Articles about inventions & science across every continent and era, oldest first.
Nature, February 1, 2018: luminescence dated the end of the Acheulian at Attirampakkam, near Chennai, to 385 ± 64 ka; a Middle Paleolithic ran to 172 ka.
· 385,000 BCGreg Bowen, a US soldier at Dongducheon, found a stone handaxe by the Hantan River in 1978. Excavation began in 1979; the age is still disputed.
· 200,000 BCNine ochre lines on a stone flake from Blombos Cave, South Africa, about 73,000 years old, drawn by Homo sapiens and reported in Nature in 2018.
· 71,000 BCScience Advances, June 12, 2020: 130 bone points at Fa-Hien Lena cave, Sri Lanka, are sized and hafted like arrows, dated to 48,000 to 34,000 years ago.
· 46,000 BCXianrendong's sherds lie in layers dated 20,000 to 19,000 cal BP; Yuchanyan's cauldron dates 18,300 to 15,430 cal BP. Foragers in southern China made both.
· 18,000 BCForagers at Odai Yamamoto in northern Japan fired plain pots about 13,000 BC and cooked fish in them; by 3900 BC Sannai-Maruyama ate chestnuts and fish.
· 13,000 BCA 13,000-year-old mammoth kill, bison kill and camp in southeastern Arizona, sealed under black clay, and the fluted points that define Clovis.
· 11,000 BCMehrgarh, Pakistan: the oldest known lost-wax casting, molars drilled 7,500 to 9,000 years ago and cotton thread in a copper bead, before the Indus cities.
· 7000 BCSix crane-bone flutes from Jiahu, China, date to 7000-5700 BC. Nature called them the earliest complete, playable, tightly-dated multinote instruments.
· 7000 BCDCCEEW dates Gunditjmara stone eel-channel construction at Budj Bim to at least 6,600 years old; UNESCO inscribed the site in 2019.
· 4600 BCNamed in 2009 as the earliest horse-domestication site, Botai in Kazakhstan lost that claim in 2018 when DNA made its horses the ancestors of Przewalski's.
· 3500 BCA 2017 PNAS paper dated ten dams and the Tangshan Levee at Liangzhu to 5,200–4,800 years ago, older than the 300 ha walled city they protected.
· 3000 BCS. R. Rao called the brick basin at Lothal the earliest dock in the world. Lawrence Leshnik measured its sill, channel and stones in 1968 and saw a tank.
· 2400 BCCharred millet, wheat and barley from cremation cists at Begash and Tasbas in Kazakhstan date to about 2300 BC; their excavators later doubted what they show.
· 2300 BCThirteen rammed-earth pillars at Taosi, Shanxi, dug in 2003–04, were read as a sunrise observatory of the 21st century BC. A 2025 paper queries it.
· 2100 BCAt Kuk Swamp in Papua New Guinea's Wahgi Valley, people grew bananas on mounds by 6950 to 6440 cal BP and dug drainage ditches by about 4000 cal BP.
· 2000 BCA 32-centimeter bronze disc inlaid with gold stars, looted from the Mittelberg in 1999, seized in Basel in 2002 and dated to about 1600 BC.
· 1600 BCA sponge diver reported "metal biscuits with ears" off Kas in 1982; the Institute of Nautical Archaeology excavated the wreck from 1984 to 1994.
· 1300 BCAnyang farmers sold inscribed Shang divination bones to pharmacies as "dragon bones" until 1899, when scholars read the marks as the earliest Chinese writing.
· 1200 BCIn May 1929 Claude Schaeffer found alphabetic cuneiform tablets at Ras Shamra, Syria. In 1930 Hans Bauer read about 20 of their 26 or 27 signs.
· 1190 BCA serpentine block with 62 signs from a Veracruz gravel quarry was reported in Science on September 15, 2006 as the oldest writing in the Americas.
· 900 BCDarius I cut the Achaemenid empire into tax districts, linked them with a road of 111 stations and relay couriers, and paid in gold darics.
· 500 BCPriests at Memphis honored Ptolemy V in 196 BC in hieroglyphic, Demotic and Greek. In 1822 Champollion read royal names from it and from a Philae obelisk.
· 196 BCTomb 3 at Mawangdui, buried in 168 BC and opened in 1973, held a lacquer box of silk and bamboo texts, among them two Laozi editions and medical works.
· 168 BC
