TheHumanAscent
From the first stone tools to the Moon: a sourced record of what people have made, and the kind of government they made it under.
What free people build
Every entry in this record is something people did for the first time, or did better than anyone had before: a tool, a discovery, a cure, a law, a work of art, a voyage. Laid end to end they trace one long climb, slow for most of our history and steep in the last few centuries.
This site asks where that climb has been steepest, and why. Our argument is that it rises fastest where people are free to think, speak, trade and try things no ruler planned, and slows where they are not. The record is here so you can test that argument yourself, entry by entry.
- 38,888inventions, discoveries, achievements and firsts
- 197countries and territories, plus international projects
- 83,583suggested citations to papers, books and records, most not yet verified
- 3.3Myears covered, from the first stone tools to 2026
Who has done the climbing since 1800
Each band is the share of a decade's entries that came from places with that kind of government at the time. Democracies and limited governments, where an elected body held real power, produced 40% of the entries in the 1800s and between 58% and 85% in every decade since 1900.
First isn't the same as furthest
The Soviet Union reached space first. The United States took people to the Moon. Both kinds of achievement are in the record, and so is the government each one happened under.
- 1957The Soviet Union launches Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite.
- 1961Yuri Gagarin becomes the first person to orbit Earth.
- 1969Apollo 11 lands the first people on the Moon, for the United States.
- 1998Work starts in orbit on the International Space Station, built by 15 nations including both former rivals.
Check the record
The record was compiled with the help of an AI model. Each entry lists suggested sources, also written by the model; a random sample checked against library catalogues and publishers found most of them real and relevant, but most haven't yet been verified one by one, and the site says so on every entry. A second, automated pass then searched scholarly indexes and the web for every entry, linked 2,050 pages and papers whose text matches 1,408 of them, and flagged possible errors; each flag was reviewed and the outcome is published.
Read how it was built and where it falls short, browse every entry with its sources, or download the whole thing. If you find a mistake, tell us.