History
Notes on history. I put some pins in the map to events I have read about. This is related to my books section.
Borders from 1886 to 2019 are year by year, from CShapes 2.0 (ETH Zurich, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, simplified). Earlier borders are approximate snapshots from historical-basemaps (GPL-3.0), starting at 10,000 BCE. From a billion years ago until then, the map shows today's coastlines moved to where plate reconstructions place them (GPlates Web Service, model of Merdith et al. 2021, CC BY 4.0), not the actual shorelines of the time, coloured by the part of today's world each piece of land belongs to; geological periods follow the International Chronostratigraphic Chart. Earlier still there is no map to draw: the time bar runs back to the Big Bang, and those stops show a schematic illustration, not to scale, with the events of each stretch beside it. Greenland, which CShapes leaves out, is added from Natural Earth (public domain). Click a country to zoom in on it and see its events; scroll or pinch to zoom, drag to pan.