Once you figure out what’s happening here, it’s pretty cool. These guys — BBC software engineers Gareth Lloyd and Tom Martin — took 14,238 Wikipedia pages of historic events, grabbed the coordinates, and mapped them out in an animated visualization of where they occurred (with a year counter in the lower right to tell you where you are in the historic timeline), A History of the World in 100 Seconds:
Understand that this is English-language Wikipedia’s view of history, so it starts out extremely Eurocentric, spreads to Asia, then ultimately explodes with North American datapoints and spreads into more of the world; by the end, you can make out continents more easily. It is not representative of everything that ever happened, everywhere. But it’s an interesting way to look at a certain perspective on recorded history.