Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity

Course Overview

Journey deeply into the ever-evolving story—the history of everything—in its monumental entirety from the moment the Universe grew from the beginning to the modern day. How is it possible for the disciplines of cosmology, geology, anthropology, biology, and history to fit together? These 48 lectures by Professor David Christian of Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia) answer that question by weaving a single story from accounts of the past developed by a variety of scholarly disciplines.

The result is a tale stretching from the origins of the universe to the present day and beyond, in which human history is seen as part of the history of our Earth and biosphere, and the Earth’s history, in turn, is seen as part of the history of the universe. It’s no wonder that Bill Gates declared this to be his favorite Great Course!

Like traditional creation stories told by the world’s great religions and mythologies, this lecture series provides a map of our place in space and time. But it does so using the insights and knowledge of modern science, as synthesized by a renowned historian. While you may have heard parts of this story before in courses on geology, history, anthropology, biology, cosmology, and other scholarly disciplines, Professor Christian provides more than just a recap of those disciplines. “To understand ourselves,” says Professor Christian, “we need to know the very large story, the largest story of all.” And that, perhaps, is one of the greatest benefits of Big History: It provides a thought-provoking way to help us understand our own place within the Universe.

Course Structure

01: What Is Big History?

Is it possible to tell a story of everything, from the big bang up to the present day? This lecture introduces the background and unique aspects of this broad, multidisciplinary perspective on history.
Duration: 31 min

02: Moving across Multiple Scales

Most history courses cover time spans of a few decades or a few centuries, but big history requires us to survey the past over scales that span billions of years. This lecture explores ways to become more familiar with the immense scales needed to cover the modern creation story.
Duration: 30 min

03: Simplicity and Complexity

In this lecture, we introduce one of the unifying themes of the course: the development of increasing complexity since the creation of the Universe. Here, we’ll examine the definition of complexity and ask how our Universe builds more complex entities.
Duration: 30 min

04: Evidence and the Nature of Science

Why should we trust the claims of modern science about events in the distant past? This lecture lays some ground rules about evidence for proving scientific claims and describes how new dating techniques have allowed scientists to peer further back into the past than previously thought possible.
Duration: 31 min

05: Threshold 1: Origins of Big Bang Cosmology

We encounter the first threshold of complexity (the creation of the Universe at the moment of the big bang) and explore the scientific evidence that allows us to piece together this ever-evolving story of creation.
Duration: 31 min

06: How Did Everything Begin?

This lecture surveys the history of different ideas about the creation of the Universe, from Ptolemaic theories of an Earth-centered cosmos to the modern notion of a constantly expanding Universe.
Duration: 30 min

07: Threshold 2: The First Stars and Galaxies

How did the Universe change from a cloud of dust to a constellation of stellar bodies? This lecture describes how gravity was fundamental in crossing the second threshold of the course: the creation of stars and galaxies from huge clouds of hydrogen and helium atoms.
Duration: 31 min

08: Threshold 3: Making Chemical Elements

Stars created the preconditions for crossing a third threshold of complexity: the formation of chemical elements. As stars collapse and die, they fuse to create new atoms that are the building blocks of all the complex chemicals that make up our Earth.
Duration: 30 min

09: Threshold 4: The Earth and the Solar System

With this lecture, we shift from the scale of the Universe to that of our solar system. Here we examine the processes by which planets and solar systems are created and the evidence that helps us piece together this part of the story.
Duration: 29 min

10: The Early Earth: A Short History

The tumultuous early history of the Earth is presented in this lecture, including the development of our planet’s internal layers, the generation of its magnetic field, the creation of the first seas, and the appearance of its early atmosphere.
Duration: 31 min

11: Plate Tectonics and the Earth’s Geography

In this lecture, we examine the history of the Earth’s surface and learn how the notion of our planet as fixed and unchanging was eventually overturned by a new vision of the Earth’s crust as broken into plates that are constantly on the move.
Duration: 31 min

12: Threshold 5: Life

With the consideration of the next threshold of complexity, life, we develop a definition of life itself, and begin to consider how life-forms adapt and change over time.
Duration: 30 min

13: Darwin and Natural Selection

In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin revealed a new story: an account of how all living species change and adapt. This lecture recounts how Darwin arrived at his revolutionary theory, and how he shared his ideas with contemporaries who were making similar breakthroughs.
Duration: 31 min

14: The Evidence for Natural Selection

In this lecture, we examine the various kinds of evidence Darwin used to establish his theory of natural selection, including the fossil record, similarities among species, and the geographic distribution of species. We also review modern evidence of natural selection.
Duration: 31 min

15: The Origins of Life

How was life first created from non-life? Modern biologists tell a complex story of the creation of life which involves the development of organic matter from simpler molecules such as amino acids, nucleic acids, sugars, and proteins.
Duration: 31 min

16: Life on Earth: Single-Celled Organisms

Here, study the first four (out of eight) major evolutionary transitions, embracing the first 3 billion years of the Earth’s history, a period in which all living organisms consisted of single cells.
Duration: 29 min

17: Life on Earth: Multi-Celled Organisms

The fusion of single-celled organisms into larger, multi-celled organisms c. 600 million years ago marked a turning point in the development of life forms on this planet. In this lecture, we focus on the evolution of multi-cellular organisms, tracing four evolutionary steps leading to our own species, Homo sapiens.
Duration: 31 min

18: Hominines

How did modern humans evolve from ape-like ancestors? This lecture surveys the evolution of primates and great apes, and then traces the adaptive development of hominines, a group of bipedal primates that appeared in Africa 7 million years ago.
Duration: 30 min

19: Evidence on Hominine Evolution

To construct the story of hominine evolution, scientists rely on three kinds of evidence: archaeological evidence, evidence based on the study of modern primates, and evidence based on genetic comparisons between modern species of primates, including ourselves.
Duration: 31 min

20: Threshold 6: What Makes Humans Different?

Human beings represent a new threshold of complexity in the story of life on Earth. In this lecture, we examine two things that make us unique: use of symbolic language and collective learning.
Duration: 31 min

21: Homo sapiens: The First Humans

Does the archaeological record reveal when the first members of our species appeared? In this lecture, we examine evidence from the Stone Age and consider several theories of the early history of the first humans.
Duration: 31 min

22: Paleolithic Lifeways

Using remains left behind by our ancestors and studies of modern societies that still use stone technologies, modern researchers have constructed a portrait of the Paleolithic way of life. In this lecture, we enter into this world and learn what life was like for our distant ancestors.
Duration: 31 min

23: Change in the Paleolithic Era

Change was gradual over the course of the long Paleolithic era, but there were some significant shifts that altered lifeways for human beings. These include climate changes during two ice ages, the rise of various technological innovations, and adaptive migration to nearly all parts of the globe.
Duration: 32 min

24: Threshold 7: Agriculture

The appearance of agriculture set human history off in entirely new directions by increasing human control of food, energy, and other resources. The development of agriculture brings about changes in the environment and lays the foundation for the development of more complex human societies.
Duration: 30 min

25: The Origins of Agriculture

Why, after 200,000 years of foraging, should human communities in quite different parts of the world take up agriculture almost simultaneously? In this lecture, we explore the different factors leading to this innovation.
Duration: 30 min

26: The First Agrarian Societies

Although early agrarian societies left behind no written record, there is evidence of many important new developments during this period. Here, we explore the lifeways of these societies, and question whether agriculture meant the early farmers lived better than their forager ancestors.
Duration: 32 min

27: Power and Its Origins

Approximately 5,000 years ago, the human species saw the rise of a new form of social organization: the first “tribute-taking” states. We begin our consideration of these states by asking how power is defined and what forms it takes.
Duration: 30 min

28: Early Power Structures

How did humankind move from kinship clans and small agricultural villages to enormous centralized societies? This lecture surveys the archaeological and anthropological evidence used to reconstruct the evolution of power structures and theorizes how these larger societies took shape.
Duration: 31 min

29: From Villages to Cities

This lecture introduces the 5,000 years of human history that were dominated by the huge and powerful societies: agrarian civilizations. With the development of writing, we get the first era of recorded history.
Duration: 32 min

30: Sumer: The First Agrarian Civilization

How did the buildup of human and material resources during the early Agrarian era lead to the development of the first tribute-taking states and the first real cities? Here, we’ll examine one of the earliest agrarian civilizations, Sumer in southern Mesopotamia, to learn how these new developments arose.
Duration: 33 min

31: Agrarian Civilizations in Other Regions

How typical was Sumer of agrarian civilizations in general? This lecture briefly surveys six different areas where agrarian civilizations appeared early, including northeastern Africa, northern India, China, and the Americas.
Duration: 31 min

32: The World That Agrarian Civilizations Made

Despite the limited contact among them, early agrarian civilizations the world over shared many features. In this lecture, we’ll examine these features and speculate why agrarian societies seem to develop along similar lines despite regional differences.
Duration: 32 min

33: Long Trends: Expansion and State Power

In this lecture, we begin to take the long view of agrarian civilizations, marking two trends that occurred during the course of 4,000 years: the expansion of civilizations to cover larger regions and incorporate more people, and the increasing power and reach of their rulers.
Duration: 31 min

34: Long Trends: Rates of Innovation

Agrarian civilizations were able to expand because they developed new ways to extract resources and manage populations. This lecture examines how features such as population growth, commerce, and tribute-taking states helped encourage innovation.
Duration: 31 min

35: Long Trends: Disease and Malthusian Cycles

Throughout human history, we see periods of innovation, population growth, increasing trade and urbanization, political expansion, and cultural efflorescence. Then, sometimes quite suddenly, there is a crash. In this lecture, we examine the factors that contribute to this cycle of boom and crash, referred to as the Malthusian cycle.
Duration: 29 min

36: Comparing the World Zones

The previous two lectures describe factors that both stimulated and limited growth in the era of agrarian civilizations in Afro-Eurasia, the largest of the four world zones of human history. Here, we begin to question whether these same features and processes appear in American, Australasian, and Pacific zones.
Duration: 31 min

37: The Americas in the Later Agrarian Era

In this lecture, we see that American agrarian civilizations experienced many of the same developments as those in Afro-Eurasia, but these developments appeared much later and never spread as far as in other world regions.
Duration: 31 min

38: Threshold 8: The Modern Revolution

In the last millennium, the pace of change accelerated sharply and decisively. Since then, humankind has experienced a number of astonishing changes, including accelerating innovation, the formation of larger and more complex societies, the integration of the four world zones, and the growing human impact on the biosphere.
Duration: 31 min

39: The Medieval Malthusian Cycle, 500–1350

This lecture describes the medieval Malthusian cycle, which lasted from the decline of the Roman and Han Empires to the time of the Black Death. We will focus on Afro-Eurasia, the largest and most significant of the four world zones, and the region that drove change in the early stages of the Modern Revolution.
Duration: 29 min

40: The Early Modern Cycle, 1350–1700

During the Early Modern cycle, for the first time in human history, the four world zones became linked through global exchange networks which stimulated both commerce and capitalism. Yet for other world zones, these changes were catastrophic, bringing disease and population collapse.
Duration: 29 min

41: Breakthrough: The Industrial Revolution

By 1700, many elements of modernity seemed to be in place, yet global rates of innovation remained slow. This lecture describes the breakthrough to modernity after 1700, focusing on one country, Britain, where the transformation has been studied most intensively.
Duration: 32 min

42: Spread of the Industrial Revolution to 1900

Within just two centuries, industrialization had transformed the entire world. No earlier transformation in human history had been so rapid or so far-reaching. This lecture describes the impact of industrialization before 1900.
Duration: 31 min

43: The 20th Century

In this lecture, we examine the hallmark events of the 20th century, including major worldwide wars, two waves of innovation, huge population growth, and an enormous surge in energy use.
Duration: 33 min

44: The World That the Modern Revolution Made

In this lecture, we attempt to describe, as we did for Paleolithic and agrarian societies, the lifeways of the Modern era. What emerges is a portrait of a single, world-spanning community of more than 6 billion people supported by ever-increasing technological innovation.
Duration: 32 min

45: Human History and the Biosphere

How has our increasing power over the natural world affected our relationship to planet Earth? Are we becoming a malignant presence within the biosphere, driving other species to extinction and impacting global climatic systems in unpredictable ways?
Duration: 32 min

46: The Next 100 Years

After surveying 13 billion years, can we resist peering into the future? We take a tantalizing glimpse into speculations about which historic trends may continue into the next century.
Duration: 31 min

47: The Next Millennium and the Remote Future

Our speculations into future developments continue with an examination of several theories about what life will be like 1,000 years in the future. Then we’ll jump even further ahead, with scientific theorization about the ultimate fate of the Universe.
Duration: 30 min

48: Big History: Humans in the Cosmos

In the final lecture of this course, we pause to ask some fundamental questions about meaning: What is the place of human beings in the Universe? Are we, perhaps, the only creations of the Universe that have consciousness?
Duration: 31 min