The History of the World in Fifteen Images

Behold the formless Earth! It’s like someone got the Rolling Stones and Kazimir Malevich to paint the whole universe. But what's that around the corner? …BOOM! Our world explodes into life. Single-celled organisms flop around in a great sea. These creatures are so dumb that the human race will need to climb another three steps up the evolutionary ladder before we can fathom just how dumb they are. One day, they will become geeks and do physics in a hilarious way. The dinosaurs are here. Initially, in a massive piece of wishful Biblical thinking, scientists think they might be giant humans (“Please let it be Goliath, please let it be Goliath.”) But they weren't. Even though all they leave behind are fossilized tokens of life as it was, from that we build up a picture of them as enormous, cold-blooded titans of death. Later, of course, they'll come back for some theme park lols. A decade or so after that, they'll take over Tumblr. Apes arrive. Dancing is invented, as is inarticulate rage that even therapy can’t get to the bottom of. Look at them scream and holler, they’ve got so much pain, so much anger, but why? Neanderthals are also on the scene. It turns out we were into fucking these monstrous creatures. You’d need at least eight beers to take that Simply Red ginger guy home, let alone the harridan in the mirror. Finally, humans are humans. They learn to express themselves but this expression is dominated by cave paintings of bulls, horses and deer, which they are obsessed with and worship as gods. Soon, Homo sapiens will put such romance aside and will dominate these pliant beasts like Russell Howard dominating another night on BBC3. The golden age of civilization arrives. Wisdom, philosophy and white columns: the ancient Greeks do it all. What do you mean you're concerned about the European bias of this global history? Go read Mao’s history of the world, Mr. Revisionist. Take the bus to SOAS and talk about the ancient cultures of the Ethiopian lowlands, Mr. Sandal Wearing Jerk. Book an all-inclusive Inca experience trip to Machu Picchu and cry at the beauty of high street pan pipe players miming over backing tracks while a fat American from Podunk, Idaho complains about his bowel disease, Mr. PhD In Obscure Cultures. The dark ages: Europeans forget their democracy, their language, their love of a communal bath and a nice olive oil wash. Poorly tattooed girls roam the land, forced to talk in plummy Surrey accents in order to see the light of the next day. Things aren’t so dark outside of Europe and, like a really lusty wind blowing in from the East, Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes overrun a third of the world. Genghis is quite the womanizer and has 16 million descendants (this is not a whimsical lie; it’s a disputed scientific fact). And this isn’t because he is a libertine, it is because he is a traditional guy who recognizes that it would be rude to conquer a group of people and then refuse the women they offer you out of fear.

Like light through a closed window, the renaissance comes, a piano tinkling Hugh Laurie in a world full of fat, game show hosting Stephen Frys. Obviously, most sponsors of the renaissance (the Medicis, Charles VIII, Colin Firth in

) are psychotic, plotting mass murderers who'll one day make Bush ‘n’ Blair look like Mandela ‘n’ Tutu. But the ends justify the means and when you find yourself gazing up at Michelangelo’s "David" or wittily pointing out that the New Labor government was obsessed with Machiavelli, just remember that a lot of innocent people were thrown off balconies in Florence in order for you to be moved / get a cheap laugh at Alistair Campbell’s expense.   Britannia rules the waves. Englishmen are carried around the Empire on sedan chairs. A massive country, Australia, is discovered and then used as a prison. The sun never sets because every Brit is too damn drunk on power to remember it even exists. The slow end of this will lead to The Kinks and The Jam, while back home in Britain the internet is foreshadowed by a load of anonymous arseholes shitting out of their windows into the street below.

   
Goodbye green and pleasant lands. Hello dark factories and capitalism, one day you will let me eat burgers while I complain about the price of oil. Of course, there is one irritable, bearded German who isn't so happy about all the proletariat oppression but, luckily for him, his ideas will form the backbone of a great, utopian 20th century government to which the phrases “Soviet death camp,” “sent to Siberia,” and “Stalin is not pleased” have absolutely no bearing. Modernity! Don Draper! Suits, martinis and carriage rides through the park. If you can’t make it on your farm you can make it in Capital City, friend. It’s all high livin’ baby! High livin’ and extremely dark weaponry… And then… Because without them you wouldn’t have this and that’d be like never having listened to the Lou Reed album that’s based on Edgar Allen Poe stories. Or the album Paul McCartney did in Latin. And without the internet your phone would still be boring and journalists wouldn't know what to write about.

I think that about covers it.