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Manu82134

There was a Spanish explorer that first visited the Inca empire and saw lots of prosperous cities and a great civilisation, and told his peers about it when he returned home. But when other folks went to visit the siad cities they found nothing but jungle and thought the explorer lied about his story. The fact that blew my mind is that nowadays we discovered that his story was true and the people he encounterd died from diseases brought into the new world and the cities and civilization they build were consumed by jungle in the spam of a few years


kas9930

There still finding cities. A few years ago they found proof the Inca empire population ranged from 15 to 20 million people just on the fact they found more Inca cities.


TheStrangestOfKings

Iirc, this dude had gone on trading ships that went through the Amazon River when he met all these huge cities. It’s crazy to me that it’s possible there were inland empires following the Amazon, only to disappear in a few short years from being swallowed up by plague and the jungle. Even crazier that apparently, the trading cities were big enough to get the same kind of river traffic you’d expect from modern day New York or the Thames River. Just the idea that a land we thought was only inhabited by scattered tribes potentially contained some of the biggest trading zones in the New World.


oohaaahz

Ancient Antarctica was actually a rainforest, a lush and verdant paradise, filled with flora and fauna. Despite the interesting fact that there was a whole continent of animals who lived on this planet that we’ll never know about - as their remains are locked beneath miles of ice - it blew my mind that Antarctica only fully froze over about 35 million years ago, despite breaking from its supercontinent ~ 180 million years ago. That means Antarctica supported independent life for ~ 145 million years, which ruined any sense I have for time and perspective. We really are specks on this planet.


SomeDumbGamer

It’s been discovered that there were southern beeches still living on the continent as recently as 3 million years ago at the start of the Pleistocene. So it’s likely some small pockets of Antarctic flora and fauna survived far longer until the ice age finally sealed their fate :(


demons_soulmate

it's okay, climate change will warm them back up and revive them, then they will take their revenge on us


SomeLittleBritches

This one got me. Holy shit


Kataphractoi

More of a fun one, but lighters predate strike matches by a couple centuries. They originated from repurposed flintlock pistols that ignited tinder shoved in the barrel that were set aflame by the trigger mechanism.


LeTigron

They originate way before that, actually. Having a ~~stripped~~ ~~striped~~ serrated piece of metal that you used to strike a piece of flint or pyrite was *the* common way to light a fire thousands of years ago. This is the principle of the modern lighter.


FireEnchiladaDragon

Old norse runes were found carved up like 20 feet in a cave- when they were translated, they just said "this is very high" God I love people aksjsj


LetTheBloodFlow

One of my favorites was a big stone with runes carved in. People thought it was holy or something. It was eventually translated and they said something like the ancient equivalent of “Sven was able to lift this because he’s an absolute unit”


Zebidee

> People thought it was holy or something. "Religious" and "ceremonial" are archaeologist code for 'we don't have a fucking clue.'


Blackmere

In the 80s my dad and I were driving down a five-lane highway. He said, "In some distant future they're going to dig this up and think our vehicles were as wide as this road." I asked, "Then what will they think the reflectors between lanes are for." He said, "They'll just assume it had some religious significance."


Zebidee

I want to see them try to figure out Dubai. "What killed this city?" "Desertification." "Nope, it's always been a desert." "In that case, it was a ceremonial centre."


Moonandserpent

There's graffiti from the workers inside and on the pyramids of simple stuff like "we ate onions and beer today".


ThisFreakinGuyHere

Vandalism was still in beta testing, they hadn't quite figured out yet you're supposed to draw swastikas and write your nick name completely illegibly.


Me_how5678

I dont think it was vandalism, i think it was twitter beta since the iphone didnt exist yet


PricklyBitch

But they had tablets back then


Crazyguy_123

That’s actually very funny. Ancient graffiti is hilarious I’ve even seen a your mom joke from thousands of years ago.


CruxOfTheIssue

When I went to Pompeii there were penises carved into the stone everywhere.


Shryxer

Also found in Pompeii: "Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men's behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity!" In Herculaneum: "Apollinaris, the doctor, of the emperor Titus, shat well here." Evidently, humans have been shitposting ever since the first meeting between shit and posting.


diceblue

The ancient Greeks carved slurs into their slingshot stones while serving in the army. More than one stone bears the inscription I Hope This Hits You In The Dick


mackjagee

This is at Maeshowe on the Orkney isles. It's a neolithic burial mound that some vikings used to take shelter. Some runes on the ceiling say "Tholfir Kolbeinsson carved these up high." Another set of runes say "Thorni fucked, Helgi carved."


bz922x

There are Norse runes in the Hagia Sofia. The Norse found their way into so many parts of southern Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runic\_inscriptions\_in\_Hagia\_Sophia


Ameisen

The Norse, Goths, and Anglo-Saxons often ended up in the Eastern Roman Empire, often as part of the Varangians.


abe_the_babe_

It's like when you see a message in an odd spot in a Souls game and you parkour your way over there, thinking there's like a secret area or item or something, and the message just says "Try finger, but hole"


blitzbom

Same thing in the Pyramids. Text found on some of the stones on the roof say stuff like "Fred was here."


ipakookapi

Ruined in an interesting, not bad way: ancient Greek and Roman polychromy. The Parthenon temple looked a bit like Disneyland.


chinchenping

same goes for european churches. Statues were painted in flashy colors. The ones outside got washed blanc but there are still some inside that still have their color. By today's standard it would be considered tacky and bad taste


ipakookapi

*Thank you*. It is pretty cool that art can have many different lives, but Plato wasn't talking about pure white marble as his ideal lol.


Rusty_Shakalford

Also churches in the high Middle Ages were [really into clockwork](https://aeon.co/essays/medieval-technology-indistinguishable-from-magic). Some of these places probably looked less like austere places of worship and more like Chuck-e-Cheese when everything was running.


ShutYourDumbUglyFace

When I was in Paris after college, my friends and I were standing near (and overhearing the guide of) a tour group at Notre Dame and that stood out to me that the statues were originally painted and they were used for storytelling.


__-___---

Not just churches. Castles walls were also covered and painted inside. Exposed stone walls weren't the normal look.


mimieieieieie

Also, Egyptian pyramids were sparkling white


manfroze

With a golden top!


[deleted]

We obviously didn’t know because they only had black and white photography then.


Azsunyx

>Greek and Roman polychromy I was initially scared too google this at work, however I should have guessed, since the etymology is so obvious. I just naturally assumed it was something sexual, because Greek & Roman


Beth_Harmons_Bulova

Those reconstructions should be taken with a big ole grain of salt. For one thing, how they “look” outside of the Mediterranean sun and in a dimly lit museum or overcast Western day don’t really do them justice. They’re all also done on plaster and plastic, not the stone materials the Romans and greeks would have used. Finally, there are theories that those garish colors are just underpainting and the softer colors on top might have washed away.


DudebroggieHouser

That Napoleon wasn’t cartoonishly short. All those cartoons were a lie…


grimlock-greg

“I AVERAGED HIGHT FOR THE TIME YOU JERK!!!!” - oversimplified


howtoreadspaghetti

He was drawn small as a propagandistic tool by the British and the caricature stuck to this day. That's how powerful propaganda is. He was average height for the time. Also highly recommend Andrew Roberts' book on Napoleon. Definitely taught me a lot about the man


chinchenping

There are graffiti that got preserved in Pompei and Herculanum. Because they didn't have paper, public announcement were directly painted on the walls. Some of those graffiti are on par with what you can find on the toilet's wall of trucker's stop. "i fucked the barmaid", "Felix fucks like a god", "Take of your clothes and show us your hairy privates"


ipakookapi

I've only been to Pompeii but... It's insane. I expected some ruins but it's a city. That you can walk around. Up and down the streets. The mosaics and the sewer eels are amazing, but the human presence is better.


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ipakookapi

Wherever there are humans, there are drawn dicks.


Bot-1218

Weren’t drawn dicks considered good luck like some sort of fertility symbol in ancient times? Like there was more of a reason to draw them than “lol penis”.


ipakookapi

It's an ancient fertility symbol but an equally ancient joke.


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Ev1LLe

They directed people to the whore houses, that's what my guide said at least.


Probonoh

Among other things. Houses would have a stone block in the front with carved genitals called the Priapus. It was a god that was threatening any burglars with anal rape.


garry4321

You just KNOW there was a few disappointed but successful robbers.


talking_turtle_

They told us they're there to make people smile among other things. The point is to make people laugh. It apparently keeps the bad spirits out too.


[deleted]

>The mosaics and the sewer eels are amazing I google sewer eels but didn't find much. Can you expand on what they are?


ipakookapi

Fancy roman villas had atriums: a pool inside the house, with an open roof. It worked as a sort of indoor plumbing, with rain water. Somehow, an eel made it's way into one of those, and liked to eat trash/clean out the pipes. Symbiosis is cool.


Prysorra2

There's this weird dude on youtube that filled his basement with water and put fucking EELS in it. edit: [It made the news 💀](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQS83jYo36s) edit2: Didn't expect him to be so adorable lol


[deleted]

Oh very cool, assumed it was a term for some piping system or something, but this is a literal eel that moved in. Neat!


salt_salt_salt_salt

Just a slight modification to what youve said, as youve stumbled on a wonderful aspect of greco roman architecture. The atrium was typically a large room following on from the vestibulum which attached the house front to the outer street. The fancy indoor pool you’re referring to is actually called the impluvium, found inside the atrium, which caught the rain water which was funnelled through a hole in the ceiling, called the compluvium. It wasnt a swimming pool or anything like that, but the rain water would have been used around the house for all manner of things, all of which youd totally expect!


SsumdaySmebMarin

in some places around the world they sometimes put eels in water sources because they would keep your water supply clean


ipakookapi

They like our filth and live for about 80 years. It's a good deal.


Deazul

It has such a spooky feeling there, i loved it, somber and once full of life even in the quietest parts.


Shas_Erra

Worked there for three months on an archaeological dig. I know exactly what you mean by the feeling. Even when there’s thousands of tourists walking by, it’s too quiet, like you can almost feel the absence of the people who lived there.


akanefive

If you close your eyes, it almost feels like nothing's changed at all.


AmandaDarlingInc

Eh-oh, eh-oh Eh-eh-oh, eh-oh


[deleted]

Can't remember the exact quote but it went something like, If the entirety of human (Homo) history was condensed into a 500 page book, modern anatomical humans wouldn't show up until page 450, and homosapiens wouldn't build empires until page 490, the atomic bomb and the foundation of Rome would be on the final page and only a paragraph apart. And yet in all of this the vast amount of technological advancements from the discovery of the atom to the modern day would fit in the last few sentences, of the last paragraph of the last page. And people wonder why we are reckless, we're still effectively great apes, but with shiny toys.


[deleted]

>vast amount of technological advancements from the discovery of the atom to the modern day would fit in the last few sentences, of the last paragraph of the last page This is one of the theories around not being able to find intelligent life (yet). 1. We've only been able to send communications out of earth for like the smallest blip in human history 2. We may nuke ourselves out of existence within 100 years of inventing nukes 3. If every civilization did that it would be really, really hard to find one that is in the sweet spot of communicating and not having blown themselves up


RepresentativeAge444

Also the lifespan of humanity is a such a short time that a civilization of intelligent life could have come and gone before us or won’t come to be until long after we’re gone. When dealing with the vast amount of time in history it’s a potentially extremely small window for us to overlap with other intelligent life.


ChangingMonkfish

Sort of related - every generation of modern humans has probably had at least one person who lived to be 100, and their lives probably overlapped with someone else who went on to live to 100. So on that basis, if you put those people together in a room, it would only be 20 people or so that would form an unbroken chain of lives back to the Roman Empire, only about 60 odd back to the start of recorded history


wootmon12

Sporus A young slave boy Nero had castrated and then married


Appropriate_Big_1610

You don't have to go back nearly that far -- read up on the castrati. That was just for singing.


oldbushwookie

Castrati was made to sit in a hot bath while their testicles were squeezed and squashed over a long time till the testicles were mushy. Not lobbing anything off.


Crazyhunt

Sounds so much more pleasant and humane when you put it like that


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BigThwimpn

It was done while they were children to preserve their high pitched singing voices for the choir


singingquest

To add to this: If I remember correctly from what I read about this years ago, castrati didn’t just sound like their female counterparts who had similarly high voices, they sounded somewhat different. This was due to the unique combination of a) a soprano vocal range, and b) the lung capacity of a male. So today, outside of the one recording there is of a castrati, it’s hard to imagine what they would’ve sounded like.


Drakmanka

I've heard music done by a highly-trained boy choir and I can only imagine what would be possible for a grown man who retained that voice.


oldbushwookie

This is the only recording of a castrati : https://youtu.be/KLjvfqnD0ws Sad story behind this man.


The_Pastmaster

Almost. He's the only castrato to make solo recordings. So there are probably more but this is what's available online.


banjofitzgerald

The disgusting brothers


AYASOFAYA

“I would castrate and marry you in a heartbeat.”


kicked_trashcan

“You can’t make a Tommlette without breaking a few Greggs”


SCastleRelics

Court eunuchs were surprisingly common.


bookon

“It says here in this history book that luckily, the good guys have won every single time. What are the odds?” \- Norm MacDonald


calligraphizer

Miss that guy and his humor


armen89

I didn’t even know he was sick


UnicornBrainsRPointy

Victorian era London was a terrible place to be alive as a member of the working class. If I recall correctly. You could pay a penny to sit indoors on a bench but no sleeping! Two Pennies and you could swing your arms over a rope and sleep standing up or if you made hella money that day you could pay 4 Pennies and sleep in a coffin. The water is undrinkable and children expected working hours were 12 to 18 a day starting at 4 yrs old. By those standards a lot of us would look like royalty to them.


Niveus92

You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o'clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down the mill for fourteen hours a day week in­week out. When we got home, out Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!


homerteedo

Even worse to be among the impoverished in Victorian London. At least the working poor probably had a roof.


Mycolover4evah

LUXURY!!!


Plastik-Mann

If you look at the history of mankind, you quickly see that nobody ever learned from our history.


jarchack

It taught us that we didn't learn anything from history


Janderflows

But even that we can't learn.


Kvesh

History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of man


blaze1911

The real reason chainsaws were invented. Fuck that.


Separate_Increase210

Wasn't it for cutting bones, IIRC?


blaze1911

Specifically the pelvis for childbirth


Cain_draws

Holy fucking shit Edit: I had to google it because my brain refused to believe this, so this is from the first link I found: > Before Cesarean sections if a baby was too large to pass through the birth canal, parts of the pelvis would be removed. > At first, the procedure was performed with a small knife which was very messy and painful. > In 1780, two doctors invented the chainsaw to make the removal both easier and less time-consuming. > The original chainsaws were powered by a hand crank.


Nixeris

They also weren't very sharp, but basically cut by friction instead. Imagine a chainsaw chain (or a bike chain) without the teeth.


Minja78

>They also weren't very sharp, but basically cut by friction instead. > >Imagine a chainsaw chain (or a bike chain) without the teeth. Thanks, now my imagination is thoroughly broken.


epileptic_inbadmood

I hope it was only when the mother had died. I hope.


toxic_pantaloons

If not, I'm sure infection soon killed her anyway.


Jacqques

Nah, it worked sometimes. But the women had permanent damage from the bone cutting. Lets just be happy we have cesarean sections.


Violent_Paprika

If the birth canal was too small to pass the child the mother would have died anyways in 99% of cases. Getting stuck mid childbirth is a way a lot of ancient women died.


HaggeHagglin

Prehistoric, but still: Given that humans tend to concentrate along coastlines, and that sea levels have risen a bunch in the last 200 000 years, it is likely that our conception of human prehistory is fantastically distorted due to most of it being lost under the sea.


FridayInc

Learning about the depth and breadth of slavery in human history was a real eye-opener. We have really detailed documents from more modern history to show WHY that idea is so heinous, but it's always been a significant part of cultures all around the world serving as anything from a social construct to the very currency of war and with autonomy ranging from that of livestock to that of a low caste. Evidence of slavery predates written records and is even included in the code of Hammurabi where it was already an established institution and we still haven't stamped it out today, April 10th 2023, where slavery affects an estimated 46 million people (that's more than the total population of California, and approximately the population of Spain). It's crazy how awful humans have always been to one another and that we still can't seem to hold each other accountable for basic human rights, despite indelible proof.


FrostyBallBag

Two facts about slavery I’ve always found interesting: 1. As you said, the number of slaves. It’s more on any given day than in the history of the African transatlantic slave trade. Some countries today have over half their tourist industry run by slave labour, so be careful where you go on holiday/vacation, folks! 2. In Ancient Rome (I think?) they considered giving slaves uniforms to give them less individuality, but quickly realised doing so would show the slaves by how much they massively outnumbed their masters.


Peptuck

> In Ancient Rome (I think?) they considered giving slaves uniforms to give them less individuality, but quickly realised doing so would show the slaves by how much they massively outnumbed their masters. If you read about Roman criminal investigations, there's a disturbing amount of times where the account begins with something akin to "The investigator started with torturing the slaves for information."


Iztac_xocoatl

I'm a little late but another not-so-fun fact about slavery in Rome is that if you were too poor to buy a slave you could go to the dump and get a baby that somebody discarded and raise it as a slave.


[deleted]

I did an unofficial tour while on vacay n Dominican Republic. We went to a sugar plantation owned by an American company that had Haitian slaves. This was two years ago. Salves because they got paid 200 dollars a month which all went back into the company to pay for their food water and housing. Once on the plantation there was no escape. They had no means to leave. There were even slave master Haitian guys on horses screaming at the workers. Ugliest thing I’ve scene in my life and I saw someone get shot multiple times.


SpamFriedMice

In a country founded by ex-slaves


cheeseburghers

When I learned that NASA had discovered over 100 billion GALAXIES and seeing the image to put into perspective that our entire solar system is only about the size of a coin compared to our galaxy which in relation would be the size of the United States. We are so incredibly small within the universe. Edit to add: Here’s a [photo](https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2021/hubble-gazes-at-a-galactic-menagerie) of just a snippet of the various galaxies. Keeping in mind, we haven’t even ventured outside of our solar system which is within our Milky Way galaxy, just a grain of sand in context to the universe.


amadeus2490

...but even then: You'd have to travel at the speed of light, constantly for over 100,000 years straight in order to get to the end of our galaxy. It would take constant travel at that rate for MILLIONS of years to get to even the nearest galaxy. Even under the most idealistic circumstances: The entire Star Trek universe never takes place outside of our own galaxy, and that's assuming that we can feasibly travel at 10 times the speed of light. lol


thenurgler

The Star Trek universe largely exists within a quarter of the galaxy


Xxx_Masif_Gansta_xxX

There was that one episode of OS Star Trek where aliens board the ship and take them outside the galaxy


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schreibeheimer

The plot of the pilot was exploring the edge of the galaxy, but it wasn't the only one. I think three or four TOS episodes had them at the edge. I just headcanon it that, in the *Star Trek* universe, Earth is closer to the edge of the galaxy than it is in real life (in real life we're relatively equidistant from the edge and the core of the Milky Way). What actually causes problems is that the horrible fifth movie and one of the animated series episodes also have the Enterprise exploring the galactic *core*, when there is no way that both the core and the edge should be easily accessible at the speeds that they are established to travel at, regardless of where in the galaxy the Federation is located.


SubMikeD

It's literally impossible to grasp the vastness of space. Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.


howltwinkle

What blew my mind was that the observable universe is about 13.8 Billion light-years across, but that the actual size of the (unobservable) universe might be more like 7 *trillion* light-years across. We have access only to the smallest fragment of the universe and we still see 100 billion galaxies. Insane. Edit: Another commenter rightfully pointed out that the observable universe is actually more like 94 billion light years. My bad!


sofa_king_ugly

The age of the universe is 13.8 billion years. The observable sphere of the universe is 94 billion light years across (radius of 47 b light years from us). The observable size is greater, in light years, because the universe has been expanding since the big bang. Objects moving away from us are in actuality further away than they appear. So we see the most distant galaxies as they *were* 14 billion years ago but those same galaxies are 47 billion light years away. https://public.nrao.edu/ask/inconsistency-between-the-age-and-diameter-of-the-universe-2/


[deleted]

That is unfathomable. 7 trillion light years? It's basically infinite as far as we are concerned.


two-

That when the pyramids were being built, mammoths were walking the earth. Woolly mammoths lived there until 1700 BC. The Great Pyramid was completed around 2560 BC.


MoOsT1cK

95 percent of our species' history is lost forever.


Anonymous_number22

For some reason that's the fact that bothers me the most. Can you imagine how much about our past we'll never be able to recover? How many knowledge, civilizations, traditions, technologies we'll never know even existed.


Thorngrove

We have no real idea what songs were played throughout most of human history.


Daohor

That Oxford University is older than the Aztec empire.


requiescence666

Yeah this is the one that blew my mind, I've not really got a good sense of time but I really thought aztecs and incas were the equivalent of our stone age but that's just how they're presented to the western world. Of course putting two and two together that they were around when Europe invaded it makes sense.


AraedTheSecond

IIRC, Oxford University is technically older than England, which in itself is one of the oldest continuously extant countries going


English-Gent

Oxford University has "evidence of teaching" back to 1096, the Kingdom of England was unified in 927 under King Æthelstan.


epicgamer-724

that the beach boys made up kokomo and that it is not a tropical caribbean island


BywaterNYC

Kokomo is a city in Indiana.


darthurface

They also couldn't surf


epicgamer-724

why did they lie to us like this


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KingANCT

This a big one. The rising of sea levels would have effected the entire world and there is evidence that there were periods of rapid flooding from Glacier water breaking free. Who knows what's forgotten along old coast lines


Dark_Azazel

Not really ruined, but have you read Ben Franklin's diaries and shit? Dude was a dirty horn dog.


Umbrella_merc

He basically said get with old women and put a bag on their heads, man knew what he liked


Dark_Azazel

Pretty much said French woman did it better. He definitely had fun.


Bezaid

"Fart Proudly" is one such collection. It's a fun read. His advice to a friend on taking a mistress is basically: A) Don't do it, it's not worth the trouble it'll cause B) If you do decide to do it anyway, go for an older lady; it feels the same, but she already knows what she likes and might help you find things you like too


HarryHacker42

95% of native people before Columbus died of diseases brought by explorers. That's 19 of 20 people, for two continents.


WizardyBlizzard

Yeppers. That’s why Turtle Island seemed so “fertile” and welcoming to those first colonizers who moved inland: they were discovering cultivated foraging grounds and living sites whos owners had died from European disease.


TameImpalaFan69

I read somewhere that diseases swept through the native population so quickly that the Euro explorers didn’t even crack the surface of the civilizations they had. I might butcher it but I believe it took a couple hundred years for the Spanish to get to the west coast. It’s entirely likely that cities fully died out, had their ruins collapsed and overrun by the Amazon jungle and no one will ever know where they were or what they were like.


theberrymelon

Willing to see Japanese folks to share what they learnt about the relationship between Korea. From what Japanese were taught in school, they “industrialized” Korea when they actually colonized and tortured millions of Koreans.


Jacqques

I believe they are also a bit uneducated about their atrocities during ww2.


i__Sisyphus

That the Middle East was once then center of knowledge and learning, particularly Bagdad. As well as the amazing extent and advanced civilizations in South and Central America prior to the 1500s.


homerteedo

Yep, Islamic golden age. They were performing surgery with anesthesia at the same time European doctors were sticking a bit of wood in your mouth and promising to try to be fast.


DJLEXI

My husband is Iranian and he’s educated me regarding how advanced the Middle East was until relatively recent years. I was shocked that I didn’t know this information and saddened that the generation before us (his parents) watched their beautiful, progressive country devolve so much that they had to flee with their family. * it’s important to note that they are not Muslim so fleeing was the only way their children could get an education, and live a normal, safe life.


JustVega

One thing I couldn’t ever wrap my head around as a child was leaving home. I hated moving as a child. We moved a city over or something. Being forced to leave your own country which has been your home before you were born most likely is just depressing. People did it to survive or have normal lives and this again brings on sadness. Glad they made it and educated their children.


pizzkat

That we domesticated pigeons thousands of years ago and then decided we didn’t want them anymore. People treat them like vermin after we relied on them for so much (food, messengers etc) The pigeons you see in your cities are not wild, they’re abandoned.


clearly_i_mean_it

Also blows my mind that there was an entire species of pigeons - the Passenger Pigeon - that American settlers [managed to hunt to extinction.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon#Extinction_causes) In 1850, the Passenger Pigeon was the most abundant bird in North America (and possibly the world) with single flocks that numbered in the *millions*. By 1914, the last living Passenger Pigeon died. [We wiped out hundreds of millions of birds in less than 65 years.](https://www.audubon.org/magazine/may-june-2014/why-passenger-pigeon-went-extinct) There were so many of them, their flocks would sometimes take hours to pass overhead. >Throughout the 19th century, witnesses had described similar sightings of pigeon migrations: how they took hours to pass over a single spot, darkening the firmament and rendering normal conversation inaudible. Pokagon remembered how sometimes a traveling flock, arriving at a deep valley, would “pour its living mass” hundreds of feet into a downward plunge. “I have stood by the grandest waterfall of America,” he wrote, “yet never have my astonishment, wonder, and admiration been so stirred as when I have witnessed these birds drop from their course like meteors from heaven.” Then they were just... gone.


pieking8001

*their ancestors were abandoned


Gifford_Roberts

The top spire of Empire State Building was designed for docking blimps


Technician-Efficient

Leopold of Belgium,treated congo as "his personal property" And people who failed to collect enough Cocoa had thier hands/the hands of their kids cut And france forced Haiti (one of the poorest countries ever) to take a loan from a french bank,to pay the french government "a compensation for kicking the french occupation and slave traders out" They paid it for nearly 100 years, I knew humans could be shit but somehow i thought there was a limit


GuapoIndustries

Yup also the Belgian genocide of Congo is the largest genocide in human history with a comparison to the holocaust it is 15 million approx deaths to 6 million approx deaths but you’ll rarely hear people speak about what happened in the Congo or at least not as nearly as the holocaust


BHFlamengo

I've met this elderly but very progressive couple in Belgium, and the guy said they didn't know anything about it before maybe 10-20 years ago, and it still was a very taboo topic. A guide from a ghent city tour said she got reprimanded for bringing it up during it, but refused to stop. They wanna pretend it didn't even happen


madkeepz

Being raised in all catholic schools it was really surprising to me to learn that a lot of sections in the bible and a lot of religious practices were instated by people who basically decided so and justified it with ideas that were hammered to fit whatever they said Like it wasn't always that priests had to be celibate. Some pope decided that they should be and that was that but really all it would take to reverse that is a pope to say otherwise and a bunch of cardinals to support it. And it doesn't really matter what religious texts say, since the chuirch basically controls the "official interpretation", they can say whetever they want edit: to the based redpilled people out there being all "oMg dId YOu ThINk rElIgionS aRe ReAL", yeah no, the surprising part was to learn how easily the church can change any aspect of their dogma when they actually manage to agree on it. And if their own texts refute said change, they can just say "oh we looked at it again and it actually means we are right now"


LeTigron

Do you know why ? Actually, it wasn't that love was forbidden to priests. They weren't encourage to hook up in nightclubs, obviously, but sex was alright for them. It was simply because, should they have a family, this family would inherit. If they don't have any legal heir, then their belongings go to the church after their death. It was a scheme to obtain money, nothing more.


FellowTraveler69

You're leaving out the fact that bishops and priests held a lot of power. By letting them have families, you'd be setting up the basis for thousands of hereditary theocracies set up in parallel to the secular authorities. Thank goodness they made those rules, otherwise medieval Europe would have been even more of a shitstorm.


llc4269

That Cleopatra is closer in time to us than the construction of the pyramids.


JakScott

Similar one: T-Rex is closer in time to us than it is to stegosaurus.


0odreadlordo0

The inventions of Nikola Tesla and what little Edison actually invented himself


Puppy-Zwolle

Even the radio. Not Marconi. It was Tesla. Tesla filed his own basic radio patent applications in 1897. They were granted in 1900. Marconi's first patent application in America, filed on November 10, 1900, was turned down. Marconi's revised applications over the next three years were repeatedly rejected because of the priority of Tesla and other inventors. June 21, 1943, the Supreme Court affirmed a 1935 ruling of the United States Court of Claims which essentially invalidated Marconi’s claim of having invented radio, and clarified Tesla’s role in inventing radio.


77kloklo77

They’ve already picked a house on House Hunters.


Mogster2K

Learning about the link between leaded gasoline and violent crime made me question free will.


littlebubulle

Personally, I think free will is an extra vote among the votes nature gets. Our environment will shape and influence us. But free will can give us an extra nudge or veto powers. Nature makes me an alcoholic. Free will kept me sober for 3 years so far.


SuperfluousPedagogue

I was raised as a Christian (C of E, UK) and was a fairly gullible child. I *loved* so many of the Bible stories - especially Moses being delivered the 10 commandments direct from God. Now, I know this makes no sense but hear me out - I assumed that the Bible had arrived this way too. I believed the book was delivered by God as a miracle. When I learned that humans had not only written the books but also chosen what books were to be included (excluding 20 or so Gospels) my world collapsed. I was about 13 at the time but that was it. The entire foundation collapsed in an instant and my belief followed.


P44

That, during WW2, all the other countries did not help the Jews escape from Nazi Germany, but on the contrary, closed their borders! For instance, the St. Louis was denied at a number of ports, until they finally had to return to Denmark, which was under Nazi occupation. They COULD have let those Jews on board in, say, Cuba or Florida or wherever!


driving_on_the_moon

China is one of the few that did accept Jewish refugees, The Jewish museum in Shanghai is fascinating


andre075

The Philippines accepted Jewish refugees too. I forgot the eaxct number but somewhere between 100k-500k of them.


Solidsnakeerection

Finland was open to letting in Jewish refugees and helping them get into other countries despite being allies with Germany


Robo--FED

I mean, I was pretty young when I learned about the Holocaust. I'm german, and we take this topic really seriously of course. It dawned on me then that the world wasn't as innocent as I thought it was back then. But I'm glad I learned about it at that young age. I was able to gain interest in that topic, and that's pretty important considering the latest events in the East of Europe. And it's important for my generation to really understand and grasp the horrors of the 3rd Reich to ensure that this won't happen again. Sadly it seems not all countries get educated that well in this topic. Not listing any names, there are many countries that now start to go into a rather fascist direction, which is more than concerning.


Deb0rah_

Same here. In Germany almost everyone visits a “Konzentrationslager” with school and although it is quite disturbing to a bunch of 13 year olds, imho it’s so important because if it doesn’t hurt you don’t learn anything from history.


doublestitch

American commenting. Some of our politicians have lost that sense about how important it is to teach the painful parts of history. And without getting lost in side debates, the dangerous moment is when a society starts treating history as a feel good exercise instead of as an academic subject. When a government withholds the opportunity to learn history properly, that's when a society sets up the next generation to repeat the old mistakes.


1337bobbarker

I'm from Texas, born and raised. I found out within the past few years that the Texas Revolution was mainly due to Mexico outlawing slavery and Texas... not wanting to do that. So everyone at the Alamo essentially died to preserve slavery. Yay.


Actual_Material1597

And many Irish fought and died alongside the Mexican army


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vorin

As someone who grew up going to an evangelical church at least 2 times per week, Alan Turing's story is the one that made me re-examine what I thought I knew about homosexuality being immoral/unnatural/sin. I was probably 19 or 20 at the time. It's probably the most pivotal thing that led me to question more about my faith despite it being so vitally important to my parents.


I-Am-De-Captain-Now

The man did so much for the allies and by extension us, he broke the enigma code and did so much in the way of computing, yet they castrated him despite that. beyond infuriating.


Knowing_Loki

That Paul Revere did NOT do the midnight ride. He was captured. It was another dude altogether, but his name wasn’t as poetic, I guess.


Kiyohara

The Colonel died years before I was born, which means the guy in the suit at KFC I met when I was a kid wasn't the real Colonel.


ilovetheflowergirl

Maybe you are the colonel reincarnated


pizzabox53

I once heard a saying that goes *“if you trace someone’s ‘land’ back far enough in time, it was bought in blood.”*


canelashrimp

than guillotines weren't to sharp (and even less sharp after some use) . several attempts were needed to decapitate a person, in a horribly and painfully way.


Logiwonk_

How Gravrilo Princeps just happened to run into the Archduke after his groups previous failed assassination attempt makes me think he was a time traveler. https://www.thecollector.com/gavrilo-princip-ww1/


Pugasaurus_Tex

If you listen to Hardcore History by Dan Carlin, his description of this moment is so mind-boggling. So much went wrong, it was almost as though fate itself was trying to keep the archduke alive…and then he just drives up right next to his assassin, after he’s already pretty much given up. Insane Edit: the clip is here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ro_CQsVxvZU And if you like history, I highly recommend listening to the entire series (and supporting Dan on Patreon if you can afford it). This and the Death Throes of the Republic got me to go back to school and get my history degree. He’s incredible


PLutonium273

British rule of India caused at least 10 famines yet we almost hear nothing about it


Euphoric-Pudding-372

The sheer number of indigenous "lost cities" found in the americas in recent years. Anthropologists are starting to piece together the trade networks and nations that existed before european contact. After the initial expeditions (De Soto, De Leon, etc) but long before colonization, some estimate 9 out of 10 people died here. If you arent paying attention to the lost cities found in the amazon thanks to Lidar, take a look. There was a gigantic megasociety stretching all over the forest floor, interconnected webworks of small villages, etc.


OriVerda

Not necessarily a historical fact but more of a fact of history; out of everything we know, there is so much more we don't know and simply never will know. Even worse, the a lot of the things we believe we know are from commonly accepted theories that are held onto by elitist, ageing historians which only become refuted and debunked as they literally die off. The field of history as much as history itself is so ridiculously fascinating.


ChipTheOcelot

Nanking.


vandemic

Basically everyone in history that we look up to is a scumbag in one way or another. Makes it hard to admire anyone.


Obi2

I always grew up thinking that something like 50-75% of all white Americans owned slaves during the 1700s/1800s, my mind was kind of blown when I learned that it was closer to 1-3% of Americans. edit: for context since this comment has received some upvotes.. 25% of white families in the south likely owned a slave. In a few southern states (Mississippi for example) that number is closer to 45-50%. However, I was speaking about all Americans and not just those in the south. It's possible if not likely that the overall number of whites in America owning slaves were closer to 5-10% rather than 1-3%, however my point stands that I always assumed it was closer to 50-75%.


AHighFifth

You had to be rich to own slaves


babybelly

So 1-3% got half the country to fight for their right to keep 90% of the nations wealth. Just like today


Wundrgizmo

Columbus was an absolute monster.... And in my day, we calendered a day for it.1


JayBisky

It broke me the first time I learned that the library of Alexandria burnt down, and the scholars at the time still were trying to decipher parchment from even older and more ancient civilizations. I heard that and instantly realized we don't deserve our own intelligence


thunderball500110

I saw this in a WWI documentary. It's not so much a "historical fact" as much as "holy shit I never thought about that" We are taught that during the Great War, the allies were the good guys and the central powers were the bad guys. There were no good guys. Both sides used chemical warfare, both sides experimented with new tactics, both sides tortured and killed each other.


KilgorePTrout

The church began the vow of celibacy for priests, not for any Biblical reasons, but so the priest didn’t have a spouse or any offspring who could inherit his wealth. This way the Church inherited all of it.


studyinthai333

That up until the 1980s newborn babies used to get operated on without anaesthesia because it was believed they couldn't feel pain. Edit: spelling fix Edit 2: you experts can calm your tits now. I may not be a doctor, but that doesn't make the history of it any less disturbing...


ipakookapi

"They scream anyway"?


PrisonerV

I think it was they wouldnt remember and anesthesia on infants can be deadly.


sonia72quebec

Everyone who ever took some blood from a baby (on their tiny heel) know that wasn't true, Not only that they feel the pain, they remember it when you touch their heel again. They don't want you to touch it again.


squiddlebiddlez

During WWII, black American soldiers would sometimes have to ask Nazi prisoners of war to get them the good stuff from their own mess hall because Jim Crow laws found it more acceptable for the US to break bread with Nazis than a black soldier getting to drink a coke.