History Memes

The song Black Velvet is actually a tribute to Elvis

• 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.

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.

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

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

• 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.

I like this one (not mine):

• The samurai were abolished as a caste in Japanese society during the Meiji restoration in 1867
• The first ever fax machine, the "printing telegraph", was invented in 1843
• Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865

=> There was a 22 year window in which samurais could have sent a fax to Abraham Lincoln.

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.

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