Antikythera mechanism

c. 100 BCEMajorContested

A bronze gear device predicting eclipses and planetary positions, the most complex known machine for over a millennium.

Longest chain: The Big Bang → First stars ignite → Supernovae seed heavy elements → The Sun forms → Earth forms → First oceans → First life → Photosynthesis evolves → Great Oxidation Event → Complex cells (eukaryotes) → Multicellular life → First animals → Cambrian Explosion → First vertebrates → Jawed fish → Fish walk onto land → The amniotic egg → The Great Dying → Dinosaurs appear → Asteroid ends the dinosaurs → Early primates → Apes split from monkeys → Human line splits from chimpanzees → Walking upright → First stone tools → Genus Homo appears → Homo erectus → Control of fire → Habitual fire and cooking → Homo sapiens appears → Complex language → Natufian villages → Oldest known bread → Agriculture begins → Irrigation → Uruk and the first cities → Cylinder seals → Writing (cuneiform) → Babylonian mathematics → Babylonian astronomical diaries → Thales and natural philosophy → Trial and death of Socrates → Plato's Academy → Euclid's Elements → Archimedes → Antikythera mechanism

Contested history

Consensus: A Greek astronomical calculator from about the 2nd to 1st century BCE, found in a shipwreck in 1901.

Greek engineering drawing on Babylonian astronomyEstablished

CT scans read its inscriptions and reconstructed its gears.

Out-of-place artifact from aliens or time travelersUnsupported

Its design matches known Greek science; similar devices are described by Cicero.

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Documentnature.com

Decoding the ancient Greek astronomical calculator known as the Antikythera Mechanism (Freeth et al., Nature 2006) ↗