Articles about places & monuments across every continent and era, oldest first.
Site G's 1978 trackway was read as three walkers; Site S added two in 2016, and Site A, redug in 2019, led to a claim of two hominin kinds at Laetoli.
· 3,660,000 BCA skull blasted from a South African quarry in 1924 became Australopithecus africanus when Raymond Dart named it in Nature on February 7, 1925.
· 2,500,000 BCFootprints were exposed at Happisburgh, Norfolk, in May 2013; tides erased them within weeks. Ashton's team dated the surface to 1-0.78 million years.
· 850,000 BCNature published two 2017 papers on skulls unearthed at Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, first in a 1961 mining accident, dated by thermoluminescence to 315,000 years.
· 300,000 BCOmo I and Omo II, found in the Kibish Formation, Ethiopia, in 1967, were dated to 195 ± 5 kyr in 2005; a 2022 Nature paper gives a minimum of 233 ± 22 kyr.
· 231,000 BCA calvaria found at Hathnora on the Narmada in 1982 was named Homo erectus narmadensis, called Homo sapiens in 1991 and dated by ESR in 2009.
· 160,000 BCA cranium found in Harbin in 1933 was named Homo longi in 2021 and dated to over 146,000 years. In 2025 its dental calculus yielded Denisovan mtDNA.
· 146,000 BCIn 1938 Okladnikov found a child's skeleton ringed by ibex horns in an Uzbek cave. DNA in 2007 and a 2012 study call it Neanderthal; a 2009 study did not.
· 70,000 BCIn 2003 a child's teeth and 121 skull fragments came out of layer 16 at Obi-Rakhmat, Uzbekistan. The teeth read as Neanderthal; the skull did not settle it.
· 70,000 BCSingle sand grains put the lowest tools at Madjedbebe, on Mirarr country in Arnhem Land, at about 65,000 years. Some archaeologists dispute the date.
· 63,000 BCA fingertip bone dug up in 2008 at Denisova Cave in the Altai held DNA unlike any Neanderthal or modern human. Its kin live on in Tibetan and Papuan DNA.
· 50,000 BCA 2016 Nature paper put people in arid Australia by about 49,000 years at Warratyi, north of Adelaide. Its Diprotodon radius is still argued over.
· 47,000 BCMary Pappin Jr. found the first Willandra Lakes footprints in August 2003. Optically dated to 19,000 to 23,000 years, the count rose from 124 to 563 by 2007.
· 21,000 BCSeeds of a water plant dated human footprints at White Sands, New Mexico, to 23,000 to 21,000 years; pollen, quartz and lake mud were tested against them.
· 21,000 BCA 2019 Science paper put people at Cooper's Ferry, Idaho, from 16,560 to 15,280 years ago. A 2020 comment, a 2022 reanalysis and two replies followed.
· 14,000 BCA camp under a Chilean bog, dated to about 14,500 years ago, put people in South America before the Clovis hunters. Later claims reach 23,000 years.
· 12,500 BCHunter-gatherers raised Göbekli Tepe's T-pillar rings about 9500 BC, before farming reached the region. Excavators now call it a settlement with rituals.
· 9500 BCGrahame Clark dug Star Carr three weeks a summer, 1949 to 1951. Excavations of 2004 to 2015 recounted the finds and dated a posthole hollow to 9300 BC.
· 9300 BCKathleen Kenyon found an 8.2-meter stone tower at Jericho in the 1950s. Four named scholars still give four different reasons for why it was built.
· 8000 BCSandstone shelters near Bhopal hold paintings from the Mesolithic to historic times, ordered by overlap, style and weathering; the paint itself is undated.
· 8000 BCÇatalhöyük's East Mound, 13 hectares on Turkey's Konya plain, held roof-entered mudbrick houses with the dead under the floors, about 7100 to 5950 BC.
· 7100 BCRaphael Pumpelly dug the two mounds at Anau in 1904 in two-foot levels, found wheat and barley chaff, and argued that drying oases sent people outward.
· 4500 BCTajikistan's physical-technical institute dates Sarazm's first dig to 1976; Roland Besenval's 1987 paper says Isakov discovered the site in 1979.
· 3500 BCGermany's archaeological institute calls Uruk one of the world's earliest metropolises: 200 hectares, perhaps 40,000 people, writing from about 3300 BC.
· 3300 BC
