About

Humanity Atlas puts recorded lives on the map and the timeline they happened on. Not a list of dates, and not a biography: a place you can stand in a decade, look at a piece of ground, and see who was there.

What a moment is

The unit is a moment — one person, one place, one point or stretch of time. A birth, a battle, a crossing, a house someone moved into. Each has its own address, its own page, and its own dot on the map, and a life is what you get when you draw them in order.

That shape is what makes the two views possible. The map answers “who was here”; the timeline answers “who was alive then”; and because a moment carries both, the same record answers both questions without being stored twice.

Where it comes from

Almost none of this is ours. The moments are built from Wikidata — its people, its events, and the coordinates it holds for them. The prose is drawn from Wikipedia articles about those events. The pictures come from Wikimedia Commons, chosen because a person already decided that image belongs to that subject.

Every card names its own source and its own picture credit, and links back to the file it came from. That is a licence condition and it is also the point: an atlas you cannot check is an atlas you have to take on faith.

What it does not claim

Nothing here is verified by hand. A moment is exactly as good as the record it was built from, and those records disagree, go out of date, and are sometimes wrong. Dates before about 1600 are frequently approximate, and a coordinate is often a city rather than a room.

Pictures are the sharpest case. An image attached to a moment was chosen for the subject, not as evidence of the event: a portrait painted forty years later, or a photograph of the hillside taken last summer, is about the right thing without depicting the moment. Nothing is marked verified, because only a person who looked at the picture could say so.

If you find something wrong, the correction link at the foot of a card is the way to say so.

How to read it

The scrubber at the bottom sets the period; the buttons beside it set how wide that period is. A circle with a number in it is a group of markers too close together to draw apart — click it and the map zooms until they separate, or, when no zoom can separate them, hands you the list of what is there. The search box takes a name, and it takes a coordinate: 48.8566,2.3522 answers with everything recorded at that point, and 48.8566,2.3522 AND Alexander narrows it.