The OP does specify “history of the whole world.” So I’m not sure the wheel inventors and bronze forgers can count. Otherwise I’d say the first one to attach a blade to the end of a spear. ( . . .led to arrows, led to guns, etc.)
What about Galileo? He is studied in every country, and his thoughts/methods influence all subsequent scientific discovery.
Nah. It’s the person who first made fire, as opposed to lending it from natural sources. We wouldn’t have ceramics, metals, glass, plastics, motors etc.etc. without ready-at-hand fire. Agriculture would’ve never gotten anywhere without it. Most of the world outside the tropics would’ve never been inhabited. Hell, there’d be no Homo sapiens.
The thing is, it really took a world-class genius with unbelievable tenacity to pull it off. It’s not that hard to make two sticks hot, or even smoke, by rubbing them together hard. But the leap from smoky sticks to a glowing ember is a huge one, as anyone who’s done it knows. Many, many things have to be just so. Without prior knowledge, there were no guarantees that all the hard work would pay off, except maybe for a genius. I’m certain making fire from scratch happened very few times in all of history, but once someone pulled it off, it spread like wildfire (heh). The single most useful piece of tech a human can have.
I came in to say Moses, Abraham perhaps envelopes a little more (like Kaballah, however it’s spelled), but Moses did a lot more to define Judaism (and thus Christianity and Islam), so I’d say a stronger influence over almost as much is more significant.
Anyway, the religions of more than half the world is derived is huge, and it really is impossible to know how Western civilization would have developed under whatever religions would have taken their place instead. And, sure, Eastern civilizations didn’t really get a huge impact from it for thousands of years; however, I still think it’s fair to say that, at this point, Western civilization has had more impact on the East than the other way around.
Newton is an interesting pick, and I remember seeing that he was the winner, but I can’t agree with him as a choice. As I understand, there were other scientists who weren’t too far behind him, so I can’t imagine it would have put off his discoveries by more than a decade or two. Not to mention, he’s relatively recent in history compared to a lot of other choices, so his cone of influence, while still very significant, is ultimately probably smaller.
However, consider if Christianity and Islam had never risen. Is it possible we never would have had the dark ages and, in turn, science would have been hundreds of years ahead of where it was when they ended, thus making the discoveries of Newton move back potentially hundreds of years. Or, perhaps the Dark Ages would have happened anyway as a part of human development but instead we never would have had the Renaissance, and science wouldn’t have been far enough advanced such that Newton would have been able to make his discoveries.
So, I’m all for considering a great scientific mind, but any one that I would consider would probably need to be considerably older to be of the same kind of historical significance of many of the religious founders.
“history of the whole world” folks. History. That means written down.
You may find this helpful.
This is completely false. The vast majority of people living in the Americas in 1491 were farmers. Think of the story of the First Thanksgiving, and how the Indians saved the Pilgrims from starvation by teaching them to grow corn. Take a look at your diet and consider how many of our modern food crops are from the New World. Corn, tomatoes, potatoes, squash, beans, chilis, peanuts, chocolate, and on and on.
The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture wasn’t due to some solitary genius figuring out that if you put a seed in the ground it grew into a new plant. Every hunter/gatherer society in the world knew this. The transition was gradual. If you know that a certain grass provides large nutritious seeds, you might spend a bit of effort encouraging that plant via controlled burning, or hacking down other plants, and so on. And as population densities increase, and other foods get more scarce, the return on investment from encouraging these favored plants becomes greater.
Agriculture is a practice that has been invented and reinvented thousands of times over the millennia, and is certainly not the creation of a single genius or a couple of geniuses.
I would have to submit that the most significant individual in the history of humankind is Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, no question about it.
I stand corrected.
Hi Czarcasm, Thanks for the invite.
I wrote and deleted four paragraphs debating the personhood of God before realizing it was just making my head hurt. Suffice to say I went with God being a fictitious, male humanoid with a human son and that makes him a fictitious person, per the OP. It’s really debatable but that’s what I went with.
The goal of the comment was to point out that rather than picking either Christianity or Islam you could go with a common ancestor to both and effectively double your realm of significance. I believe the good FriarTed picked up on that with his answer “Abraham”
There is nothing really special about mitochondrial Eve. Her great grand mother produced several common matrilineal ancestors and her grandmother produced even more.
If mitochondrial Eve, (the one truly identified as such ) never existed it wouldn’t have made any difference to mankind of today.
I think you got pretty close, but what exactly did Abraham do other than produce progeny that may qualify for universal influence?
I think you do a disservice to the vast majority of mankind that do not look to St Paul for answers to the “truth”.
Simply, you’ll have to do better than that.
Growing crops is no big deal. Agriculture sprung up independantly all over the globe,
Fine, but was that bigger than the internet ? Look, there are those who suggest type setting actually originated in China. I’ll bet the technology is absolutely obsolete today.
If it had any influence on the Magna Carta I’d give that some credence. But I don’t see any evidence for that.
What ever precedent and influence existed fom ancient civilizations pretty well was hidden to English and northern European society that generated the development of modern legal concepts.
I never heard of these people, but I still think you are an 8 
All these inventions were waiting to be invented.
The bronze age is over. we don’t need it any more.
The steam engine is over too.
The wheel is still big but marine transport is much bigger and the travois is much more versatile and useful for much of human history.
The Americas is an example for the opposite conclusion. Agriculture and civilization wa developed independantly from the civilizations of Asia in Middle America.