Every Chronicle article on world history, newest first: battles, empires, disasters, discoveries and revolutions.
Sibudu became one of the key Middle Stone Age sites for showing that early Homo sapiens used complex technologies, including compound adhesives, likely bows and arrows, and managed plant bedding.
The skull helped convince scientists that Australopithecus africanus was a hominin and became South Africa's best-known fossil.
Hundreds of complete skeletons of rhinos, horses, camels and birds, killed by ash from a Yellowstone hotspot eruption, are preserved where they died.
Simple single-celled microbes appeared, the ancestors of all living things; how non-living chemistry became life is still unresolved.
Bubonic plague killed an estimated 12 to 15 million people, mostly in India and China, and research during the pandemic identified the plague bacterium and its spread by rat fleas.
The damaged Admiral Graf Spee took refuge in Montevideo and was scuttled by her crew on 17 December 1939.
The British delayed the German First Army for a day, then joined the general Allied retreat towards the Marne.
Bengal Regulation XVII of 1829 declared sati illegal and punishable as culpable homicide; the ban was extended to Madras and Bombay in 1830.
The entire British squadron surrendered, giving the United States control of Lake Erie and forcing the British to abandon Detroit.
Niépce produced the oldest surviving photograph taken with a camera, proving that a lasting image of nature could be fixed by light.
Napoleon was crowned Emperor of the French and Joséphine Empress, giving religious and ceremonial sanction to the new hereditary empire.
The murals revealed close artistic links between central Mexico and the Maya world in the centuries after Teotihuacan's fall.
