, and of course the use of many softer materials such as wood, bone, and fibers continued.

The beginning of bronze-smelting coincides with the emergence of the first cities and of writing in the Ancient Near East and the Indus Valley.

The Late Bronze Age collapse occurs around 1200 BC,[207] extinguishing most Bronze-Age Near Eastern cultures, and significantly weakening the rest.

The Nippur cubit-rod, c. 2650 BCE , in the Archeological Museum of Istanbul , Turkey
With the Greco-Roman trispastos ("three-pulley-crane"), the simplest ancient crane , a single man tripled the weight he could lift than with his muscular strength alone. [ 218 ]
Egyptian reed pens inside ivory and wooden palettes, the Louvre [ 246 ]
An illustration depicting the papermaking process in Han dynasty China.
The earliest fore-and-aft rigs , spritsails , appeared in the 2nd century BC in the Aegean Sea on small Greek craft. [ 269 ] Here a spritsail used on a Roman merchant ship (3rd century AD).
Schematic of the Roman Hierapolis sawmill . Dated to the 3rd century AD, it is the earliest known machine to incorporate a crank and connecting rod mechanism. [ 296 ] [ 297 ] [ 298 ]
A Nepali Charkha in action
A Mongol bomb thrown against a charging Japanese samurai during the Mongol invasions of Japan after founding the Yuan dynasty , 1281.
The 15th-century invention of the printing press with movable type by the German Johannes Gutenberg . [ 373 ]
A 1609 title page of the Relation , the world's first newspaper (first published in 1605) [ 385 ] [ 386 ]
Karl von Drais on his original Laufmaschine, the earliest two-wheeler, or hobbyhorse, in 1819
BERy articulated streetcar no. 2 in 1913. The Boston Elevated Railway was the world's first street railway system to use articulated streetcars.
The original 0 series Shinkansen train. Introduced in 1964, it reached a speed of 210 km/h (130 mph).