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300,000 Neanderthals appear in Europe.

200,000 Give or take thousands of years, humans (homo sapiens) in Africa leave what will be a fossil record of their species.

73,000-68,000 The Toba Catastrophe Theory holds that at Lake Toba, on the island of Sumatra, a super-volcanic eruption has repercussions that reach Africa and reduces the world's human population to between 1,000 and 10,000 breeding couples.

50,000 Humans running from drought have left Africa, taking a coastal route to India and then to Australia.

48,000 In Asia, Neanderthals are becoming extinct.

43,000 Humans are in an area around 500 kilometers south of what is today Moscow, their presence to be surmised in CE 2007 by archaeologists who have uncovered artifacts at what today is called the Kostenki Site.

40,000 Near what today is Beijing, human bones dating to around this year have been found. At least one person to whom these bones belong wore shoes. According to Erik Trinkaus of Washington University in Missouri, evidence also exists of some shoe or sandal wearing among Neaderthals.

38,000 Neanderthals in Europe have numbered no more than 10,000 at any one time.

26,000 In Europe, Neanderthals are becoming extinct. There will be no traceable genetic markers (along matrilineal lines) that suggest any Neanderthal and human reproduction mixture.

20,000 By now humans are in southern Greece.

20,000 A single Siberian population group moves across the Bering Strait to North America, according to genetic evidence. They will remain in Alaska for thousands of years, blocked from moving south by glacial ice.

14,500 An ice-free corridor in Canada allows migration from Alaska southward.

14,000 A melting ice sheet begins a rise in sea levels and warming in Europe.

13,000 Rice is being grown in Korea.

11,000 People with a Paleoindian culture, described by archaeologists as Clovis, dominate North and Central America.

10,000 Humans have spread into most of the earth's habitable places. Sparse populations allow for hunting game, gathering food that grows wild and drifting from campsite to campsite. Storytelling and myth are a major pastime.

10,000 In Eurasia and North America, the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), has become extinct.

10,000 People in the Middle East are living as hunter-gatherers and have domesticated goats and dogs.

9,000 In the Jordan Valley, figs are cultivated, while wild barley, oats and acorns are being gathered. (See BBC News, June 1, 2006.)

8000 Hunter-gatherers in Southeast Asia begin growing crops to supplement their food supply. In the Jordan Valley, a walled settlement exists at Jericho.

7600 Hunter-gatherers are living along the Seine River in what is today the city of Paris.

7300 Tribal people in what is today Britain have domesticated dogs.

7200 In what is today Greece, people have domesticated sheep.

7000 In the Fertile Crescent, people are farming and raising animals. Their farms anchor them to one place. Gods are seen as settled into a temple and place.

6500 In what today is northwest Turkey, cow herders are producing what will be tentatively considered the world's first dairy.

6000 Growing crops and domesticating animals have begun in southern and eastern Europe, including Greece. Agriculture is developing among hunter-gatherers in southern Mexico. Along the upper Nile, people are growing sorghum, millet and wheat.

5600 Sea levels have been rising, and - according to the disputed "Black Sea Deluge Theory" - sea water suddenly begins pouring into the Black Sea basin, flooding vast amounts of inhabited land and sending people on new migrations with stories about a great flood.

5500 People in China are planting seeds.

4500 Agriculture has spread from Greece into central Europe. Farming reappears in Africa south of the Sahara in the Niger Basin in the West. The Sahara at this time is grass and woodland with an abundance of rainfall, rivers, lakes, fish and aquatic life. People there are growing crops and raising sheep, goats and cattle.