Fossilized bacteria have been found in rock 3.5 billion years old in Africa

A female of the species Australopithecus Afarensis (nicknamed Lucy when her skeleton is found), lives in the Afar Depression in Ethiopia within 50 miles of where her predecessor Ardi was unearthed

A species of human in east Africa, Homo erectus, is probably the first identifiable ancestor of modern man

Homo erectus, moves out of Africa and begins to spread through Europe and Asia

A Homo erectus boy, aged about ten, lives near Lake Turkana in Kenya and dies at Nariokotome

Fire is used in China by Peking man, and may have been in use much earlier in Africa

Peking man shelters in caves south of modern Beijing, leaving many scraps of evidence of his way of life

A spear of hardened yew, presumably flung or thrust by a human, fixes itself between the ribs of an elephant in what is now Saxony

Humans evolve who can be classified as Homo sapiens - among them Neanderthal Man

A possible second migration from Africa begins, involving at some time the ancestors of modern man, Homo sapiens sapiens

Fossilized bones found in the caves of Skhul and Qafzeh, in modern Israel, are of anatomically modern humans

The first human inhabitants of Australia make the crossing from southeast Asia

Neanderthals carve a flute from the leg bone of a young bear, in the region that is now Slovenia

Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers use mammoth tusks and bones to support hide-covered tents at Dolni Vestonice (in the Czech Republic)

The Neanderthals vanish quite suddenly from the fossil record, leaving modern humans as the only surviving members of our species

Rhinoceroses, lions and mammoth feature on the walls of the Chauvet cave, in southern France

With the sea level falling, a land bridge (known as Beringia) forms between Siberia and Alaska, enabling humans to enter the continent of America

The La Brea tarpit in Los Angeles shows signs of human activity in the region

Needles of bone or ivory are now fine enough to take a thread as thin as horse hair

A canine jaw, discovered in a cave in Mesopotamia, is the earliest evidence of the domestication of dogs

Sheep are the first farm animals of which evidence of domestication survives, from a settlement in northern Iraq

Jericho, often quoted as the first town, grows into a settlement covering ten acres

The spindle develops naturally in the process of twisting fibres into thread by hand

Humans cross from eastern Siberia to the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, according to the earliest traces left by the Jomon culture

Human communities in the Middle East cultivate crops and domesticate animals, in the Neolithic Revolution