Humanities & Culture
41 points from the earliest roots to the research frontier: 25 researched, 4 current research, 6 unsolved and 6 that become possible once they are solved. State of knowledge: October 2026.
Open the interactive tree →Prehistorybefore 3000 BC
- Musical Instruments~40,000 years agoResearchedBone and ivory flutes from caves in Germany are the oldest known instruments: music is as old as cave art.
Antiquity3000 BC – 500 AD
- History Writing (Herodotus)~430 BCResearchedHerodotus' Histories (about 430 BC) are the first large work to investigate the past by asking witnesses and comparing accounts.
Middle Ages & Renaissance500 – 1700
- Musical Notation~1025ResearchedGuido of Arezzo's staff notation (about 1025) lets singers learn music from writing, so compositions can be kept and exchanged.
- Linear Perspective~1420ResearchedBrunelleschi and Alberti (about 1415-35) construct images by geometry so that depth looks convincing on a flat surface.
Industrial Age1700 – 1900
- Public Museum1753ResearchedThe British Museum (founded 1753, opened 1759) is the first national public museum.
- Sign Language Schools~1760ResearchedAbbé de l'Épée opens a free school for deaf pupils in Paris (about 1760) and teaches in their own signs.
- Comparative Linguistics1786ResearchedWilliam Jones (1786) notes that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin share a common source; regular sound laws turn languages into family trees.
- Hieroglyphs Deciphered1822ResearchedChampollion cracks Egyptian hieroglyphs (1822) with the Rosetta Stone, found in 1799, and the Coptic language.
- Braille1824ResearchedLouis Braille, aged 15, devises a six-dot tactile alphabet (1824) that blind people can read and write.
- Source-Critical History (Ranke)1824ResearchedRanke (1824) makes history a research discipline: original sources, critical reading and seminar training.
- Three-Age System1836ResearchedThomsen orders Danish museum finds into Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages (1836), the first scientific chronology of prehistory.
- Public Libraries1850ResearchedBritain's Public Libraries Act (1850) and Boston's public library (1854) offer free books to everyone, paid for from public funds.
- Cuneiform Deciphered1857ResearchedAfter Grotefend and Rawlinson, independent translators agree on a test text (1857): Akkadian and Sumerian become readable.
- Typewriter & Keyboard1868ResearchedSholes' typewriter (patent 1868, Remington 1873) makes machine-written text standard and fixes the QWERTY keyboard.
- Sound Recording1877ResearchedEdison's phonograph (1877) records and plays back sound; Scott had traced sound waves without playback in 1857.
- Cinema1895ResearchedThe Lumière brothers' public screening in Paris (December 1895) launches cinema, the first mass medium of moving images.
Machine Age1900 – 1945
- Falsifiability (Popper)1934ResearchedPopper (1934) proposes that a theory is scientific if observation could refute it, and that science advances by conjecture and test.
Atomic & Space Age1945 – 1990
- Radiocarbon Dating1949ResearchedLibby shows (1949) that the decay of carbon-14 in wood, bone and charcoal gives their age up to about 50,000 years.
- Linear B Deciphered1952ResearchedVentris shows in 1952 that Linear B tablets from Knossos and Pylos record an early form of Greek, pushing written Greek back to about 1400 BC.
- Formal Grammars (Chomsky)1956ResearchedChomsky's hierarchy of grammars (1956) links the structure of languages to types of computing machines.
- Paradigm Shifts (Kuhn)1962ResearchedKuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) describes science as stable 'normal' periods broken by paradigm shifts.
- Video Games1972ResearchedThe Magnavox Odyssey and Atari's Pong (1972) bring interactive electronic games to homes and arcades.
Digital Age1990 – 2015
Present2015 – Oct 2026
- Lidar Maps Hidden Ancient Cities2012-2026Current researchAircraft laser scanning sees the ground under forest; surveys in Mexico (2024) and Brazil (2026) show ancient settlement far denser than ground work…
- AI Reads Archives & Inscriptions2022-2026Current researchHandwriting recognition makes archive pages searchable, and DeepMind's Ithaca (2022) and Aeneas (2025) restore and date damaged Greek and Latin…
- AI for Low-Resource Languages2022-2026Current researchMeta's NLLB (200 languages), Omnilingual ASR (1,600+ languages) and 110 languages added to Google Translate in 2024 reach languages that older…
- AI Reads Herculaneum Scrolls2023ResearchedMachine-learning ink detection on X-ray scans reads the first words (October 2023) and passages (February 2024) of unopened carbonised scrolls.
- Whole Herculaneum Scroll Read2025-2026Current researchIn June 2026 the Vesuvius Challenge team announced it had virtually unwrapped and read PHerc. 1667 end to end, the first Herculaneum papyrus read in…
Research Frontier · Todayunsolved as of Oct 2026
- Avoiding a Digital Dark AgeopenUnsolvedDigital records rely on formats, software and hardware that keep changing: 38% of 2013 web pages were gone by 2023, and no medium has a…
- Deciphering Linear AopenUnsolvedThe Minoan script of Crete (about 1800-1450 BC) can be sounded out using Linear B values, but its language is unknown and no text can be read.
- Deciphering the Indus ScriptopenUnsolvedThousands of short inscriptions on seals from about 2800-1900 BC remain unread, and experts disagree even on whether the signs record a language.
- Origin of Human LanguageopenUnsolvedLanguage leaves no fossils, so when and how it arose is unknown; estimates run from about 2.5 million years ago to under 200,000.
- Reading All Herculaneum ScrollsopenUnsolvedOne scroll is read in full, but hundreds stay sealed and much of the villa that held the library is still buried.
- Saving Endangered LanguagesopenUnsolvedOf about 7,800 languages in Glottolog, over 4,000 are threatened, shifting, moribund or nearly extinct, and a quarter have only a wordlist or less.
If Solvedbecomes possible
- Herculaneum Library Fully Read2030s?If solvedAll surviving Herculaneum scrolls are scanned, unwrapped, read and edited, and perhaps more of the villa is excavated.
- Every Language Documented2040s?If solvedEach of the world's languages has a recorded, transcribed and described archive that its own community governs.
- Records Readable for Centuries2040s?If solvedImportant digital records stay readable for centuries by design: open formats, tested media and institutions funded to keep them.
- Indus Inscriptions ReadopenIf solvedThe Indus seals can be read and the language of the Harappan cities identified.
- Language Origins ExplainedopenIf solvedA theory of how and when human language arose that makes predictions evidence can confirm or refute.
- Minoan Palace Archives ReadopenIf solvedThe Linear A tablets of Crete can be read, which gives the Minoan language and the records of its palaces and towns.