Credits & sources
How this poster was made
Nicolas Goossens designed and edited the poster. The first draft of the data was written with an AI assistant (Claude, by Anthropic) from general reference knowledge. Each regional column was then checked, item by item, by a search-based AI assistant against the published sources below, and the most debated topics went through a second, targeted check. The corrections were reviewed and applied by hand. This is careful work, but it is not peer review by specialist historians.
Dates are simplified for a poster: “c.” marks an approximation, and debated dates are flagged as such. Corrections are welcome at hello@synoptica.ch.
Main references
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, the reference used throughout (about 60% of all citations in the checks).
- The Cambridge histories and the UNESCO General History of Africa.
- Encyclopaedia Iranica and the Oxford Research Encyclopedias.
- For deep time and ancient DNA: Nature, Science and PNAS.
Specialist sources by column
| Column | Also checked against |
|---|---|
| Western & Northern Europe | Cambridge History of Scandinavia; Antiquity; Smithsonian Human Origins Program |
| Mediterranean Europe | Cambridge Ancient History; New Cambridge Medieval History; Antiquity |
| Eastern Europe & Russia | Cambridge Archaeological Journal |
| North Africa & Egypt | Oxford Research Encyclopedia (“Aterian”); The Metropolitan Museum of Art; University of Chicago, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures |
| Sub-Saharan Africa | UNESCO General History of Africa; Cambridge History of Africa; South African History Online |
| Middle East | Encyclopaedia Iranica; British Museum; ORACC (Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus) |
| Steppe & Central Asia | Encyclopaedia Iranica; Nature (ancient DNA); Kazakhstan's national history portal (e-history.kz) |
| South Asia | Encyclopaedia Iranica; Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers |
| Southeast Asia & Oceania | Te Ara – Encyclopedia of New Zealand; Natural History Museum (London); Australian Museum |
| East Asia | Columbia University, Asia for Educators; UNESCO World Heritage Centre; International Dunhuang Project (British Library); Max Planck Society |
| Americas | Science; US Geological Survey; Koch et al. (UCL), “the Great Dying” (2019) |
Debated topics
A second check covered Indigenous peoples and colonisation, contested states and names, atrocities and death tolls, and religion and deep origins. Its main sources were:
- Indigenous peoples: US National Park Service; Government of Canada (Crown–Indigenous Relations); The Canadian Encyclopedia; AIATSIS; National Museum of Australia; Waitangi Tribunal; SlaveVoyages database.
- Contested states and names: United Nations documents and General Assembly resolutions; International Court of Justice; Encyclopedia of Ukraine; Australian War Memorial.
- Atrocities and death tolls: US Holocaust Memorial Museum; Cambridge World History of Genocide; Sciences Po, Mass Violence and Resistance network; Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia; UK National Archives.
- Religion and deep origins: Nature; Science; Encyclopaedia Iranica; British Museum.
Design credits
- Typefaces: Inter (Rasmus Andersson) and Lora (Cyreal), SIL Open Font License 1.1.
- Icons: Tabler Icons, MIT licence.
- World map: world-atlas (Mike Bostock, ISC licence), from Natural Earth data (public domain); Equal Earth projection (Šavrič, Patterson & Jenny, 2018).
- Zoomable viewer on this site: OpenSeadragon, BSD 3-Clause licence.
Licence
© 2026 Nicolas Goossens · CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. You may share the poster unchanged and with credit, for non-commercial purposes. Details.