Exploration & colonisation

At Shangchen on the Loess Plateau of Shaanxi Province in northern China, archaeologists led by Zhaoyu Zhu recovered 96 simple stone artefacts — notches, scrapers, cores and hammerstones — from seventeen sediment layers, the oldest dated by…

At Dmanisi in southern Georgia, excavations led by David Lordkipanidze uncovered a remarkable assemblage of early human fossils — including five well-preserved skulls — alongside simple Oldowan-style stone tools and animal bones, securely…

Homo erectus colonised eastern and southeastern Asia and persisted there for well over a million years.

An upper jawbone with most of its teeth, recovered from Misliya Cave on Mount Carmel in Israel and analysed in detail in 2018, dates to roughly 177,000–194,000 years ago.

The Indian subcontinent lay on the principal corridor for modern humans expanding eastward from Africa and Southwest Asia toward Sahul and East Asia.

Excavations at Madjedbebe, a rock shelter on the lands of the Mirarr people in northern Australia, place human occupation at around 65,000 years ago on the basis of optically stimulated luminescence dating of the artefact-bearing sands.

Between Sunda (the Ice Age landmass of mainland Southeast Asia) and Sahul lies Wallacea, a chain of islands — including Sulawesi, Flores and Timor — separated from both continental shelves by deep-water straits that were never bridged even…

By around 45,000 years ago, populations of Homo sapiens had spread from Southwest Asia into Europe, encountering Neanderthal populations that had occupied the continent for hundreds of thousands of years.

A single fossilised femur eroding from a bank of the Irtysh River in western Siberia, discovered in 2008, belonged to a man who lived around 45,000 years ago.

The open-air site of Nwya Devu, located about 4,600 metres above sea level on the central Tibetan Plateau, documents the earliest secure human presence in such an extreme high-altitude environment.

Modern humans reached the Japanese archipelago by around 38,000 years ago, most likely entering Kyushu via the Korean Peninsula and the Tsushima Strait, with further routes into the Ryukyu Islands and across to Honshu.

The Yana Rhinoceros Horn Site (Yana RHS), at 71° north on the Yana River in far northeastern Siberia, pushed back the date of human settlement above the Arctic Circle to around 32,000 years ago — roughly twice as old as any previously…

Fossilised human footprints exposed in the dry bed of an ancient lake at White Sands National Park, New Mexico, provide some of the strongest evidence that people were living in the interior of North America far earlier than the…

While the larger Wallacean islands were settled around 45,000 years ago, the smaller and more isolated islands of eastern Indonesia — places such as Obi and Kisar that were never connected to any larger landmass — were colonised much…

A cluster of well-documented sites overturned the long-dominant 'Clovis-first' theory and showed that people had spread across the Americas before the Clovis culture.

The Linear Pottery culture (Linearbandkeramik, or LBK) carried the Neolithic farming economy rapidly across temperate central Europe.

Beginning around 3000 BCE, Neolithic farming communities speaking early Austronesian languages set out from Taiwan in one of history's most far-reaching maritime migrations.

Around 1500 BCE, Austronesian voyagers departing from the northern or central Philippines reached the Mariana Islands in the western Pacific, becoming the first humans to settle in Remote Oceania.

Between roughly 1100 and 900 BCE, Lapita seafarers became the first humans ever to reach the islands of Remote Oceania beyond the Solomon Islands, crossing wide ocean gaps to settle Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji and then West Polynesia.

Phoenician settlers from Tyre founded Carthage (Phoenician 'Qart-hadasht', 'New City') on the coast of modern Tunisia, traditionally in 814 BCE under Queen Elissa (Dido).

Around 733 BCE settlers from Corinth founded Syracuse on the east coast of Sicily, soon after the Euboean foundation of Naxos. Syracuse became one of the most powerful Greek cities of the western Mediterranean.

After taking Egypt from Persian control, Alexander the Great founded the city of Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast at the western edge of the Nile delta, traditionally in spring 331 BCE.

In 138 BCE Emperor Wu of Han sent the envoy Zhang Qian westward to seek an alliance with the Yuezhi against the Xiongnu nomads.

Around 1200 CE, seafaring Polynesians and Indigenous South Americans made transoceanic contact in eastern Polynesia, a meeting long suspected and finally confirmed by genetics.

Within roughly a single century, around A.D. 1190-1290, Polynesian seafarers discovered and colonised nearly all of the remaining habitable islands of the eastern Pacific, including the Hawaiian archipelago to the north, Rapa Nui (Easter…

East Polynesian voyagers in double-hulled ocean canoes settled Aotearoa New Zealand around the late thirteenth to early fourteenth century, the last major landmass on Earth to be reached by humans.

Around 1271 the young Venetian merchant Marco Polo set out with his father and uncle along the Silk Road, reaching the court of Kublai Khan in China by the mid-1270s.

Between 1405 and 1433 the Ming admiral Zheng He, a Muslim eunuch in the service of the Yongle Emperor, commanded seven great maritime expeditions across the South China Sea and Indian Ocean.

On 12 October 1492 an expedition led by the Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus, financed by the Crown of Castile, made landfall on an island in the Bahamas that its Lucayan inhabitants called Guanahani and that Columbus renamed San…

On 20 May 1498 the Portuguese commander Vasco da Gama anchored near Calicut (Kozhikode) on India's Malabar Coast, becoming the first European to reach India by sea.

On 22 April 1500 a Portuguese fleet commanded by Pedro Álvares Cabral, bound for India along Vasco da Gama's route, made landfall on the coast of present-day Bahia in South America.

In 1510 the Portuguese governor Afonso de Albuquerque seized Goa from the Sultanate of Bijapur, occupying the city in February, losing it in May, and finally storming it in November.

Between 1519 and 1522 a Spanish expedition achieved the first circumnavigation of the globe.

On 24 June 1571 the Spanish conquistador Miguel Lopez de Legazpi formally founded the city of Manila on the ruins of the Tagalog polity of Maynila, designating it the capital of the Spanish East Indies.

In October 1606 the Spanish (Galician-born) navigator Luís Vaz de Torres completed the first recorded European passage through the strait separating the island of New Guinea from the Australian mainland, a waterway later named the Torres…

On 14 May 1607 roughly a hundred settlers sent by the Virginia Company of London established a fort on Jamestown Island in the Chesapeake Bay, founding the first permanent English settlement in North America.

On 3 July 1608 Samuel de Champlain led some 32 colonists to a narrowing of the St Lawrence River and built a fortified trading post, the 'Habitation', that grew into Quebec City, the first permanent French settlement in what is now Canada.

In September 1620 about a hundred passengers, including English Separatists later known as the Pilgrims who sought to worship outside the Church of England, sailed from England aboard the Mayflower.

In 1621 the Dutch East India Company, under Governor-General Jan Pieterszoon Coen, completed a brutal conquest of the Banda Islands, the world's only source of nutmeg and mace.

Seeking to control the fur trade of the Hudson valley, the Dutch West India Company established a fortified settlement at the southern tip of Manhattan Island.

In 1642 the Dutch East India Company (VOC) dispatched navigator Abel Janszoon Tasman from Batavia with the ships Heemskerck and Zeehaen to probe the southern oceans for the fabled Great South Land and new trade routes.

On Easter Sunday, 5 April 1722, the Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen became the first European to sight and land on Rapa Nui, which he named Paasch-Eyland (Easter Island) for the day of its discovery.

During the first Pacific voyage of HMS Endeavour (1768-1771), Lieutenant James Cook undertook the systematic European charting of New Zealand and the previously uncharted east coast of Australia.

On 14 June 1830 a French expeditionary force of some 34,000 troops under General de Bourmont landed at Sidi Ferruch, west of Algiers, and within three weeks compelled the surrender of Hussein Dey, ruler of the Ottoman Regency of Algiers.

Between 1865 and 1876 the Russian Empire subjugated the three Uzbek khanates of Central Asia, completing its southward expansion into Turkestan.

The Third Anglo-Burmese War (November 1885) completed the British conquest of Burma.

On 17 October 1887 France formally established the Indochinese Union (Union indochinoise), binding together the directly ruled colony of Cochinchina with the protectorates of Annam, Tonkin and Cambodia under a single Governor-General.

Syria and Lebanon secured full independence in 1946 when the last French troops withdrew, ending a quarter-century of mandate rule imposed after the Ottoman collapse.

The Philippines became a fully sovereign republic on 4 July 1946, when the United States relinquished sovereignty under the Treaty of Manila, signed by High Commissioner Paul McNutt and President Manuel Roxas.

The Malagasy Uprising was a nationalist rebellion against French colonial rule in Madagascar that began on the night of 29 March 1947 and was crushed by early 1949.

Ceylon, today Sri Lanka, became independent on 4 February 1948, transitioning from a British Crown Colony to a self-governing dominion within the Commonwealth.

In 1975 Portugal relinquished its two largest African colonies, ending nearly five centuries of empire and closing the era of European colonial rule on the continent.