• glorkon
    2145·
    7 天前

    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.

  • OldSageRick@lemmy.zip
    176·
    7 天前

    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

  • masterspace@lemmy.caEnglish
    104·
    7 天前

    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

    • shalafiEnglish
      26·
      7 天前

      🎵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.

    • Trainguyrom@reddthat.comEnglish
      7·
      6 天前

      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

    • bitjunkie
      5·
      6 天前

      TIL I’ve shot rapids in a 320m year old body of water

  • Masterkraft0r@discuss.tchncs.de
    30·
    2 天前

    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

      • PhilipTheBucket@quokk.auEnglish
        12·
        7 天前

        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.

    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
      13·
      7 天前

      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.

      Yes, i’m easily stressed.

      • frank@sopuli.xyz
        13·
        7 天前

        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

        • caseyweederman@lemmy.ca
          4·
          7 天前

          I mean, there was still a tremendous amount of things happening in 1930, they just didn’t report on any of it.

  • marzhall
    471·
    6 天前

    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.

      • I_Has_A_Hat
        18·
        6 天前

        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.

        • IlovePizza
          418·
          6 天前

          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

          • 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.

    • sexual_tomato@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      5·
      6 天前

      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.

    • AngryCommieKender
      6·
      6 天前

      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.

        • Uruanna
          7·
          6 天前

          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.

  • niktemadur
    94·
    7 天前

    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.

      • niktemadur
        2·
        6 天前

        When archaeologists express that very same concept, they widely use 12025 BP (Before Present).

  • GraniteM
    733·
    7 天前

    • 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.

  • hactar42@lemmy.ml
    52·
    6 天前

    The Appalachian Mountains are older than trees, dinosaurs, the Atlantic Ocean, and Pangea

  • jambudz@lemmy.zip
    31·
    6 天前

    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”

  • Bennyboybumberchums
    271·
    6 天前

    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.

      • Bennyboybumberchums
        6·
        6 天前

        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

        • flubba86
          9·
          6 天前

          Bro, I think they were definitely gonna steal your kidneys! Good job weasling out of it, bullet dodged!

  • CitizenKong
    81·
    7 天前

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

  • ronl2kEnglish
    42·
    5 天前
    • 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.
    • mkwt
      9·
      6 天前

      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)

    • dellish
      10·
      6 天前

      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?

      • ronl2kEnglish
        3·
        5 天前

        Or do you mean the last surviving person,

        She was the last surviving person born before 1900. I corrected my original post to clarify my intent.

    • Unlearned9545
      42·
      6 天前

      I’ve personally seen behavior from cats and bears that appear to contradict your last statement but only anecdotal.