In Peru's Supe Valley, the city of Caral was already thriving around 2600 BCE, when the pyramids of Giza were being built. Its people raised stepped pyramids, sunken circular plazas and residential districts more than a thousand years before the Olmecs. Excavated since the 1990s by archaeologist Ruth Shady, it was added to the World Heritage List in 2009 as the oldest known center of civilization in the Americas.
Around 2300 BCE, Enheduanna, daughter of King Sargon of Akkad, became high priestess of the Moon god at Ur. She composed hymns to the goddess Inanna and put her name to them. She is the oldest person identified as the author of a literary work, about 1,500 years before Homer.
Squeeze Earth's 4.5 billion years into a single 24-hour day. Homo sapiens shows up around 11:59:54 p.m., roughly six seconds before midnight. All of written history, from Sumerian tablets to today, fits into the final tenth of a second. A cosmic blink.