I always wanted something like a "History of human progress" which when zoomed out shows me something like this:

    -2000000 Stone tools
    -1000000 Using fire
    -6000 Metal tools
    -6000 Agriculture
    -4000 Writing
    1550 Printing
    1888 Telephones
    1888 Cars
    1903 Planes
    1941 Penicillin
    1941 First computer
    1982 Homecomputers
    1983 Mobile phones
    1990 The internet
    2001 Wikipedia
    2004 Facebook 
    2007 Iphone
    2022 ChatGPT

The issue is that the timeline is built in a Eurocentric way. Europe (and the Near East) are shown as the starting point of history, while Africa, Asia, and the Americas only appear when Europeans make contact with them.

This hides thousands of years of independent development in those regions—empires, and creates the false impression that they had no real history before Europe showed up.

It repeats an old colonial story where Europe is the main character and everyone else is treated as secondary.

Cool project, but seems to be abandoned. At one point I was a subscriber to their premium version, but then started getting spam to the (unique) email address I used for the subscription. I emailed them to warn that their account database might be compromised but never heard back from them (this was back in '22).

Also, back then, their map tiles loading had a very high failure rate when loading, so I wrote a custom caching proxy to make it tolerable (which had built-in retry and also cached any successful response for a very long time).

How do you make this? It doesn't seem to be like Wikipedia has coordinates or map boundaries for ancient empires, so there's no simple way to mine the data.

And if you don't mine it from somewhere, how do you know what to include? How many people will have heard enough about every part of the world to even be able to research ancient borders?

Seeing that it fails to portray the current map accurately, by not to separating PRC and ROC (taiwan), makes me question everything about older data

I've been having fun with the following AI prompt recently:

> You roleplay as the various Ancient Roman (Year 0) people I encounter as an accidental time traveler. Respond in a manner and in a language they would actually use to respond to me. Describe only what I can hear and see and sense in English, never translate or indicate what others are trying to say. I am suddenly and surprisingly teleported back in time and space, wearing normal clothes, jeans, socks and a t-shirt into the rural outskirts of Ancient Rome.

In think this is a fun way to learn languages too.

These lovely kinds of projects always leave me wanting more. In the same way every telescope leaves me wanting a larger one. Because what they reveal is so immediately interesting.

I would love to be able to slip through time with a slider. Especially if there was enough data on the movement and geographic span of early peoples to represent their story with moving, fading in/out diffusions of color.

And now I am curious! How clearly we have pinned down migration and geographic spans for the history of all human families?

NONE of this is an actual suggestion to do any more work.

It is great as it is!

I don't think having the Scoti in the northeast of what is now Scotland from 300 BC to 1 BC inclusive is right. I don't think the term appeared until ~300 AD, and it originally applied to people from Ireland: it only later came to be applied to the inhabitants of northern Britain when Irish became commonly spoken there (whether by immigration, conquest, or deliberate self-Gaelicisation under the influence of Irish missionaries).

Not very "technically accurate", since it does not represent (at least some?) vassal states differently from their suzerain. For example, compare this [1] map of the Ottoman Empire with the one in this atlas.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/OttomanE...

mm..I wish there was a really immersive version of this, something that looked like the map in Crusader Kings 3 but which let you zoom in on what was actually going on in every place at every time. I'm a map junkie and collector, and like to read historical atlases cover to cover. This is cool but it could be so much richer. I didn't take the time to seek out inaccuracies.

Cool but the white areas are so annoying. How little we know about all the undiscovered empires destined to be forgotten forever…

Shocked to see in 900BC Israel and Judea, yet palestinian states mentioned nowhere in the past 3k years.