History Memes

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

Sharks are older than the North Star. (450mya vs. 70mya)

Sharks are older than trees. (450mya vs 390mya)

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

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.

During the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, friendly Native American tribes gathered upon request, hoisted american flags, and waved white flags as volunteer cavalry gunned them down leaving not even women or children alive. Chief Black Kettle, a prominent "Peace Chief" had managed to secure multiple treaties before this point and worked towards coexistence, and his efforts were repaid with blood as his people were killed in front of him after almost 20 years of dedicating himself to diplomacy. He survived only to die at yet another massacre in 1868.

During the same time period was the US Civil War from 1861 to 1865, except that's wrong! The US Civil War dated back to the Bleeding Kansas period of the 1850s, with the Kansas Nebraska Act establising two new territories and invalidating the Missouri Compromise that didn't allow slavery below a line of latitude, as well as the creation of "popular sovereignty" to allow the residents to vote on whether or not to allow Slavery, which led to antiracist freestaters and "Jayhawkers" being brought in by the Emigrant Aid Co. to fight slavery, followed by racist "Bushwackers" being brought in by former Senator Atchinson to shift the political landscape, as well as siege towns, kill abolitionists, and cause general chaos. While neither side was officially a state with an army, you can see how these battles that destroyed towns easily continued into the civil war period.

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

In 1913, Stalin, Hitler and Sigmund Freud all lived in the central part of Vienna.

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.

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.

I did a poop once. A very big one. It was a pivotal moment in the history of my ass.

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.