Art historianMaximilian Schich put together this pretty visualizationthat commemorate humanity ’s cultural history over 2,600 years . The blue and red dots you see above are the birthplaces and destruction for over 120,000 people who were “ notable enough ” to have their birth and deaths recorded .
The estimate is that by tracking the lives of ‘ important the great unwashed ’ , you’re able to find out a stack about which metropolis dish out as the ethnical hubs of their era . The more people , the more ‘ important ’ the place .
In the beginning , most of the battery-acid form around Rome . But then in 1789 , more of the the dots initiate move to Paris , mark a change in the mankind ’s cultural hub . More recently , New York and Los Angeles have acquire importantly larger with more people traveling there .

Nature writes :
The team used those data to create a picture show that starts in 600 bc and ends in 2012 . Each person ’s nativity position appears on a single-valued function of the world as a blue dit and their demise as a crimson Transportation . The event is a fashion to visualize ethnic history — as a urban center becomes more authoritative , more notable citizenry die there . The workplace that the animate map is basedon was report on 31 July in Science1 .
The aliveness meditate some of what was known already . Rome gave way to Paris as a cultural centre , which was eventually overtaken by Los Angeles and New York . But it also puts figure and dates on these switch — and tolerate for precise comparisons . For exercise , the data suggest that Paris overtake Rome as a cultural hub in 1789 .

The data point comes from Google ’s Freebase . It ’s obvious that there ’s a European preconception to this visual image but it ’s still fascinating to see how the westerly world took physique over the old age .
Culturemaps
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