Video of the Week: The entire history of the world’s cities in 3 minutes
Humans have been building cities for a very long time. Even the places we think of as old - Jerusalem, Athens, Cusco - are fairly new when viewed as part of the entire timeline of urbanization.
You can now watch the rise and fall of every city in history thanks to a new three-minute video. After researchers at Yale published digitized, geocoded data that maps documented urban settlements from 3700 B.C. to 2000 A.D., data enthusiast Max Galka created a visualization of it for Metrocosm.
Galka's video charts the entire history of cities, beginning with the earliest Sumerian civilization in the fertile crescent.