Recently, Reddit user u/FlickTheSwitch167 asked, "What historical fact have you learned that ruined everything you ever thought you knew about this life?" and I was basically like this with every response:
Here are 32 that truly changed how people look at history.
1. "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 that 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 34 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 of time and perspective. We really are specks on this planet."
2. "Ninety percent of Native people who lived in the Americas before Columbus died from diseases brought by explorers."
"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 whose owners had died from European disease."
3. In fact, "diseases swept through the Native population so quickly that the Euro explorers didn’t even crack the surface of the civilizations they had."
"There was a Spanish explorer (Francisco de Orellana) who first visited the Inca Empire and saw lots of prosperous cities and a great civilization, and told his peers about it when he returned home. But when other folks went to visit said cities, they found nothing but jungle and thought the explorer lied about his story."
"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."
"This dude had gone on trading ships that went through the Amazon River when he met all these huge cities. It’s wild 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 wilder 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 on the River Thames. 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."
Editor's note: The existence of these ancient cities along the Amazon River is still contested, but new evidence supports Orellana's claims more and more. Check out this documentary for more info, and read more about Francisco here.
5. "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 because most of it was lost under the sea."
Editor's note: Read more about ancient cities found underwater here.
6. "Ancient Greek and Roman polychromy [the art of employing many colors in decoration, as in painting or architecture]. The Parthenon temple looked a bit like Disneyland."
"Same goes for European churches. Statues were painted in flashy colors. There are still some inside that still have their color. By today's standard, it would be considered tacky and in bad taste."
7. "Not just churches. Castle walls were also covered and painted inside. Exposed stone walls weren't the normal look."
"The interior of almost all castles was plastered and intricately/brightly painted, or wood-paneled. Bare stone walls were rare."
8. The Egyptian pyramids were once covered with smooth, white limestone, with a gold cap on top.
—Suggested by u/mimieieieieie and u/manfroze
9. Also, "when the pyramids were being built, mammoths were walking the Earth. Woolly mammoths lived on it until around 1700 BCE. The Great Pyramid was completed around 2560 BCE."
11. Speaking of Cleopatra, "She was Greek, not Egyptian."
"She was also the first Ptolemaic ruler of Egypt who actually knew Egyptian. Imagine ruling a place and not speaking their language."
"Not mind-altering, necessarily, but I recently learned Cleopatra was also a diplomatic badass and legendary leader who knew many languages. She was very well respected in the region. Didn’t know that before. Pretty cool."
12. The first US president, George Washington, was opposed to political parties. He thought they'd tear us apart.
—Suggested by...me.
13. "The Middle East was once the center of knowledge and learning, particularly Baghdad. As well as the amazing extent of advanced civilizations in South and Central America prior to the 1500s."
"Yep, the 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."
14. "Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire."
"IIRC, Oxford University is technically older than England, which in itself is one of the oldest continuously extant countries going."
"Oxford University has evidence of teaching back to 1096; the Kingdom of England was unified in 927 under King Athelstan."
15. "Learning about the depth and breadth of slavery in human history was a real eye-opener. It's always been a significant part of cultures all around the world. Evidence of slavery predates written records and is included in the Code of Hammurabi, where it was already an established institution. We still haven't stamped it out today, when slavery affects an estimated 50 million people (that's more than the total population of California and even more than Spain). It's wild 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."
"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 labor, so be careful where you go on holiday/vacation, folks!
2) In ancient Rome, they considered giving slaves uniforms to give them less individuality, but quickly realized doing so would show the slaves how much they massively outnumbered their masters."
17. "It didn't ruin everything for me, but the real story of Johnny Appleseed was eye-opening. He didn't plant apple trees for apples to eat and sustain; apples were much different back then. He planted the apple trees to ferment alcohol. His apple trees were for cider, not fruit for food."
18. Napoleon wasn’t "cartoonishly short"; he was of average height for his time. The idea that he was short came most likely from British cartoonist James Gillray, who drew him that way, and other cartoonists who followed...doing so mostly, it seems, because Napoleon hated it.
—Suggested by u/DudebroggieHouser and u/howtoreadspaghetti
19. "Can't remember the exact quote, but it went something like, if the entirety of human history was condensed into a 500-page book ... the vast amount of technological advancements, from the discovery of the atom to the modern day, would fit on ... the last page. And people wonder why we are reckless. We're still effectively great apes, but with shiny toys."
Here's the actual quote, if you're interested.
20. "When I learned that NASA had discovered over 100 billion GALAXIES... [Editor's note: Research now suggests there are over 2 trillion galaxies in the universe.] 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 US. We are so incredibly small within the universe. Here’s a photo of just a snippet of the various galaxies."
"Keep 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."
"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 ideal circumstances, the entire Star Trek universe never takes place outside our own galaxy, and that's assuming that we can feasibly travel at 10 times the speed of light."
"What blew my mind was 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."
21. "Prior to the rise of the Nazi Party, the Weimar Republic (Germany, basically) was the most progressive society of the time, home to a huge social justice movement, equal rights for women, abortion rights, a bastion for gay people, and with the first trans clinic, complete with an entire library of transgender research (which can be seen in the famous Nazi book burning photos...on fire)."
22. "The inventions of Nikola Tesla and what little Thomas Edison actually invented himself."
"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 Nov. 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. In 1943, the Supreme Court affirmed a 1935 ruling of the US Court of Claims that essentially invalidated Marconi’s claim of having invented radio, and clarified Tesla’s role in inventing radio."
23. "The fax machine was invented in 1843."
24. "Viking helmets did not have horns."
26. "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."
"Also blows my mind that there was an entire species of pigeons — the passenger pigeon — that American settlers managed to hunt to extinction. 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 had died. We wiped out hundreds of millions of birds in less than 65 years."
27. "More of a fun one, but lighters predate strike matches. They originated from repurposed flintlock pistols that ignited tinder shoved in the barrel that was set aflame by the trigger mechanism."
"They originate way before that, actually. Having a 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."
28. "T. rex is closer in time to us than it is to stegosaurus."
29. "I grew up in a conservative hometown. When I was in late college, I began to learn how the Bible is essentially a long game of telephone, and one where the members playing telephone purposely exaggerated and changed what they repeated to the next person. The Bible was written by men who never met Jesus, who got their information about Jesus from other people, in a time period that relished mystics. And it was normal to change facts, and people did not have any understanding of 'facts' in general or reliability. The men also changed what they wrote about Jesus based on political changes at the time."
"Don't forget the translations of translations of translations that also unintentionally changed the meaning because of interpretations based on the morals of the time. It's just a massive mess that's kind of funny to take as, well...gospel."
"I was raised as a Christian and was a fairly gullible child. I loved so many of the Bible stories — especially Moses being delivered the Ten Commandments directly 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 had chosen which 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."
30. "Paul Revere did NOT finish the midnight ride. He was captured. It was another dude altogether, but his name wasn’t as poetic, I guess." (Editor's note: He also didn't say, "The British are coming.")
31. "History is written by the victors, so no matter how much history I read and study, and stories and myths, history is a jigsaw puzzle, and somebody is holding on to the pieces that make it all fit...worst case, they died with them."
“'It says here in this history book that luckily, the good guys have won every single time. What are the odds?' —Norm Macdonald."
32. And finally..."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, a lot of the things we believe we know are from commonly accepted theories that are held on to by elitist, aging historians and only become refuted and debunked as they literally die off. The field of history as much as history itself is so ridiculously fascinating."
What's a fact that changed the way you look at the world? Let us know in the comments.
Note: Some submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.