According to DNA studies, modern humans left Africa in a single migration, spreading across the planet after just one tribe crossed into today’s Arabia. Indeed, it’s reckoned that every human alive now who is not sub-Saharan African ultimately derives from a single woman. Archaeologists argue, but the 'out of Africa' thesis is the most popular explanation. So from Tokyo to Helsinki, São Paulo to Saffron Walden, we’re all family. I find that curiously moving, in a woozy, Olympics-ceremony kind of way. So – go that girl Photograph: Michael Nicholson/Corbis
Or, to put it differently, the first of at least five separate moments when farming was discovered – that is, the planting and selection of cereals, alongside the tethering of some animals. It meant that people stopped being nomadic hunters, and human populations grew, trapping farmers with more mouths to feed. It also meant tooth decay, bad backs and a lot of very boring work. But without it there would have been no villages, towns – no empires, no cars, no moon landing, no history, really, at all. And, of course, with GM foods and fish farms, it’s an ancient story that hasn’t stopped Photograph: Roberto Esposti/Alamy
Da Yu is a mythic rather than historical figure. He’s supposed to have united the clans living along China’s Yellow River by persuading them to co-operate in a huge network of channels and canals to end its devastating floods. It turns out that the link between rivers such as the Yellow, the Nile, the Tigris and the Indus, and the growth of early civilisations is very strong. To tame them, or irrigate, people have to be organised and submit to some kind of authority. So rulers and classes emerge. Da Yu symbolises something absolutely real. I like the idea that China’s first hero was a civil engineer Photograph: Public Domain
Why did the creed of Jesus of Nazareth sweep the Mediterranean? The tent maker from Tarsus and persecutor of Christians, Saul, later Paul, was the man who got it all going. After his famous moment on the road to Damascus he decided this creed was for everyone, not just for Jews. His manic missionary journeys began to spread the word even to Rome. Eventually one of the least likely saints, Emperor Constantine (he poisoned his illegitimate son and boiled his wife to death in the bath, it’s said), made Christianity the official Roman religion, and now it’s the world’s most popular Photograph: Bob Thomas/Getty Images
... and survives despite being exiled from his tribe and living wild in the forest. He will later rise to power, meld all the Mongol tribes together and take the name Genghis Khan, or world ruler. His devastating invasions of Asia destroyed Muslim civilisations and tilted the balance for the first time in favour of Christian Europe – one unintended consequence of a career that would also change Russia, India and China, making Temujin probably the most influential human in history. As to his private life, DNA researches suggest 16 million men alive now are direct descendants Photograph: Alamy
The Inca and their emperor, Atahualpa, were no innocents. They were a ruthless bunch, overwhelmed first by Spanish gunpowder and then by microbes. Some 95% of the population disappeared after Europeans arrived in the Americas. Francisco Pizarro’s obsession with gold and silver meant he melted down priceless artworks and sent them home as dreary blocks of bullion. The Spanish blew the wealth on church decorations and unsuccessful wars. Meanwhile, Pizarro’s men missed the really valuable object all around them – the potato Photograph: North Wind Picture Archives / Al/Alamy
People had known for a long time that you could stop someone getting smallpox (one of the world’s great killers, blinders and disfigurers) by infecting them with a tiny amount of pus or scabs. But this was also dangerous. Jenner discovered you could protect them by giving them harmless cowpox. He did it by grabbing a local Gloucestershire boy and trying it. He wouldn’t be allowed to do this now, of course, but he probably saved more lives than any other human who has ever lived. Along with Shakespeare, he deserves to be the best-known Englishman Photograph: Heritage Images/Corbis
One was an Irish-American anarchist rebel, the other a fabulously wealthy member of America’s industrial aristocracy. But they shared, by smuggling contraceptives and, much later, by funding research into the Pill, this strange alliance which did more for women than any conventional political movement. Sanger (above) wasn’t exactly an admirable woman – a bully, a eugenicist and at times a liar – but then big historical change-makers, I’ve noticed, are rarely nice Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis
… and damn! For Hitler had ducked. The marching rebel beside him was shot dead. Thus the Nazis’ Munich “beer-hall revolution” ended in an embarrassing shambles. The following year, Hitler got a relatively light sentence for treason. In prison he dictated a book originally with the stupendously bad title of My Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice. But, in the renamed Mein Kampf, Hitler told the world exactly what he intended to do next – what he thought of the Jews, and Germany’s eastern destiny. But just then, the world wasn’t listening. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Hiroshima The Los Alamos Manhattan Project brought scientists from Europe and America together to create the atom bomb, which devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. J Robert Oppenheimer, the man in charge, is one of history’s great enigmas – lefty, humanitarian, immensely cultured, fascinated by eastern religions… and also a man who ended up calculating the precise height for a detonation that would burn to death the most civilians, including children Photograph: The National Archives/AFP/Getty Images
