Wouldn't have been phone at that point, it'd be wired telegraph. Which I don't need to elaborate did not go from Japan to the United States but there were exiled Samurai kicking around in Spanish territory for a bit even into the 1800s so possibly one of them could've visited the US and sent Lincoln a Fax. Also I think the king of Siam tried to give the Union war elephants during the Civil War which is much weirder.
A few months ago my mother was cleaning the home of grannie who died, and there it was found.
An old cookbook, handwritten by grannie, the book it self had a stamp on it (as in caved in leather) that it was made in 1910.
from the words of my grandfather this book was given to grandmama by grand grandma.
The mindblowing thing is that this handwriting book which survived both world wars, the fall of communism and the turmoil afterwards, still has easier to follow instructions than most recipes today I see, also no about me and my life section
There was a 20 million year window, in which dead trees just piled up. Nothing could digest the lignin. This is how germany's brown coal reserves came to be.
The sharks thing actually leads to another fun fact:
Sharks are older than some of the north star, as the noth star is actually a binary star system next to a solo star. I forget what part it's actually older than, so here's the source.
And just to be clear, Polaris is not actually the "North Star" all the time. North Stardom rotates around on a 26,000 year period, as the earth precesses. That's crazy lightning fast spinning on the time scales we're taking about.
There was a day, 18th April 1930, where the BBC reported no news. It really shocks me because of how different the times are now. I can't imagine there's any minute that doesn't have dozens news stories running
IDK if the BBC still does this, but back when I watched, they had a habit of just cutting to some B-roll footage of whatever situation, and just shutting up for a while to let it play out and let the audience breathe a little bit, as a segueway and palate cleanser before whatever the next segment was. Absolute perfection. I cannot imagine the American news doing that (and indeed they do not) without someone losing their job.
I can't imagine there's any minute that doesn't have dozens news stories running
Honestly, that's your choice. My advice; limit your news to 2 - 3 "channels" (like RSS app, Lemmy), set them up that you have to "open them" (no by-the-side stream) and have days where you just don't do that.
Oh I don't read much for news. A local paper (which is in a language I barely know), a little on here but most in blocked, and The Onion type publications sometimes.
I still can't imagine that a news source says "there's not news now, have some piano" in 2025
The great lakes are super big, have huge flow rates, Superior is famously super deep since it's a continental-rift lake that was widened by glacial retreat .... But they only formed like 14,000 years ago when the glaciers retreated...
The river Tyne in England is 30 million years old, just when Antarctica was separating from Australia and South America.
The river Thames is 58 million years old, that's just after the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs.
The Rhine is at least 240 million years old ... From the Triassic era if not earlier.
And then there's 3 rivers in Appalachia that are ~ 320 million years old... The French Broad river, the Susquehanna river, and (ironically) the New river.
They've been continuously flowing since the carboniferous period, literally when Pangea first started forming and before any bacteria or enzymes could break down trees (which eventually compacted and became all the coal in the mountains that formed alongside them).
The first part is correct, but technically both the river and life in that area predate the mountains, and all of them predate the continent by hundreds of millions of years, which is wild in its own right.
Sorry you're confused. We are referencing this comment in which masterspace mentions the Susquehanna River. Not the Shenandoah River. Somehow it made shalafi excited and his brain substituted Susquehanna for Shenandoah which reminded him of the John Denver song, which yes is a lovely song, I belt it out loud every time I drive alone through West Virginia.
The New river also formed a beautiful gorge where we humans built an awesome bridge and some scenic overlooks. If you find yourself driving through that southern region of WV, it is worth a detour!
before any bacteria or enzymes could break down trees (which eventually compacted and became all the coal in the mountains that formed alongside them).
Building off of this, the difference between coal and oil is that coal comes from carbon that was buried before the bacteria existed to break it down, and oil after. There will eventually be more oil, but there will never be more coal
Have you heard of the truly ancient - Stone Age, in fact - ruins of what is now called Gobekli Tepe (Potbelly Hill) in Anatolia, Turkey, near the Taurus Mountains, between rivers that converge further downstream to create the Euphrates River.
These long-gone people, hunter/gatherers and slightly later hunter/harvesters (a primitive phase of agriculture), now called Tash Tepeler (in modern Turkic), build stone urban centers on a large scale, were completely unknown before 1992, and let me put it this way, how long ago they were:
Ancient Sumeria, cradle of civilization, where writing was invented, is closer to us than it is to the time when Gobekli Tele was thriving.
Gobekli Tepe is near halfway between the Lascaux and Chauvet cave paintings and us.
Scotland's first railway, the Cockenzie and Tranent waggonway, played a role in the Battle of Prestonpans (1745). The final piece of the line went out of use in the 1960s.
The Last Stand by Sabaton was describing an event that happened in 1527, the year Henry VIII was trying to get an annulment. The events of The last stand played a role in the founding of the church of England.
San Marino is so old it was founded before The Council of Nicea.
The oldest Evidence in the archeological record we have of transgender individuals is older than the oldest archaeological evidence for gay couples.
The first use of "OMG" was on a memo sent to Winston Churchill in 1917.
India and Sri Lanka were connected by a land bridge until the 1500s. The remains of which are still a tourist attraction.
The first scientific study into transgender people was published in 1896 and studies about transgender people were burnt by the Nazis. Don't ever let people say transgender people are a recent thing.
The Romance languages have been written down for so long that we can basically watch the evolution of multiple languages in real time through texts.
Oxford university was founded before what would become the Maori settled in New Zealand.
One of the last people born into (legal) Slavery in the USA died after being hit by a car in the 1970s.
It's possible that former Samurai lived to see the 20th century.
There are older mountain ranges on earth than the Appalachians. The oldest on earth are likely the Barberton Mountains coming in at a whopping 3.4 billion years old.
Columbus' contact resulted in a 92% loss of population in North, Central, and South America. Mexico City area only just re-reached its pre-contact population estimate in the 1960s.
The sheer amount of people, knowledge, and culture lost in the Americas due to European invasion and their treatment of the native peoples makes me so sad.
It is the greatest loss of human knowledge that we know of. Certainly the largest in the last 4000 years. It puts the burning of the Library of Alexandria to shame. Entire civilizations, and the sum of all their knowledge, gone. Wiped out. Practically erased from history. The Aztecs had a full writing system and a long recorded history, all burned to ash by the Spaniards just for the hell of it; only scraps remain.
Several Indigenous civilizations in the Americas had their written records deliberately destroyed, while others relied heavily on oral knowledge that disappeared when communities were decimated. Here’s a clear breakdown of both types:
Civilizations Whose Records Were Intentionally Destroyed
Aztec (Mexica) Empire
Type of records: Pictorial and glyphic codices on history, astronomy, tribute, law, and religion.
Destruction: After the conquest, Spanish authorities, most famously Bishop Juan de Zumárraga and later Diego de Landa, burned almost all Aztec codices as “idolatrous.”
Survival: Fewer than 20 pre-conquest or early-contact codices survive.
Maya Civilization
Type of records: Highly developed writing system; texts on astronomy, mathematics, calendars, history, and ritual.
Destruction: Inquisition-era clerics burned “thousands” of books and idols; Diego de Landa’s auto-da-fé in 1562 is the most notorious.
Survival: Only four confirmed pre-conquest Maya codices remain (Dresden, Madrid, Paris, Grolier).
Mixtec Civilization
Type of records: Rich pictographic histories of dynasties, genealogies, wars, religious rituals.
Destruction: Many codices lost to Spanish burnings and suppression of Mixtec priest-scribes.
Survival: A few extraordinary codices remain (Codex Zouche-Nuttall, Codex Vindobonensis).
Inca Empire (Tawantinsuyu)
Type of records: Not written in books, but quipus—complex knotted-string recording systems for census, tribute, calendrics, and possibly narrative information.
Destruction: Colonial authorities destroyed many quipus, and forced conversion efforts suppressed quipu-keepers (khipukamayuqs).
Survival: ~1,000 quipus remain, but most without context.
Taíno (Caribbean)
Type of records: Primarily oral, but also ceremonial carvings (zemis), sacred objects, and chronicled songs.
Destruction: Spanish campaigns wiped out most of the population within decades; much material culture was destroyed or lost.
Muisca (Colombia)
Type of records: Mostly oral histories and sacred textiles and objects.
Destruction: Spanish suppression of temples and ceremonial items erased much of their intellectual heritage.
Civilizations Whose Knowledge Faded With Their Communities
These relied heavily on oral traditions or fragile local materials. When communities were devastated by disease, enslavement, and forced assimilation, their knowledge systems could not survive intact.
Mississippian Cultures (e.g., Cahokia)
No writing system; history was preserved orally.
Collapse accelerated by population loss after contact, long before written ethnography could record their traditions.
Ancestral Puebloans, Hohokam, Mogollon
Sophisticated sciences (astronomy, hydrology, architecture) maintained through oral knowledge.
Much was lost after displacement, missionization, and cultural fragmentation.
Wari, Tiwanaku (pre-Inca Andes)
No writing system; relied on knot-based or symbolic systems.
Knowledge of state organization and ritual life vanished after the societies collapsed long before Spanish arrival, and then post-contact disruptions erased remaining memories.
Nahua, Zapotec, Purepecha, and many others
These groups had writing or semi-writing systems, but much of what we know today survives only in fragments because:
manuscripts were burned,
priestly classes were suppressed,
or oral lineages were broken.
The Scale of Loss
Across the Americas, scholars estimate:
hundreds of languages vanished, each carrying unique worldviews and knowledge systems;
countless scientific, agricultural, ecological, and medical traditions were lost or fragmented;
many civilizations’ histories and lineages were erased or only partially reconstructed through archaeology.
It truly was a civilizational-scale knowledge collapse—yet also a story of survival, because many Indigenous peoples continue to preserve, revive, and rebuild these traditions today.
The weird part about that is that Columbus was the third expedition to the American continent from the European continent.
First was a single Irish/Celtic(?) monk in the 800s. Second was Leif Erikson and his crew of "Vikings" in the 1100-1200s. Neither one of those caused widespread disease in the Americas, despite the fact that the monk made it as far as The Great Lakes, and Leif Erickson's expedition was cut quite short with them engaging in battle with the first natives they saw, resulting in the death of Leif Erikson as well as a few of his companions.
Brendan the navigator, 6th c., but the story about "Saint Brendan's island" is not proven to be about America AFAIK. Or true. It's a legend about a blessed island that may be a religious myth.
There's a ton of legends of sailors finding a vanishing island, an island of plenty, the island of apples, that various theories have attached to the Canaries or Azores and such IINM. Saint Brendan is just one among those, so it's hard to assume it's fact.
Also, Leif Erikson was in year 1000. And there is a strong suspicion that diseases did play a big role and made it a shitshow.
Then Cortez finished the job when he explored from Florida to Texas. He also introduced wild hogs to the continent, which introduced trichinella parasites to native fauna. Truly one of the most ecologically destructive events in the past thousand years.
In the early 15th century (before the "discovery" of the Americas and the age of colonization), China had assembled a heavily militarized fleet that was likely bigger than all European powers' fleets combined. They used it to become the dominant maritime power of their time, bringing India, South Asia and Eastern Africa into their sphere of influence.
Then internal struggle and threats on their northern borders lead to a shift in policy and the fleet was recalled from further exploration to the west and dismantled - making Europe's naval expansion possible.
To provide some context and a good book to read more on this:
Historian Louise Levathes, in When China Ruled the Seas (2008), argues that “the Ming voyages were primarily a diplomatic mission to incorporate Indian coastal states into the Chinese tributary system; the Sultan of Calicut and the ruler of Cochin accepted Chinese titles and protection in exchange for regular tribute and trade privileges (tax exemptions)”.
I wouldn't take this to mean that all or even the majority of India came under China's sphere of influence. The kingdoms of the Malabar coast acted as the gateway into India for over a millennia and were plutocratic hubs where foreign influence (Arab, European, African) was not uncommon.
In fact it was common for the kingdoms of the Malabar coast to pay tribute to multiple domestic and foreign polities to secure tax exemptions.
This was also the port through which significant trade occurred between India and the Roman Empire which led a prominent Roman (Pliny the Elder, writer of Naturalis Historia) to remark
‘It is quite surprising that the use of pepper has come so much into fashion,’ Pliny wrote, 'especially when you consider that in other substances which we use, it is sometimes their sweetness, and sometimes their appearance that has attracted our notice; whereas, pepper has nothing in it that can plead as a recommendation to either fruit or berry, its only desirable quality being a certain pungency; and yet it is for this that we import it all the way from India! Who, I wonder, was the first to make trial of it as an article of food?'
In confirmation of such grumbles, two south Indian dynasties, the Pandyas and the Cheras, went as far as sending embassies to Rome to discuss the balance-of-payments problem and the inability of the Romans to pay their various Indian debts.
Eighty per cent of the 478 recipes included in the Roman cookbook of Apicius included pepper, and it appears regularly even in the pudding section. It was still, however, an expensive treat. The Tamil and Sanskrit words for sugar, ginger, pepper, sandalwood, beryl, cotton and indigo all made their way into Latin, and hence to modern English: ‘pepper’ and ‘ginger’ are both loan words from Tamil – pipali and singabera respectively.
According to some recent calculations, customs taxes on trade with India may have generated as much as one-third of the entire income of the Roman exchequer.
(Source: The Golden Road by William Dalrymple)
The history of the Ming Treasure Fleet and Zhang He is absolutely fascinating and I will be reading more on it! If I may get on my soapbox, it is important for everyone to expose themselves to non Eurocentric historical narratives to arrive at a more complete and balanced worldview.
Humans got to Tasmania, Australia 20 000 years before they got to Scotland despite it being 3x the distance and featured the first time humans journeyed over the ocean.
Bananas were domesticated in New Guinea
The Maori beat Europeans to new Zealand by roughly 500 years
We get about 3 months a year of snow where I live (and 5 months of below freezing. Used to be a proper 5 months of snow not 25 short years ago but climate change has shifted that noticeably) the snow is absolutely magical and I can't imagine living somewhere that doesn't get it. Yes it makes a mess of commutes and drivers who don't know how to drive in snow (literally just drive like a grandma, and of course make sure you have "all season" tires not those touring tires that are the default) and yeah whatever snow accumulates on the sidewalk and driveways you need to clear off, but you just do what you gotta do and appreciate the wonderland the snow turns the world into
Humans got to Tasmania, Australia 20 000 years before they got to Scotland despite it being 3x the distance
Early humans out of Africa walked along the south Asian coasts, so Tasmania makes sense it its path was warmer than Scotland. Also, there were land bridges available near Australia that aren't present today.
and featured the first time humans journeyed over the ocean.
We can't possibly know that since Homo Erectus bones have been found on Crete. They could have island-hopped there from Greece, or they could have built a boat/raft.
John Tyler, 10th president of the US (1790-1862), had a grandson, Harrison Ruffin Tyler (Nov, 1928) who just recently died in May of 2025.
The last survivor from the 1800's was Emma Morano, born 11/29/1899 Civiasco, Italy. Died 04/15/2017 in Verbania, Italy. So most people reading this had a chance to speak to someone born in 1899.
All of Napoleon Bonaparte's 4 brothers lived into the age of photography (1826) and had their photo taken with a camera. His youngest brother Jérôme sat for many photo sessions. Only one of his 3 sisters, Caroline, lived into the era but never had a photo taken. Napoleon Bonaparte (08/15/1769 - 05/05/1821), didn't live into the age of photography.
Humans are the only animals capable of appreciating art. Yes, chimps and elephants can make their own art, but they have no interest in it after they're done with it.
In July 1938, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave a speech at Gettysburg to mark the 75th anniversary of the battle. 25 veterans from the original battle attended. They were filmed, on movie film, walking in the parade.
The Battle of Thermopylae where king Leonidus and his "300 spartans" (it was actually a few thousand of a coalition force) held off the Persian invasion of Greece.
The plan was to use the narrow mountain path to pit a few of tgeir well trained soldiers against a few of Persias rank and file. The idea being a few well trained soldiers could take out a lot more rank and file if they didnt have battle tactics to worry about.
What caused Leonidus to lose that battle is an alternate route through the mountains that let the Persians flank the Spartans and probably totally destroy them.
What's mind blowing is this was hundreds year old history when Rome tried the same thing.
This one spot is famous for losing battles and ancient people loved choosing this battleground and then losing
Ah classic mistake, building up defenses on a choke point only to realize it's not the only entrance to your base and now zerglings are eating your SCVs.
Also, phalanx v short swords just lose as soon as the formation breaks a tiny bit, there's uneven terrain or open flanks. Up close long pikes don't do anything and the gladius goes stabby stabby.
Should be noted that it was a few thousand initially. When they found out they were being flanked they sent away most of the other soldiers. So it was just the Spartans and one other contingent, 700 Thespians.
Isaac Newton was the Master of the Mint. Back then, issues with counterfeiting or diluting the coinage was an issue. He personally went in disguise to bars to track down these counterfeiters. Who were then executed.
Back then, the point of the coins was to represent that they contained a certain weight of metal, without forcing people to weigh them out all the time.
Shit, you're right. I was conflating Isaac Newton with the kite-zappy guy with the fart fetish. I'll leave the original post unedited as a testament to my biggotry.
This is more of a hypothesis than a fact, but there are credible claims that Henry VIII suffered from the so-called McLeod syndrome and the associated Kell-positive blood type, which is a rare recessive genetic variant affecting the X gene and which he may have inherited from his maternal great grandmother (Jaquetta of Luxemburg) who may have carried this gene. The syndrome would explain both the high mortality among the second-born children that Henry VIII had with his many wives (and similar issues of other male relatives of Jaquetta) and whose pregnancies often ended in miscarriage and (male) children who did not survive infancy, as well as Henry VIII's early mental decline.
Perhaps not really mind blowing, but I think it's crazy that the historical events of that time and the "Elizabethan era" that followed might have been shaped in this way by a single occurrence of a specific genetic disorder.
George Washington's Continental Army had a vaccine mandate.
Heroin was first synthesized in 1874. It's older than 13 US states. Sitting Bull and heroin existed at the same time. In 1898 it was sold by Bayer as a recreational drug under the brand name Heroin. Frederick Nietzsche was around for the heroin trade.
I've seen Bayer heroin tins in a few museums and was glad I lived in an era where you had to go to the work of calling your friend's brother Todd to take you to Corey's house to get high, which was way more trouble than it was worth.
the funny thing about Custer is that he was warned about the ambush but his hubris was just too much
also it is rumored among those that have heard direct stories from people that were there was that it was a woman that made the killing blow on him and they probably scalped and then dismembered him and most of his men, and thats why nobody found him
Earlier in his Army career, Custer attended the Confederate surrender at Appomattox (as a Union officer). He decided to keep the white dish towel that Lee used as a flag of truce (aka the true last and final Confederate flag), as a souvenir. Custer's wife bequeathed that dish towel to the Smithsonian quite a bit later.
Recently I read a comment on here saying that French was older than English. I also randomly remembered that I learned that several countries in Europe are actually younger than the US. Italy feels like it’s older than the US but the country wasn’t unified till the 19th century.
Anyway I’m getting sidetracked. The point is that I decided to look into when the French started regulating language and discovered that English is older than French.
Now, Vulgar Latin, from which French and other romance languages originated is older than Old English. However, since it’s the source of the other Romance languages which aren’t French, I’d say it doesn’t count as French.
The oldest Old French we have is from 842AD, but old English fragments are as old as the 5th century.
Early modern french seems to date back to the 1500s (“Paris Latin” was still a thing during this time), but Early Modern English predates 1500 in the beginning of the vowel shift.
Now the end of the English vowel shift probably happened after the Académie française was first established; however, common people in France at the time did not speak this formalized French. Furthermore, the work of the Academy was ended and the academy abolished during the Revolution. It was only after 1816 that the academy was restored and the idea of having a single unified language was supported by the French government. Late modern English (current English) was established by that point.
Anyway long story short, English is older than French if only by a century or two through their histories. This might not seem like a big surprising time difference, but it was a bit of a shock to me.
Interesting. I think the real question about "is it the same language?" is whether modern readers can still understand it.
For early modern English (think Shakespeare) then most modern speakers can. You'd probably have a basic understanding from reading, although missing some nuance. A lot of the jokes in Shakespeare come out better when they're performed, so you'd probably have a better understanding of it in the theatre.
For middle English (think Chaucer) then you'd struggle a bit. Vocabulary and grammar have changed a lot. Might have a few passages in the Canterbury Tales that make sense unaided, but in general, not really.
For early English (think Beowulf) ha ha, fat chance. Even scholars of early languages don't understand everything in it, there's a few words the meaning of which are lost, but in general about one word in fifty even looks familiar and it's probably a false friend.
So I'd probably put English at 'about 500 years old'.
How far back modern French speakers can understand French would be interesting. I can understand a fair amount of Latin from my knowledge of Spanish; and unlike eg. William the Bastard invading England and introducing a whole pile of new vocabulary, the French have the advantage of never having been invaded by the French ;-)
I always found it super interesting that you can sort of see the class divide in English based on the French and Germanic roots, especially when it comes to food and farming. For example:
Cow = Germanic (Kuh), Beef = French (Boeuf)
Hen = Germanic (Henne/Huhn), Poultry = French (Poulet)
Sheep = Germanic (Schaf), Mutton = French (Mouton)
Wheat = Germanic (Weizen), Flour = French (Farine/Fleur in old French)
It's not all words of course, but there are quite a few ones where you can see that the people who grew the food used the Germanic, and the people who ate the food used the French.
I realized in like 4th grade that I could parse various Latin languages okay just from knowing some Spanish. I thought old English would be the same or easier… nope. Beowulf still looks more like Icelandic than English
This is a very arbitrary way of looking at the problem and you won't see serious linguists claiming this sort of stuff. Latin branching off into a variety of languages and Old English not branching off doesn't change anything about the relationship between Latin and French as opposed to OE vs. Modern English. They're a "parent" and "child" language, and whehter they have any "siblings" is a consequence of their geographical distribution (occupy more space > changes in language not reaching all areas equally > divergence into dialects and languages). Besides, OE is also a parent of Scots, so you actually can't count it as an unambiguous ancestor of Modern English.
Comparing a district in Paris actively using Latin and English undergoing the vowel shift is mixing up internal and external linguistic phenomena.
All the stuff about Académie is not relevant for determining the identity of a language. Institutions tend to have only surface-level effect on language (spelling, prescribing some words, etc., hardly anything that can create or end a language).
Fair points, I’m not a linguist. I mostly was just going off the dates I could find for old-early-middle-modern periods for each language.
The end of the vowel shift was what seemed to separate early-modern from late-modern English, and the establishment of the academy marks the beginning of modern regulations on the French language. As such I thought those were good enough markers to compare the current versions with each other.
Anyway good point about old English also being the source of a language that isn’t English. And yeah I mean trying to gauge the age of a language is bound to be arbitrary since languages don’t abruptly change. Kind of a ship of Theseus situation. At what point did one language become another? Are they the same because we call them all English or are they different because old English and modern English don’t appear to be the same language?
"English is older than French" is a weird way to put it. "English spelling was standardised a century before French spelling" might be a better. After all, both languages existed the whole time but are named differently by periods in history for convenience. There's no way to say "Middle English ended in 1658" for example.
Men’s clothing keep getting shorter and shorter in the late Middle Ages/early modern period to the point where at court, their dicks could be seen. The solution was cod pieces, some of which were elaborate, bejeweled, erect penises. This trend ended in England when Elizabeth I fully came into her role as “the virgin queen”
Trees are not that related to each other. Woody plants evolved multiple times over earths history. And while e.g. beeches are closely related to oaks, they are more closely related to strawberries than to e.g. ashes. Black locust tree is more closely related to beans or peas than to birches (which are again related to oaks and beeches). Apples are even more closely related to strawberries than to oaks. That broke my mind during Covid. All conifers are somewhat closely related though.
Hildegard von Bingen was a nun in medieval times that used nature to heal. We are still studying and rework her book on natural plants and how to heal with them. It seems like some plants dont exist anymore
Edit: she also was the first abbess leading the first female only monestary that took in especially girls from poor peasents who would otherwise only ended up with a force marriage or rape
Oh yeah its real. Romans used something to spice their meals that apperently grew all over italy greece and anatolia. Today we cant find any plant matching the looks nore the taste. But it must have been really good
I once turned down a gangbang that would have been me and 6 girls because I felt a little hung over... That was 25 years ago, and Im still not over how monumentally fucking stupid that was.
Thats a good one, but I usually try to sooth myself by thinking it was a ploy to steal my kidneys... YEah, they were after my kidneys... They were after my kidneys... Im going to be crying about that one on my deathbed lol
Walgreens the pharmacy that was ran by the family of the same name made their fortune selling Alcohol during the prohibition era. If you were well off your doctor would write you a prescription for booze which they would happily fill. They grew over thirty times their original size during this time.
Vikings generally did a lot of trading and in some cases just kinda started to focus on trade instead of raiding taking advantage of the width and breadth of the Norse world. It wouldn't be impossible for goods from North America to be sold in a Syrian market, though I don't know if that did happen but we have found Norse Chainmail in an Inuit grave cache.
I pretty much ignore any of the claims in this thread that hinge on someone being really old. There's just no way to tell if that's really true, the older the people supposedly get the more likely it is that they faked (or just didn't know) their real age, e.g. by using a relative's paperwork or telling an official that they're 40 instead of 50. BTW the "blue areas" are probably fake, too.
Yeah. Black and white pictures really fuck with time.
Chuds shouting with a straight face like "America was better in the 1950s" to a old black woman who had constant death threats and couldn't even own a bank account.
The last mammoths died out at roughly the same time as the Giza pyramids were built. Albeit they being in the Arctic and being shrunk by insular dwarfism, had the Egyptians traveled to Wrangels island and captured some they could have had them as work animals while building the pyramids.
This mean that the movie 10,000 BC accurately portraited at least one thing correctly.
My grandfather enlisted at 18 to fight in WWII. He was the second youngest of 13 siblings. His oldest brother died around age 18 in the flu pandemic that was going on during WWI. My reference point for the space between the wars has always been the time it took to have 13 children.
Greenland sharks have incredibly long lifespans due to their large size (6m+), environment, and very slow metabolism estimated up to 500 years. There could be a shark that is still alive today that was alive during Shakespeare's life and the switch to the Gregorian calendar.
Human beings have been around, in their current state of intellectual capacity for well over 100,000 years.
Looking at all that we've accomplished in just the last 10,000 years of known history...it is not unreasonable to assume that we could have accomplished just as much several times over already...but for whatever reason the knowledge of those accomplishments have been repeatedly erased from history.
Not this "erased from history" crap again. There was no grand ancient civilization that existed and was wiped out before the Sumerians came around 4,000 BCE. You know how we know? Because 1) there would be archaeological evidence and there is none 2) they would have had to invent agriculture and that would've left evidence behind via genetics in modern plants of human-guided cultivation 3) they would have used all the same energy resources we have, so timber, peat, coal, oil, etc. and that would have significantly altered the environment in such a way as to leave a record - not to mention it would mean there would be no coal or oil left for us and 5) we have archaeological evidence of early humans during this time - and they were hunter/gatherers leading basic subsistence lives as evidenced by the wear on their bones and teeth and the radioactive signatures in their bones of what they ate.
So why did it take almost all of the last 100,000 years for civilization to happen? Because without the stability provided by agriculture, doing anything more than surviving is really fucking hard. Not to mention the repeated ice ages and other things that made long term progress impossible.
Yes, which as far as we can tell was a purely ritual site with no signs of habitation, no burials. Even "pre-civilization" folks were capable of amazing works, but that doesn't meet the definition of a "civilization" in the classic sense. It's probably the best indication of what humans could build pre-agriculture, but everything points to it being an upper-limit.
BTW, that doesn't take anything away from the site, and in fact makes it more remarkable.
We use terms like "stone age" and "iron age" because those are materials that lasted long enough for us to see them. Wood, fabric, rope, animal hide, many other materials don't last that long so we have much less information about what people were doing with them.
That's actually not true. Even steel girders will dissolve to rust within a few hundred years, if left to the elements. Fossils are a 1 in a million occurrence that require precise conditions in order to happen. In conditions that are less than ideal, there would be zero evidence of anything we have built in the last few thousand years without constant maintenance.
Only stone endures long enough to last longer than that, and we tend to harvest stone to build new things, every time we find old things made out of it. So everything that would have otherwise lasted, could have easily been recycled so many times over, that it's completely unrecognizable now. Except for the few, rare structures that we see today, and have little to no explanation for, other than speculation based on vague 3rd person accounts.
You know that the rate of discoveries & innovations accelerates in history, to the point that the last century was more knowledge created than all of humanity before? Exactly.
Can't invent much if all you have is a sharp stone and very limited understanding of nature.
I'm gonna piggy back mine on this one. Before the invention of writing, the only new thoughts you could ever encounter, were from the people you would meet face to face.
To further this, there probably was a long time before humans developed sophisticated language. Imagine what a game changer that must have been. It is still engraved in our cultural memory in the form of the wizard doing magic by simply saying certain words.
there probably was a long time before humans developed sophisticated language.
Homo Erectus was the longest living human ever, lasting about 1.5 million years before going extinct about 115,000 years ago. Their bones have been found on Crete, which means that they likely had the intelligence to walk out of Africa and build a boat or raft for island-hopping from Greece. However, even building a raft requires a sophisticated language. So our ancestors have been conversing for a very long time. They also harnessed fire and invented cooking, so Homo Sapiens aren't all that special.
Proto human ancestors were also far more capable than we give them credit for. There is archaeological evidence that, possibly as far back as 2.5 million years ago, human ancestors were harvesting specific types of stone in one location before transporting it over seven miles away to a different location where it was being processed. That is vastly beyond the complexity of what most people think homosapiens were capable of only 100k years ago.
People didnt have to build a society in the exact likeness of modern humanity for it to be vastly complex and advanced in its own right
We don't. But I find it hard to believe that not one person in 90,000 years of human history, never came up with a single advancement similar to the ones that happen all the time now. Our brains were just as developed as they are now, for that entire time.
It is inconceivable that we only started using them in any significant capacity, just recently.
Well, we did use them, but mostly for not starving to death and not getting eaten. Both of which we did very regularly anyway. Also, there were only a few thousand humans overall.
Hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers have pretty similar workloads - by many estimates, subsistence farming requires more labor, even. The advantage in subsistence farming is consistency and food preservation, allowing for larger populations, surplus, and specialization.
If you make a stone spearhead twice a month, you might not spend much time thinking of how to do it better - but if you do it for the whole village, 60 times per month, you might be spending some of that knapping time thinking about how to make it easier.
We didn't just start using our brains like that in recent time only. There may have been a few Albert Einsteins in the stone age but if they couldn't spread their ideas, then that civilization did not have that knowledge. Leather tanning and meat conservation can be discovered easily, but it has to be rediscovered every time there's a new group of 20 people, it doesn't get transfered to be improved upon over the centuries.
The problem your reasoning is missing is scale. We know you can't build the Great Pyramid if your busiest cultural center is a village of 200 people in the closest 100 km and they couldn't communicate.
And all our tech is based on improving upon something that exists. No one can conjure a microchip and a cell phone out of thin air.
Or sometimes the technology is there, but we're just not ready. For example, a very rudimentary steam engine existed in ancient Rome, and was described by others as early as 30BC. While it was highly unlikely to happen because the infrastructure/materials were limited, imagine where we'd be now if the Industrial Revolution had happened in Ancient Rome.
It also makes me wonder if there's anything around today that's considered some oddball quirk of physics that might change the world in the future when we're ready to use it.
You need steel for the industrial revolution. You can't make a steam locomotive out of bronze, first of all it's too expensive, second of all the boiler will burst before you get up enough steam to pull a train, third the crown sheet would melt. You outright need the Bessemer process to make steam engines.
The real innovation with the steam engine during the industrial revolution was metals strong enough to hold enough pressure for the engine to be capable of powering meaningful work. But the industrial revolution was initially quite slow as these labor saving devices cost significantly more than the labor they saved. It took the technology existing and the labor costing more than it would cost to implement the machinery before the industrial revolution could fully begin
@[email protected] Look into Islamic scolars, a lot of scientific discoveries done in Europe after the middle ages were made hundreds of years earlier by them. Then I guess their dark ages started, making a lot of knowledge "lost". On te other hand, you should keep in mind two things, the first is that knowledge is incremental, everything we know is built on previous knowledge. The other is that while humans were around a long time, they were not in the big numbers of today. As a consequence they didn't need farming, they could always travel further to new lands for finding food and shelter.
@[email protected] ...King Louis XIV had an anal fistula and required a doctor's attention and horrific chair that would frighten anyone, the entire court began using the tortuous device unnecessarily...
? The last pyramid in Egypt (other cultures like the Nubians built their own) was built by Ahmose I in the mid to late 16th c. BCE, IINM. Not sure what you're thinking of for 2611 BCE, even the Giza pyramids are within the hundred years after that.
So you mean the oldest pyramid, not the last? The pyramids in Egypt were built starting around ~2660 BCE up until ~1530 BCE, with the 3 in Giza through 2600 to 2530 BCE, roughly. All dates give or take maybe 10 years. The dates you have would likely be a range for the first of the 3 pyramids in Giza.
The iPhone was released in September of 2007, slightly over 2037 years after her death.
The Great Pyramid of Giza, tomb of Khufu, was built ~2600BCE, making it some 2530 years old when Cleopatra was born. So the statement "Cleopatra was closer in time to the iPhone than the construction of the Great Pyramid" is correct. But, the Great Pyramid is the largest and heaviest, but not the oldest, of the ancient Egyptian pyramids. So, the same can be said for the dozen or so pyramids built before, to include the Bent and Red pyramids of Dahshur, the Meidum pyramid, and Djoser's stepped pyramid.
You've also got 500 years after the Great Pyramid as well, which covers the rest of the Giza necropolis (with the possible exception of the Sphinx), right on up to Pepi II with room to spare. There are some pyramids newer than ~2000BCE but they're smaller, not as well built, most are ruined.
What's wild is how short the pyramid construction craze was. Both pyramids ad Dahshur and the pyramid of Meidum, and their complexes, were built during the reign of Sneferu, partially simulteneously. Djedefre and Khafre were brothers, so they're pyramids were constructed either simultaneously or in very quick succession. The entire Giza necropolis including the two largest pyramids ever built was done start to finish in approximately 85 years. One human could have lived to watch the whole thing. The Great Pyramid itself was built in 20 years. And they did it with human muscle and copper chisels.
If we go to something like the discovery of electricity or the founding of the United States, we can say without qualifications that event was closer to Cleopatra's life than the construction of anything we would call an "Ancient Egyptian Pyramid."
Which is all of them; the Great Pyramid of Giza is the largest pyramid ever built by man, and I'm pretty sure it was the single heaviest structure built by humans until certain hydroelectric dams built in the 20th century.
The second largest pyramid is only a couple hundred feet away, Khafre's pyramid. Khafre's pyramid is the middle of the three Giza pyramids, it's the one that has some of its casing stones left on the top. It is somewhat smaller, the base isn't as wide and it's at a slightly shallower angle, so it isn't as high. To partially compensate for this, it was built uphill from Khufu's pyramid to hide the size difference somewhat, and since antiquity several courses of stones have been removed from the peak of Khufu's pyramid, slightly shortening it, but Khufu's pyramid still stands higher above sea level than Khafre's pyramid.
The third Giza pyramid, Menkaure's pyramid, is much smaller, though about a third of its height was cased in granite rather than limestone. Something incredibly stupid happened to Menkaure's sarcophagus. You've probably seen a picture of what's left of Khufu's sarcophagus, a plain, partially ruined granite box with the lid entirely missing. Khafre's sarcophagus is intact, almost mysteriously so, it was set into the floor and the lid had a locking mechanism that apparently wasn't defeated, yet the lid stands open. Menkaure's pyramid used to contain a beautifully carved basalt sarcophagus, but in the 1800s the British decided to take it back to England, and then the ship wrecked and it was lost to sea.
Fun fact II: there was a period of earth's infancy where the seas were full of iron. Green in colour, mostly from volcanic activity.
Then up pop some photosynthetic bacteria who start farting out oxygen. The oceans start to rust. The rust falls to sediment and the farting contines. The ocean depletes of iron and the farting contines. The oxygen starts to fill up the sky and the farting continues. Some say it still goes on to this day. But what happened to the iron?
Well not uluru specifically but that's what Australia's distinctive colouration is. Ancient fart rusted sea iron
We only understand about 15% of the Universe, and we're probably wrong about much of that. For instance, we know dark matter is pervasive throughout the Universe, and we don't have the slightest idea of what it is.
Also, one of the leading theories of why we haven't met other intelligent alien cultures is because there is one major ancient, highly advanced race that is so devoted to being the only race on the Universe, that every time they find any evidence of another intelligent race, they travel there and extinguish them entirely.
It is already too late to save us. We have been beaming all sorts of electronic signals into the universe in every direction for decades, and sooner or later, it will reach THEM.
Bit of a nitpick, we don't know that the dark matter is pervasive throughout the universe. What we observe is that galaxies and galaxy clusters are held together too strongly to be explained by our current theory of gravity, and the motions of galaxies within clusters do not match the gravitational forces that are known to act on them from observed matter - The Milky Way for instance is spinning fast enough for the stars on the edges to be flung off into intergalactic space.
One solution to this contradictory observation is that there is bunch of extra mass we can't see (dark matter) that is holding the galaxies and clusters together. Every experiment designed to detect dark matter has failed, and more serious work is going into adjusting theories of gravity as a result. However no adjusted theory has arisen that can explain every observation either, so physics is a bit lost at the moment.
I always sort of vaguely wonder if we actually are surrounded by evidence of intelligent life, we just don't know how to interpret or even detect it. Sort of like one of those isolated Amazonian tribes surrounded by wifi signals.
I think it's either something like that, or we haven't found anything because the universe is just too big and there simply isn't any way to get around it, no matter how advanced a species becomes. Like FTL travel/wormholes/whatever just isn't possible. Which is not a fun explanation but Occam's Razor and all that.
My son is taking an astronomy course with a highly regarded astronomer, and she believes there are many, many intelligent civilizations in our galaxy alone. They are just too far apart. A galaxy may look small in an photo with lots of galaxies, but in reality, a single galaxy is so huge as to be almost mind-boggling in itself, without even considering the wider Universe.
I'm not an astronomer, but IIRC, our electronic signals don't make it particularly far out of the solar system until they merge with the background noise. So I guess we are safe for now.
They've been evolving and developing for a billion years, and eliminating entire civilizations is their religion. They long ago figured out how to filter the background noise for important electronic waves. The one that discovered it is now a highly regarded saint.
Also, one of the leading theories of why we haven’t met other intelligent alien cultures is because there is one major ancient, highly advanced race that is so devoted to being the only race on the Universe, that every time they find any evidence of another intelligent race, they travel there and extinguish them entirely.
I think it's more likely that either life getting to the point of space travel is incredibly rare and the universe is just so vast they don't run into each other or they destroy their planet before they get very far (like we're doing).
It is not just vast in distance, it is also vast in time.
Imagine an advanced civilization; it rises and is space fairing for 30million years. Something (who knows what) happens and they either go extinct; or render themselves unable to travel in space/use technology.
30 million years; it seems so long from our point of view; but that 30 million years could have ended a million years ago and we would be none the wiser. Their signals faded to nothingness the machines all broken and cold. And still that is a blip on the scale of the universe.
This is the theory I like best. There have been plenty of civilizations throughout the Universe, it's just that very few emerge at the same time, and we've never had another one emerge close enough for us to notice.
Most of school going humans are aware of the concept of force and motion.
We have vague ideas of the laws that govern them roughly 400 years after their discovery by Newton.
On the basis of that, one can form a rough estimate that it would take humans another 30-40 years to assimilate quantum mechanics and special relativity.
We can see the relationships between forces and motion in our everyday lives so we naturally internalise a model of how they work. Newton didn’t actually ‘discover’ the force of gravity, for example, he developed calculus to be able to extrapolate out from the force we see when we drop something on Earth to the planets themselves.
Quantum mechanics is completely different, there is nothing we see in our everyday lives which allows us to naturally build up a mental model of how quarks interact, or the way that photons propagate. It is only through dedicated study, a solid grasp of very advanced maths, and painstaking experimentation that we can figure out how those things work.
So I don’t think school going people will ever have the same inherent understanding of it that we do of forces like gravity.
I like this one (not mine):
=> There was a 22 year window in which samurais could have sent a fax to Abraham Lincoln.
And still they didn't warn him
Historians refuse to debate the great Anti-Lincoln samurai fax conspiracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_submarines
And they could've done it from french submarines.
Ooooh that's a good one
Was there a phone line network intact enough to send a fax from Japan to the United States........?
Wouldn't have been phone at that point, it'd be wired telegraph. Which I don't need to elaborate did not go from Japan to the United States but there were exiled Samurai kicking around in Spanish territory for a bit even into the 1800s so possibly one of them could've visited the US and sent Lincoln a Fax. Also I think the king of Siam tried to give the Union war elephants during the Civil War which is much weirder.
Missed opportunity.
A few months ago my mother was cleaning the home of grannie who died, and there it was found. An old cookbook, handwritten by grannie, the book it self had a stamp on it (as in caved in leather) that it was made in 1910. from the words of my grandfather this book was given to grandmama by grand grandma.
The mindblowing thing is that this handwriting book which survived both world wars, the fall of communism and the turmoil afterwards, still has easier to follow instructions than most recipes today I see, also no about me and my life section
Ironic that you didn't post a recipe and only an about me and my life section.
recipe or gtfo
Perfect, already done!
Arise, chicken
Like ... With yeast, or the dark arts?
Yes.
The one time you might have wanted a touch of personal trivia with your goulash recipe... Good grief!
https://justtherecipe.com/ <-- pretty good scraper that removes all the mommy blog fluff
Sharks are older than the North Star. (450mya vs. 70mya)
Sharks are older than trees. (450mya vs 390mya)
There was a 20 million year window, in which dead trees just piled up. Nothing could digest the lignin. This is how germany's brown coal reserves came to be.
The sharks thing actually leads to another fun fact:
Sharks are older than some of the north star, as the noth star is actually a binary star system next to a solo star. I forget what part it's actually older than, so here's the source.
https://youtu.be/-YU8Vt9VpbE
And just to be clear, Polaris is not actually the "North Star" all the time. North Stardom rotates around on a 26,000 year period, as the earth precesses. That's crazy lightning fast spinning on the time scales we're taking about.
There was a day, 18th April 1930, where the BBC reported no news. It really shocks me because of how different the times are now. I can't imagine there's any minute that doesn't have dozens news stories running
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p010szlg
This would be so nice I swear.
IDK if the BBC still does this, but back when I watched, they had a habit of just cutting to some B-roll footage of whatever situation, and just shutting up for a while to let it play out and let the audience breathe a little bit, as a segueway and palate cleanser before whatever the next segment was. Absolute perfection. I cannot imagine the American news doing that (and indeed they do not) without someone losing their job.
Honestly, that's your choice. My advice; limit your news to 2 - 3 "channels" (like RSS app, Lemmy), set them up that you have to "open them" (no by-the-side stream) and have days where you just don't do that.
Yes, i'm easily stressed.
Oh I don't read much for news. A local paper (which is in a language I barely know), a little on here but most in blocked, and The Onion type publications sometimes.
I still can't imagine that a news source says "there's not news now, have some piano" in 2025
I mean, there was still a tremendous amount of things happening in 1930, they just didn't report on any of it.
Hey, that was my -76th Birthday!
Here's some wild river history for you:
The great lakes are super big, have huge flow rates, Superior is famously super deep since it's a continental-rift lake that was widened by glacial retreat .... But they only formed like 14,000 years ago when the glaciers retreated...
The river Tyne in England is 30 million years old, just when Antarctica was separating from Australia and South America.
The river Thames is 58 million years old, that's just after the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs.
The Rhine is at least 240 million years old ... From the Triassic era if not earlier.
And then there's 3 rivers in Appalachia that are ~ 320 million years old... The French Broad river, the Susquehanna river, and (ironically) the New river. They've been continuously flowing since the carboniferous period, literally when Pangea first started forming and before any bacteria or enzymes could break down trees (which eventually compacted and became all the coal in the mountains that formed alongside them).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rivers_by_age
🎵Almost Heaven, West Virginia
Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River
Life is old there, older than the trees
Younger than the mountains, growin' like a breeze🎶
Crazy those lyrics are literal facts. Also, you win the thread.
The first part is correct, but technically both the river and life in that area predate the mountains, and all of them predate the continent by hundreds of millions of years, which is wild in its own right.
Ok but he said Susquehanna River. Not Shenandoah.
Great song though.
He sings Shenandoah.
https://genius.com/John-denver-take-me-home-country-roads-lyrics
Edit: Even better source:
https://johndenver.com/tracks/take-me-home-country-roads/
Sorry you're confused. We are referencing this comment in which masterspace mentions the Susquehanna River. Not the Shenandoah River. Somehow it made shalafi excited and his brain substituted Susquehanna for Shenandoah which reminded him of the John Denver song, which yes is a lovely song, I belt it out loud every time I drive alone through West Virginia.
Artistic license
The New river also formed a beautiful gorge where we humans built an awesome bridge and some scenic overlooks. If you find yourself driving through that southern region of WV, it is worth a detour!
https://www.nps.gov/neri/planyourvisit/nrgbridge.htm
It's a national park now too!
Funfact regarding the New River:
The Cartographers charting the river had it marked by the direction it flows, NE-W, eventually this just stuck as the name.
Building off of this, the difference between coal and oil is that coal comes from carbon that was buried before the bacteria existed to break it down, and oil after. There will eventually be more oil, but there will never be more coal
TIL I've shot rapids in a 320m year old body of water
Have you heard of the truly ancient - Stone Age, in fact - ruins of what is now called Gobekli Tepe (Potbelly Hill) in Anatolia, Turkey, near the Taurus Mountains, between rivers that converge further downstream to create the Euphrates River.
These long-gone people, hunter/gatherers and slightly later hunter/harvesters (a primitive phase of agriculture), now called Tash Tepeler (in modern Turkic), build stone urban centers on a large scale, were completely unknown before 1992, and let me put it this way, how long ago they were:
Ancient Sumeria, cradle of civilization, where writing was invented, is closer to us than it is to the time when Gobekli Tele was thriving.
Gobekli Tepe is near halfway between the Lascaux and Chauvet cave paintings and us.
The basis for the human era calendar, more or less, right? We'd be on year 12025.
When archaeologists express that very same concept, they widely use 12025 BP (Before Present).
In 1913, Stalin, Hitler and Sigmund Freud all lived in the central part of Vienna.
That could make for a very interesting sitcom.
Coca-Cola: Founded 1888
Nintendo: Founded 1889
Dracula, by Bram Stoker: Published 1897
It would have been historically accurate for the vampire hunters who killed Dracula to celebrate by having a Coke and playing Nintendo.
Were they still a playing card company then?
Right until 1970 when they took a hard pivot into the new-fangled tech called "Computers"
I thought they pivoted to pachinko machines before going digital
Aye, and just before that to toys
Yup!
Weren't they involved with brothels at some point?
I'm sorry, I don't know their history well though to answer that.
So playing a card game and drinking literal cocaine?
As one does
Probably something Bram Stoker did.
Don't forget Kodak & the Dracula book were apparently contemporaries too: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/22690621
1850s, possibly. Good facts tho
Scotland's first railway, the Cockenzie and Tranent waggonway, played a role in the Battle of Prestonpans (1745). The final piece of the line went out of use in the 1960s.
The Last Stand by Sabaton was describing an event that happened in 1527, the year Henry VIII was trying to get an annulment. The events of The last stand played a role in the founding of the church of England.
San Marino is so old it was founded before The Council of Nicea.
The oldest Evidence in the archeological record we have of transgender individuals is older than the oldest archaeological evidence for gay couples.
The first use of "OMG" was on a memo sent to Winston Churchill in 1917.
India and Sri Lanka were connected by a land bridge until the 1500s. The remains of which are still a tourist attraction.
The first scientific study into transgender people was published in 1896 and studies about transgender people were burnt by the Nazis. Don't ever let people say transgender people are a recent thing.
The Romance languages have been written down for so long that we can basically watch the evolution of multiple languages in real time through texts.
Oxford university was founded before what would become the Maori settled in New Zealand.
One of the last people born into (legal) Slavery in the USA died after being hit by a car in the 1970s.
It's possible that former Samurai lived to see the 20th century.
This is still happening tbf
Can you expand more on this, I'd love to know more.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/04/08/135212785/researchers-dig-up-homosexual-or-transsexual-caveman-near-prague
The last ship to (illegally) bring Africans as slaves to the United States landed in Mobile Bay in 1860. There are photographs of it.
110 human cargo on an 86 foot boat.
The last known survivor from that trip died in 1940.
The Appalachian Mountains are older than trees, dinosaurs, the Atlantic Ocean, and Pangea
Life is old there, older than the trees
Younger than the mountains, growin' like a breeze
country road.. .. take me home...
Pretty sure sharks are older than trees too
And almost certainly the oldest mountains in the solar system
There are older mountain ranges on earth than the Appalachians. The oldest on earth are likely the Barberton Mountains coming in at a whopping 3.4 billion years old.
Older than bones....
Columbus' contact resulted in a 92% loss of population in North, Central, and South America. Mexico City area only just re-reached its pre-contact population estimate in the 1960s.
"1491" is a good read.
The sheer amount of people, knowledge, and culture lost in the Americas due to European invasion and their treatment of the native peoples makes me so sad.
It is the greatest loss of human knowledge that we know of. Certainly the largest in the last 4000 years. It puts the burning of the Library of Alexandria to shame. Entire civilizations, and the sum of all their knowledge, gone. Wiped out. Practically erased from history. The Aztecs had a full writing system and a long recorded history, all burned to ash by the Spaniards just for the hell of it; only scraps remain.
From ChatGPT:
Several Indigenous civilizations in the Americas had their written records deliberately destroyed, while others relied heavily on oral knowledge that disappeared when communities were decimated. Here’s a clear breakdown of both types:
Civilizations Whose Records Were Intentionally Destroyed
Aztec (Mexica) Empire
Maya Civilization
Mixtec Civilization
Inca Empire (Tawantinsuyu)
Taíno (Caribbean)
Muisca (Colombia)
Civilizations Whose Knowledge Faded With Their Communities
These relied heavily on oral traditions or fragile local materials. When communities were devastated by disease, enslavement, and forced assimilation, their knowledge systems could not survive intact.
Mississippian Cultures (e.g., Cahokia)
Ancestral Puebloans, Hohokam, Mogollon
Wari, Tiwanaku (pre-Inca Andes)
Nahua, Zapotec, Purepecha, and many others
These groups had writing or semi-writing systems, but much of what we know today survives only in fragments because:
The Scale of Loss
Across the Americas, scholars estimate:
It truly was a civilizational-scale knowledge collapse—yet also a story of survival, because many Indigenous peoples continue to preserve, revive, and rebuild these traditions today.
Fuck ChatGPT.
Lol
Don't care
The weird part about that is that Columbus was the third expedition to the American continent from the European continent.
First was a single Irish/Celtic(?) monk in the 800s. Second was Leif Erikson and his crew of "Vikings" in the 1100-1200s. Neither one of those caused widespread disease in the Americas, despite the fact that the monk made it as far as The Great Lakes, and Leif Erickson's expedition was cut quite short with them engaging in battle with the first natives they saw, resulting in the death of Leif Erikson as well as a few of his companions.
Who was the monk?
Brendan the navigator, 6th c., but the story about "Saint Brendan's island" is not proven to be about America AFAIK. Or true. It's a legend about a blessed island that may be a religious myth.
There's a ton of legends of sailors finding a vanishing island, an island of plenty, the island of apples, that various theories have attached to the Canaries or Azores and such IINM. Saint Brendan is just one among those, so it's hard to assume it's fact.
Also, Leif Erikson was in year 1000. And there is a strong suspicion that diseases did play a big role and made it a shitshow.
Then Cortez finished the job when he explored from Florida to Texas. He also introduced wild hogs to the continent, which introduced trichinella parasites to native fauna. Truly one of the most ecologically destructive events in the past thousand years.
follow it up with "Guns, Germs, and Steel"
That is historically not accurate.
In the early 15th century (before the "discovery" of the Americas and the age of colonization), China had assembled a heavily militarized fleet that was likely bigger than all European powers' fleets combined. They used it to become the dominant maritime power of their time, bringing India, South Asia and Eastern Africa into their sphere of influence.
Then internal struggle and threats on their northern borders lead to a shift in policy and the fleet was recalled from further exploration to the west and dismantled - making Europe's naval expansion possible.
To provide some context and a good book to read more on this:
I wouldn't take this to mean that all or even the majority of India came under China's sphere of influence. The kingdoms of the Malabar coast acted as the gateway into India for over a millennia and were plutocratic hubs where foreign influence (Arab, European, African) was not uncommon.
In fact it was common for the kingdoms of the Malabar coast to pay tribute to multiple domestic and foreign polities to secure tax exemptions.
This was also the port through which significant trade occurred between India and the Roman Empire which led a prominent Roman (Pliny the Elder, writer of Naturalis Historia) to remark
(Source: The Golden Road by William Dalrymple)
The history of the Ming Treasure Fleet and Zhang He is absolutely fascinating and I will be reading more on it! If I may get on my soapbox, it is important for everyone to expose themselves to non Eurocentric historical narratives to arrive at a more complete and balanced worldview.
Humans got to Tasmania, Australia 20 000 years before they got to Scotland despite it being 3x the distance and featured the first time humans journeyed over the ocean.
Bananas were domesticated in New Guinea
The Maori beat Europeans to new Zealand by roughly 500 years
Considering the yellow weather warning and snow this morning in Scotland, I think I'd choose walking to Tasmania as well.
I'm scared to ask what a yellow weather warning in Scotland is, must mean it's pishing down?
Pishing down, with snow!
It wasn't much, but enough to make traveling stressful and idiots slide all over the place.
Yellow warning is our lowest level warning.
As someone who's seen snow up close once, it seems kind of cool. Like turning your commute into a rally stage
It's fun until you realize most people don't have the driving skills necessary for that.
We get about 3 months a year of snow where I live (and 5 months of below freezing. Used to be a proper 5 months of snow not 25 short years ago but climate change has shifted that noticeably) the snow is absolutely magical and I can't imagine living somewhere that doesn't get it. Yes it makes a mess of commutes and drivers who don't know how to drive in snow (literally just drive like a grandma, and of course make sure you have "all season" tires not those touring tires that are the default) and yeah whatever snow accumulates on the sidewalk and driveways you need to clear off, but you just do what you gotta do and appreciate the wonderland the snow turns the world into
Early humans out of Africa walked along the south Asian coasts, so Tasmania makes sense it its path was warmer than Scotland. Also, there were land bridges available near Australia that aren't present today.
We can't possibly know that since Homo Erectus bones have been found on Crete. They could have island-hopped there from Greece, or they could have built a boat/raft.
Prior to their win in 2016, the Chicago Cubs hadn't won a world series since before the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
That's a good one. I should really learn more about the Ottoman Empire.
Did 1899 skip December for some reason?
Edit: Or do you mean the last surviving person, or longest-lived person, born in the 1800's?
Every 1899 years there's a leap month
She was the last surviving person born before 1900. I corrected my original post to clarify my intent.
In this vein,
In July 1938, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave a speech at Gettysburg to mark the 75th anniversary of the battle. 25 veterans from the original battle attended. They were filmed, on movie film, walking in the parade.
(This vignette opens the Ken Burns documentary)
I've personally seen behavior from cats and bears that appear to contradict your last statement but only anecdotal.
Last statement feels presumptuous
The Battle of Thermopylae where king Leonidus and his "300 spartans" (it was actually a few thousand of a coalition force) held off the Persian invasion of Greece.
The plan was to use the narrow mountain path to pit a few of tgeir well trained soldiers against a few of Persias rank and file. The idea being a few well trained soldiers could take out a lot more rank and file if they didnt have battle tactics to worry about.
What caused Leonidus to lose that battle is an alternate route through the mountains that let the Persians flank the Spartans and probably totally destroy them.
What's mind blowing is this was hundreds year old history when Rome tried the same thing.
This one spot is famous for losing battles and ancient people loved choosing this battleground and then losing
Ah classic mistake, building up defenses on a choke point only to realize it's not the only entrance to your base and now zerglings are eating your SCVs.
Fell victim to one of the classic blunders...
Never take on a Sicilian when pizza is on the line
Also, phalanx v short swords just lose as soon as the formation breaks a tiny bit, there's uneven terrain or open flanks. Up close long pikes don't do anything and the gladius goes stabby stabby.
Should be noted that it was a few thousand initially. When they found out they were being flanked they sent away most of the other soldiers. So it was just the Spartans and one other contingent, 700 Thespians.
When the Barbarian leaves but the Bard stays. ;)
Isaac Newton was the Master of the Mint. Back then, issues with counterfeiting or diluting the coinage was an issue. He personally went in disguise to bars to track down these counterfeiters. Who were then executed.
He is also the inventor of all the ridges around the edge of coins, because at the time it made coins almost impossible to forge.
They added ridges so that the circumference couldn't be shaved off and melted into more coins
Back then, the point of the coins was to represent that they contained a certain weight of metal, without forcing people to weigh them out all the time.
From what I've heard, the position was given to him as a sinecure — but Newton, being Newton, took it seriously.
Land of the free lol
Britain's Royal Mint of course. The US didn't exist in the 17ᵗʰ century and the US Mint got created 90 years after this.
Shit, you're right. I was conflating Isaac Newton with the kite-zappy guy with the fart fetish. I'll leave the original post unedited as a testament to my biggotry.
yes. Isaac Newton, the famous American
Europeans used to make a drink out of Egyptian mummies.
Here's some more information on it:
https://historycanthide.substack.com/p/europeans-ate-egyptian-mummies-for
Also paint
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_brown
How else do you cure a cough?
There's a sar-cough-agus joke in here somewhere.
sarcophagus in your œsophagus..... hmmm..... so egyptians did master deepthroating
AI could never write such a thing
Foul.
This is more of a hypothesis than a fact, but there are credible claims that Henry VIII suffered from the so-called McLeod syndrome and the associated Kell-positive blood type, which is a rare recessive genetic variant affecting the X gene and which he may have inherited from his maternal great grandmother (Jaquetta of Luxemburg) who may have carried this gene. The syndrome would explain both the high mortality among the second-born children that Henry VIII had with his many wives (and similar issues of other male relatives of Jaquetta) and whose pregnancies often ended in miscarriage and (male) children who did not survive infancy, as well as Henry VIII's early mental decline.
Perhaps not really mind blowing, but I think it's crazy that the historical events of that time and the "Elizabethan era" that followed might have been shaped in this way by a single occurrence of a specific genetic disorder.
That's really interesting, thank you.
I guess when you're seriously inbred like the royal families of Europe, the risk of recessive genetic disorders manifesting is far higher.
Should have picked up the Pure Blooded dynastic trait.
there actually is a reference to "Kodak pictures" in Dracula
Read it 3 times and that never clicked! Nice one.
That was a snappy pun!
George Washington's Continental Army had a vaccine mandate.
Heroin was first synthesized in 1874. It's older than 13 US states. Sitting Bull and heroin existed at the same time. In 1898 it was sold by Bayer as a recreational drug under the brand name Heroin. Frederick Nietzsche was around for the heroin trade.
I've seen Bayer heroin tins in a few museums and was glad I lived in an era where you had to go to the work of calling your friend's brother Todd to take you to Corey's house to get high, which was way more trouble than it was worth.
Custer's Last Stand happened while the Brooklyn Bridge was being built.
Construction for the bridge occured between 1869-1883.
Custers last stand happened 1876.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn_Bridge?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Little_Bighorn?wprov=sfla1
Some other stuff: Mamoths were still alive when the Pyramids were being built.
the funny thing about Custer is that he was warned about the ambush but his hubris was just too much
also it is rumored among those that have heard direct stories from people that were there was that it was a woman that made the killing blow on him and they probably scalped and then dismembered him and most of his men, and thats why nobody found him
Earlier in his Army career, Custer attended the Confederate surrender at Appomattox (as a Union officer). He decided to keep the white dish towel that Lee used as a flag of truce (aka the true last and final Confederate flag), as a souvenir. Custer's wife bequeathed that dish towel to the Smithsonian quite a bit later.
Recently I read a comment on here saying that French was older than English. I also randomly remembered that I learned that several countries in Europe are actually younger than the US. Italy feels like it’s older than the US but the country wasn’t unified till the 19th century.
Anyway I’m getting sidetracked. The point is that I decided to look into when the French started regulating language and discovered that English is older than French.
Now, Vulgar Latin, from which French and other romance languages originated is older than Old English. However, since it’s the source of the other Romance languages which aren’t French, I’d say it doesn’t count as French.
The oldest Old French we have is from 842AD, but old English fragments are as old as the 5th century.
Early modern french seems to date back to the 1500s (“Paris Latin” was still a thing during this time), but Early Modern English predates 1500 in the beginning of the vowel shift.
Now the end of the English vowel shift probably happened after the Académie française was first established; however, common people in France at the time did not speak this formalized French. Furthermore, the work of the Academy was ended and the academy abolished during the Revolution. It was only after 1816 that the academy was restored and the idea of having a single unified language was supported by the French government. Late modern English (current English) was established by that point.
Anyway long story short, English is older than French if only by a century or two through their histories. This might not seem like a big surprising time difference, but it was a bit of a shock to me.
Interesting. I think the real question about "is it the same language?" is whether modern readers can still understand it.
For early modern English (think Shakespeare) then most modern speakers can. You'd probably have a basic understanding from reading, although missing some nuance. A lot of the jokes in Shakespeare come out better when they're performed, so you'd probably have a better understanding of it in the theatre.
For middle English (think Chaucer) then you'd struggle a bit. Vocabulary and grammar have changed a lot. Might have a few passages in the Canterbury Tales that make sense unaided, but in general, not really.
For early English (think Beowulf) ha ha, fat chance. Even scholars of early languages don't understand everything in it, there's a few words the meaning of which are lost, but in general about one word in fifty even looks familiar and it's probably a false friend.
So I'd probably put English at 'about 500 years old'.
How far back modern French speakers can understand French would be interesting. I can understand a fair amount of Latin from my knowledge of Spanish; and unlike eg. William the Bastard invading England and introducing a whole pile of new vocabulary, the French have the advantage of never having been invaded by the French ;-)
Some of Shakespeare's puns actually don't work unless one uses the pronunciations of his time period.
I always found it super interesting that you can sort of see the class divide in English based on the French and Germanic roots, especially when it comes to food and farming. For example:
Cow = Germanic (Kuh), Beef = French (Boeuf)
Hen = Germanic (Henne/Huhn), Poultry = French (Poulet)
Sheep = Germanic (Schaf), Mutton = French (Mouton)
Wheat = Germanic (Weizen), Flour = French (Farine/Fleur in old French)
It's not all words of course, but there are quite a few ones where you can see that the people who grew the food used the Germanic, and the people who ate the food used the French.
Wheat flour was actually historically spelled flower and used to be the same word.
Damn I never noticed that, that is pretty interesting
I bet those Old English fragments were way easier to understand for speakers of Old Saxon that for a 1500s English speaker.
Yeah, that’s definitely true
I realized in like 4th grade that I could parse various Latin languages okay just from knowing some Spanish. I thought old English would be the same or easier… nope. Beowulf still looks more like Icelandic than English
This is a very arbitrary way of looking at the problem and you won't see serious linguists claiming this sort of stuff. Latin branching off into a variety of languages and Old English not branching off doesn't change anything about the relationship between Latin and French as opposed to OE vs. Modern English. They're a "parent" and "child" language, and whehter they have any "siblings" is a consequence of their geographical distribution (occupy more space > changes in language not reaching all areas equally > divergence into dialects and languages). Besides, OE is also a parent of Scots, so you actually can't count it as an unambiguous ancestor of Modern English.
Comparing a district in Paris actively using Latin and English undergoing the vowel shift is mixing up internal and external linguistic phenomena.
All the stuff about Académie is not relevant for determining the identity of a language. Institutions tend to have only surface-level effect on language (spelling, prescribing some words, etc., hardly anything that can create or end a language).
Fair points, I’m not a linguist. I mostly was just going off the dates I could find for old-early-middle-modern periods for each language.
The end of the vowel shift was what seemed to separate early-modern from late-modern English, and the establishment of the academy marks the beginning of modern regulations on the French language. As such I thought those were good enough markers to compare the current versions with each other.
Anyway good point about old English also being the source of a language that isn’t English. And yeah I mean trying to gauge the age of a language is bound to be arbitrary since languages don’t abruptly change. Kind of a ship of Theseus situation. At what point did one language become another? Are they the same because we call them all English or are they different because old English and modern English don’t appear to be the same language?
"English is older than French" is a weird way to put it. "English spelling was standardised a century before French spelling" might be a better. After all, both languages existed the whole time but are named differently by periods in history for convenience. There's no way to say "Middle English ended in 1658" for example.
If you look at countries by their constitutions then the US is the second oldest country behind just San Marino.
I like how languages evolve, but recently they've domesticated themselves. But languages like English are more like free range language.
Men’s clothing keep getting shorter and shorter in the late Middle Ages/early modern period to the point where at court, their dicks could be seen. The solution was cod pieces, some of which were elaborate, bejeweled, erect penises. This trend ended in England when Elizabeth I fully came into her role as “the virgin queen”
The way you phrased that, it's like the queen wouldn't fuck so dicks went out of style.
Did someone say codpiece?
Trees are not that related to each other. Woody plants evolved multiple times over earths history. And while e.g. beeches are closely related to oaks, they are more closely related to strawberries than to e.g. ashes. Black locust tree is more closely related to beans or peas than to birches (which are again related to oaks and beeches). Apples are even more closely related to strawberries than to oaks. That broke my mind during Covid. All conifers are somewhat closely related though.
edit: typo
There's a village in Germany that was a neolithic cannibal slaughterhouse. They killed and ate about 20 people a year for 50 years.
Herxheim
Link not working:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herxheim_(archaeological_site)
Also, HOLY SHIT!
Fixed it thanks. Did not we didn't need exit characters for links! :)
Sounds like a good name for a metal band
Based on the popularity of the genre in that region, I'd be shocked if there wasn't one already.
e: I was correct
I'll have to check them out and see if they're any good
They're a bit sludgy tempo-wise for my taste, but not bad.
Hildegard von Bingen was a nun in medieval times that used nature to heal. We are still studying and rework her book on natural plants and how to heal with them. It seems like some plants dont exist anymore
Edit: she also was the first abbess leading the first female only monestary that took in especially girls from poor peasents who would otherwise only ended up with a force marriage or rape
There's a bardcore artist that goes by Hildegard von Blingin. Apparently the OG von Bingen was also something of a notable musician.
I found out about Hildegard from a book called Listen to the Music that I got for my 2 year old
Crikey I wouldn't have thoughts plants would have gone extinct so easy! interesting fact
Have you heard about the plant Siphilim? Apparently it was fairly prevalent and very highly valued in ancient times, but was lost by the middle ages.
Never heard of it, that's one for googling thanks
Silphium
Could be that many medicinal plants are considered weeds or have very specific habitats that have been built over.
Oh yeah its real. Romans used something to spice their meals that apperently grew all over italy greece and anatolia. Today we cant find any plant matching the looks nore the taste. But it must have been really good
She wrote some bangers. “O Viridissima Virga” slaps.
Paramount Pictures was created 1 month before Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated.
And look at them now... Scrubbing their backloga of anything that paints Nazis in a bad light.
Wouldn't want to upset the new owners ;)
Gaumont was created in 1895.
And this time period was supposedly The Enlightnement, which jack shit of was taught in the school I went to as a kid. Sounds cool as fuck.
https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/72331-abraham-lincoln-vampire-hunter
Now I'm just imagining Nintendo in the early 1900s attempting to sue every other card manufacturing company for copyright infringement.
I once turned down a gangbang that would have been me and 6 girls because I felt a little hung over... That was 25 years ago, and Im still not over how monumentally fucking stupid that was.
Could have been six child support cases... Avoided!
Thats a good one, but I usually try to sooth myself by thinking it was a ploy to steal my kidneys... YEah, they were after my kidneys... They were after my kidneys... Im going to be crying about that one on my deathbed lol
Bro, I think they were definitely gonna steal your kidneys! Good job weasling out of it, bullet dodged!
Walgreens the pharmacy that was ran by the family of the same name made their fortune selling Alcohol during the prohibition era. If you were well off your doctor would write you a prescription for booze which they would happily fill. They grew over thirty times their original size during this time.
and now private equity is going to burn the candle at both ends until all the stores are spirit halloweens
Vikings generally did a lot of trading and in some cases just kinda started to focus on trade instead of raiding taking advantage of the width and breadth of the Norse world. It wouldn't be impossible for goods from North America to be sold in a Syrian market, though I don't know if that did happen but we have found Norse Chainmail in an Inuit grave cache.
The last American Civil War pensioner passed away in May 2020.
Her father served. He fathered her at 82, in 1930.
Possible... But unlikely in practice. Male sperm starts decreasing in quantity and quality after 30.
And the timing means they still had literal milkmen...
I pretty much ignore any of the claims in this thread that hinge on someone being really old. There's just no way to tell if that's really true, the older the people supposedly get the more likely it is that they faked (or just didn't know) their real age, e.g. by using a relative's paperwork or telling an official that they're 40 instead of 50. BTW the "blue areas" are probably fake, too.
Danny Trejo and Anne Frank were alive at the same time.
Fuck off no way
Edit: 81 YEARS OLD!?!?
Yeah. Black and white pictures really fuck with time.
Chuds shouting with a straight face like "America was better in the 1950s" to a old black woman who had constant death threats and couldn't even own a bank account.
Another one I found:
Dick Van Dyke (still very much alive!) was alive at the same time as Annie Oakley, Harry Houdini, and Claude Monet.
The last mammoths died out at roughly the same time as the Giza pyramids were built. Albeit they being in the Arctic and being shrunk by insular dwarfism, had the Egyptians traveled to Wrangels island and captured some they could have had them as work animals while building the pyramids.
This mean that the movie 10,000 BC accurately portraited at least one thing correctly.
Terrorism used to be cool. It wasn't about killing as many people as possible, but was aimed at wealth and wealthy
We could bring this back.
Uuuh... When was that? Got some examples?
Communists, factory workers, Union strikes... All of Irelands history. The Robin Hood cartoon is about local terrorism as well 🤷♂️
Narodniks and Mark Twain
WWi's end and WWII's start were 21 years apart. This is not what it seemed like to me at all, I thought they were like 8 years apart or something.
it always seemed to be like they were further. 21 years between the 2 most brutal wars is insane.
I remember in history class in school we learned that the victory babies of 1919 were just old enough to fight in WW2
And the ww2 victory babies were sent to Nam
My grandfather enlisted at 18 to fight in WWII. He was the second youngest of 13 siblings. His oldest brother died around age 18 in the flu pandemic that was going on during WWI. My reference point for the space between the wars has always been the time it took to have 13 children.
And WW2 lasted 50% longer
Greenland sharks have incredibly long lifespans due to their large size (6m+), environment, and very slow metabolism estimated up to 500 years. There could be a shark that is still alive today that was alive during Shakespeare's life and the switch to the Gregorian calendar.
Human beings have been around, in their current state of intellectual capacity for well over 100,000 years.
Looking at all that we've accomplished in just the last 10,000 years of known history...it is not unreasonable to assume that we could have accomplished just as much several times over already...but for whatever reason the knowledge of those accomplishments have been repeatedly erased from history.
Not this "erased from history" crap again. There was no grand ancient civilization that existed and was wiped out before the Sumerians came around 4,000 BCE. You know how we know? Because 1) there would be archaeological evidence and there is none 2) they would have had to invent agriculture and that would've left evidence behind via genetics in modern plants of human-guided cultivation 3) they would have used all the same energy resources we have, so timber, peat, coal, oil, etc. and that would have significantly altered the environment in such a way as to leave a record - not to mention it would mean there would be no coal or oil left for us and 5) we have archaeological evidence of early humans during this time - and they were hunter/gatherers leading basic subsistence lives as evidenced by the wear on their bones and teeth and the radioactive signatures in their bones of what they ate.
So why did it take almost all of the last 100,000 years for civilization to happen? Because without the stability provided by agriculture, doing anything more than surviving is really fucking hard. Not to mention the repeated ice ages and other things that made long term progress impossible.
Counter: Göbekli Tepe exists. :)
But no, it would be ridiculous to posit that vast cultures rose and fell and were utterly erased from history.
Yes, which as far as we can tell was a purely ritual site with no signs of habitation, no burials. Even "pre-civilization" folks were capable of amazing works, but that doesn't meet the definition of a "civilization" in the classic sense. It's probably the best indication of what humans could build pre-agriculture, but everything points to it being an upper-limit.
BTW, that doesn't take anything away from the site, and in fact makes it more remarkable.
We use terms like "stone age" and "iron age" because those are materials that lasted long enough for us to see them. Wood, fabric, rope, animal hide, many other materials don't last that long so we have much less information about what people were doing with them.
That's actually not true. Even steel girders will dissolve to rust within a few hundred years, if left to the elements. Fossils are a 1 in a million occurrence that require precise conditions in order to happen. In conditions that are less than ideal, there would be zero evidence of anything we have built in the last few thousand years without constant maintenance.
Only stone endures long enough to last longer than that, and we tend to harvest stone to build new things, every time we find old things made out of it. So everything that would have otherwise lasted, could have easily been recycled so many times over, that it's completely unrecognizable now. Except for the few, rare structures that we see today, and have little to no explanation for, other than speculation based on vague 3rd person accounts.
You know that the rate of discoveries & innovations accelerates in history, to the point that the last century was more knowledge created than all of humanity before? Exactly.
Can't invent much if all you have is a sharp stone and very limited understanding of nature.
I'm gonna piggy back mine on this one. Before the invention of writing, the only new thoughts you could ever encounter, were from the people you would meet face to face.
To further this, there probably was a long time before humans developed sophisticated language. Imagine what a game changer that must have been. It is still engraved in our cultural memory in the form of the wizard doing magic by simply saying certain words.
Homo Erectus was the longest living human ever, lasting about 1.5 million years before going extinct about 115,000 years ago. Their bones have been found on Crete, which means that they likely had the intelligence to walk out of Africa and build a boat or raft for island-hopping from Greece. However, even building a raft requires a sophisticated language. So our ancestors have been conversing for a very long time. They also harnessed fire and invented cooking, so Homo Sapiens aren't all that special.
Happy cake day!
Thank you, cake sounds like a good idea 😊
Proto human ancestors were also far more capable than we give them credit for. There is archaeological evidence that, possibly as far back as 2.5 million years ago, human ancestors were harvesting specific types of stone in one location before transporting it over seven miles away to a different location where it was being processed. That is vastly beyond the complexity of what most people think homosapiens were capable of only 100k years ago.
People didnt have to build a society in the exact likeness of modern humanity for it to be vastly complex and advanced in its own right
Do we know that knowledge of those accomplishments has been repeatedly erased from history? That seems like a bit of a leap.
We don't. But I find it hard to believe that not one person in 90,000 years of human history, never came up with a single advancement similar to the ones that happen all the time now. Our brains were just as developed as they are now, for that entire time.
It is inconceivable that we only started using them in any significant capacity, just recently.
Well, we did use them, but mostly for not starving to death and not getting eaten. Both of which we did very regularly anyway. Also, there were only a few thousand humans overall.
I bet there were dozens of Grugs who tamed fire and were promptly beaten to death by the rest of the tribe. Fucking conservatives, man.
We didn't have free time until agriculture and automation.
Hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers have pretty similar workloads - by many estimates, subsistence farming requires more labor, even. The advantage in subsistence farming is consistency and food preservation, allowing for larger populations, surplus, and specialization.
If you make a stone spearhead twice a month, you might not spend much time thinking of how to do it better - but if you do it for the whole village, 60 times per month, you might be spending some of that knapping time thinking about how to make it easier.
doubt
We didn't just start using our brains like that in recent time only. There may have been a few Albert Einsteins in the stone age but if they couldn't spread their ideas, then that civilization did not have that knowledge. Leather tanning and meat conservation can be discovered easily, but it has to be rediscovered every time there's a new group of 20 people, it doesn't get transfered to be improved upon over the centuries.
The problem your reasoning is missing is scale. We know you can't build the Great Pyramid if your busiest cultural center is a village of 200 people in the closest 100 km and they couldn't communicate.
And all our tech is based on improving upon something that exists. No one can conjure a microchip and a cell phone out of thin air.
Or sometimes the technology is there, but we're just not ready. For example, a very rudimentary steam engine existed in ancient Rome, and was described by others as early as 30BC. While it was highly unlikely to happen because the infrastructure/materials were limited, imagine where we'd be now if the Industrial Revolution had happened in Ancient Rome.
It also makes me wonder if there's anything around today that's considered some oddball quirk of physics that might change the world in the future when we're ready to use it.
You need steel for the industrial revolution. You can't make a steam locomotive out of bronze, first of all it's too expensive, second of all the boiler will burst before you get up enough steam to pull a train, third the crown sheet would melt. You outright need the Bessemer process to make steam engines.
Considering how much we destroyed the biosphere since the Industrial Revolution ...
The real innovation with the steam engine during the industrial revolution was metals strong enough to hold enough pressure for the engine to be capable of powering meaningful work. But the industrial revolution was initially quite slow as these labor saving devices cost significantly more than the labor they saved. It took the technology existing and the labor costing more than it would cost to implement the machinery before the industrial revolution could fully begin
@[email protected] Look into Islamic scolars, a lot of scientific discoveries done in Europe after the middle ages were made hundreds of years earlier by them. Then I guess their dark ages started, making a lot of knowledge "lost". On te other hand, you should keep in mind two things, the first is that knowledge is incremental, everything we know is built on previous knowledge. The other is that while humans were around a long time, they were not in the big numbers of today. As a consequence they didn't need farming, they could always travel further to new lands for finding food and shelter.
@[email protected]
Sharks are older than the moon
Sharks are older than polaris, the north star.
They are older than trees.
They have traveled around the milky way twice.
@[email protected] ...King Louis XIV had an anal fistula and required a doctor's attention and horrific chair that would frighten anyone, the entire court began using the tortuous device unnecessarily...
@[email protected]
Actually, that thing with Kleopatra is only to the Great Pyramid.
Cleopatra (69 BCE-30 BCE) was born well AFTER the LAST pyramid was built in 2611 BCE.
? The last pyramid in Egypt (other cultures like the Nubians built their own) was built by Ahmose I in the mid to late 16th c. BCE, IINM. Not sure what you're thinking of for 2611 BCE, even the Giza pyramids are within the hundred years after that.
My Google research shows the Egyptian pyramids being built 2589 - 2611 BCE.
So you mean the oldest pyramid, not the last? The pyramids in Egypt were built starting around ~2660 BCE up until ~1530 BCE, with the 3 in Giza through 2600 to 2530 BCE, roughly. All dates give or take maybe 10 years. The dates you have would likely be a range for the first of the 3 pyramids in Giza.
But ~500 years is less than ~2000 years.
Incorrect.
Cleopatra lived from ~70BCE to ~30BCE.
The iPhone was released in September of 2007, slightly over 2037 years after her death.
The Great Pyramid of Giza, tomb of Khufu, was built ~2600BCE, making it some 2530 years old when Cleopatra was born. So the statement "Cleopatra was closer in time to the iPhone than the construction of the Great Pyramid" is correct. But, the Great Pyramid is the largest and heaviest, but not the oldest, of the ancient Egyptian pyramids. So, the same can be said for the dozen or so pyramids built before, to include the Bent and Red pyramids of Dahshur, the Meidum pyramid, and Djoser's stepped pyramid.
You've also got 500 years after the Great Pyramid as well, which covers the rest of the Giza necropolis (with the possible exception of the Sphinx), right on up to Pepi II with room to spare. There are some pyramids newer than ~2000BCE but they're smaller, not as well built, most are ruined.
What's wild is how short the pyramid construction craze was. Both pyramids ad Dahshur and the pyramid of Meidum, and their complexes, were built during the reign of Sneferu, partially simulteneously. Djedefre and Khafre were brothers, so they're pyramids were constructed either simultaneously or in very quick succession. The entire Giza necropolis including the two largest pyramids ever built was done start to finish in approximately 85 years. One human could have lived to watch the whole thing. The Great Pyramid itself was built in 20 years. And they did it with human muscle and copper chisels.
If we go to something like the discovery of electricity or the founding of the United States, we can say without qualifications that event was closer to Cleopatra's life than the construction of anything we would call an "Ancient Egyptian Pyramid."
What about the Not-as-great pyramid?
Which is all of them; the Great Pyramid of Giza is the largest pyramid ever built by man, and I'm pretty sure it was the single heaviest structure built by humans until certain hydroelectric dams built in the 20th century.
The second largest pyramid is only a couple hundred feet away, Khafre's pyramid. Khafre's pyramid is the middle of the three Giza pyramids, it's the one that has some of its casing stones left on the top. It is somewhat smaller, the base isn't as wide and it's at a slightly shallower angle, so it isn't as high. To partially compensate for this, it was built uphill from Khufu's pyramid to hide the size difference somewhat, and since antiquity several courses of stones have been removed from the peak of Khufu's pyramid, slightly shortening it, but Khufu's pyramid still stands higher above sea level than Khafre's pyramid.
The third Giza pyramid, Menkaure's pyramid, is much smaller, though about a third of its height was cased in granite rather than limestone. Something incredibly stupid happened to Menkaure's sarcophagus. You've probably seen a picture of what's left of Khufu's sarcophagus, a plain, partially ruined granite box with the lid entirely missing. Khafre's sarcophagus is intact, almost mysteriously so, it was set into the floor and the lid had a locking mechanism that apparently wasn't defeated, yet the lid stands open. Menkaure's pyramid used to contain a beautifully carved basalt sarcophagus, but in the 1800s the British decided to take it back to England, and then the ship wrecked and it was lost to sea.
Fun fact II: there was a period of earth's infancy where the seas were full of iron. Green in colour, mostly from volcanic activity.
Then up pop some photosynthetic bacteria who start farting out oxygen. The oceans start to rust. The rust falls to sediment and the farting contines. The ocean depletes of iron and the farting contines. The oxygen starts to fill up the sky and the farting continues. Some say it still goes on to this day. But what happened to the iron?
Well not uluru specifically but that's what Australia's distinctive colouration is. Ancient fart rusted sea iron
We only understand about 15% of the Universe, and we're probably wrong about much of that. For instance, we know dark matter is pervasive throughout the Universe, and we don't have the slightest idea of what it is.
Also, one of the leading theories of why we haven't met other intelligent alien cultures is because there is one major ancient, highly advanced race that is so devoted to being the only race on the Universe, that every time they find any evidence of another intelligent race, they travel there and extinguish them entirely.
It is already too late to save us. We have been beaming all sorts of electronic signals into the universe in every direction for decades, and sooner or later, it will reach THEM.
Bit of a nitpick, we don't know that the dark matter is pervasive throughout the universe. What we observe is that galaxies and galaxy clusters are held together too strongly to be explained by our current theory of gravity, and the motions of galaxies within clusters do not match the gravitational forces that are known to act on them from observed matter - The Milky Way for instance is spinning fast enough for the stars on the edges to be flung off into intergalactic space.
One solution to this contradictory observation is that there is bunch of extra mass we can't see (dark matter) that is holding the galaxies and clusters together. Every experiment designed to detect dark matter has failed, and more serious work is going into adjusting theories of gravity as a result. However no adjusted theory has arisen that can explain every observation either, so physics is a bit lost at the moment.
Valid. Love the extra context. Thanks.
Another solution would be gravity being a push force instead of pull force - google " la sage edwards theory"
Isn't gravity not a force at all according the to theory of relativity?
I always sort of vaguely wonder if we actually are surrounded by evidence of intelligent life, we just don't know how to interpret or even detect it. Sort of like one of those isolated Amazonian tribes surrounded by wifi signals.
I think it's either something like that, or we haven't found anything because the universe is just too big and there simply isn't any way to get around it, no matter how advanced a species becomes. Like FTL travel/wormholes/whatever just isn't possible. Which is not a fun explanation but Occam's Razor and all that.
Relevant xkcd to the first point.
https://xkcd.com/638/
My son is taking an astronomy course with a highly regarded astronomer, and she believes there are many, many intelligent civilizations in our galaxy alone. They are just too far apart. A galaxy may look small in an photo with lots of galaxies, but in reality, a single galaxy is so huge as to be almost mind-boggling in itself, without even considering the wider Universe.
I'm not an astronomer, but IIRC, our electronic signals don't make it particularly far out of the solar system until they merge with the background noise. So I guess we are safe for now.
They've been evolving and developing for a billion years, and eliminating entire civilizations is their religion. They long ago figured out how to filter the background noise for important electronic waves. The one that discovered it is now a highly regarded saint.
Good thing we've been speedrunning killing ourselves off before they get here 🤪 TRUMP 2027
"Take me to your leader."
"Gladly."
What evidence is there to support this theory?
Absolutely none.
That is a variance on the dark forest theory. It has flaws just like any of the proposed solutions to the Fermi paradox.
I think it's more likely that either life getting to the point of space travel is incredibly rare and the universe is just so vast they don't run into each other or they destroy their planet before they get very far (like we're doing).
It is not just vast in distance, it is also vast in time.
Imagine an advanced civilization; it rises and is space fairing for 30million years. Something (who knows what) happens and they either go extinct; or render themselves unable to travel in space/use technology.
30 million years; it seems so long from our point of view; but that 30 million years could have ended a million years ago and we would be none the wiser. Their signals faded to nothingness the machines all broken and cold. And still that is a blip on the scale of the universe.
This is the theory I like best. There have been plenty of civilizations throughout the Universe, it's just that very few emerge at the same time, and we've never had another one emerge close enough for us to notice.
That theory says more about humans than anything else
I did a poop once. A very big one. It was a pivotal moment in the history of my ass.
Did you feel lighter afterwards, like a great weight had been taken from you?
I felt as triumphantly buoyant as the monster turd which not only cleared the water line but nearly touched the seat
Most of school going humans are aware of the concept of force and motion.
We have vague ideas of the laws that govern them roughly 400 years after their discovery by Newton.
On the basis of that, one can form a rough estimate that it would take humans another 30-40 years to assimilate quantum mechanics and special relativity.
No you can't, because Special Relatively and Quantum Mechanics are inherently more complicated and harder to learn.
what would you estimate the time to be ? For school going people.
We can see the relationships between forces and motion in our everyday lives so we naturally internalise a model of how they work. Newton didn’t actually ‘discover’ the force of gravity, for example, he developed calculus to be able to extrapolate out from the force we see when we drop something on Earth to the planets themselves.
Quantum mechanics is completely different, there is nothing we see in our everyday lives which allows us to naturally build up a mental model of how quarks interact, or the way that photons propagate. It is only through dedicated study, a solid grasp of very advanced maths, and painstaking experimentation that we can figure out how those things work.
So I don’t think school going people will ever have the same inherent understanding of it that we do of forces like gravity.
Just read about Doggerland or the Messinian salinity crysis and then think of climate change.
The song Black Velvet is actually a tribute to Elvis
Your mind-blowing scale of history fact is a tribute to Elvis was written in the 1980's?
Everybody already beat me to the cool ones.
There are more trees on Earth than there are stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.
Cleopatra lived closer to the discovery of electricity than To the building of the pyramids
That's a less impressive version of one of the two facts that are specifically not asked for :-)