Where Inventions Came From: A Map of Invention from the First Stone Tools to the Present, from Wikipedia and Wikidata

Where did inventions come from, and how did the centre of invention move? I combine three open sources into one map. A hand-checked table, built from the text of nine English Wikipedia pages, places and dates 115 early innovations at 155 places, keeping date ranges and several places wherever the pages give them. The 314 entries since 1500 in Wikipedia's Timeline of historic inventions extend this curated list to the present. And 1,443 inventions from Wikidata, filtered from 24,186 items with an inventor or a date of invention, add a much larger but much less even layer, placed by where they were made, the inventor's birthplace, or the country of origin. Six innovations arose independently in several places on the pages' own account, among them farming (11 centres), writing (4) and zero (3). Averaging each period's locations, the centre of invention sits in Africa in the deep past, in West Asia from 10,000 BC to AD 1 (where 51% of the landmarks of 5000 to 2000 BC came from), in East Asia from AD 1 to 1500 (50%), in Europe from 1500 (all 16 landmarks of 1500 to 1700), and in North America from 1950 to 2000 (55%). The open record is lopsided: 91% of Wikidata's mapped inventions are in Europe or North America, regions with 14% of today's population, and 83% are credited to named individuals. The map describes the written record of invention, not invention itself. Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/inventions-map/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/inventions-map. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/31/inventions-map/.