History5 steps
Your timeline is wrong
A rabbit hole is a short chain of facts where each one hands you to the next. Start at the top and see where it leaves you.
- Mammoths were alive while the Great Pyramid went up.
Woolly mammoths were still alive while the Great Pyramid was being built. A population survived on Wrangel Island, off Siberia, until roughly 4,000 years ago — centuries after…
And the timeline gets worse — ask Cleopatra…
- Cleopatra is closer to the Moon landing than the pyramids.
Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to the construction of the Great Pyramid. She died in 30 BC — roughly 2,500 years after the pyramid went up, but barely…
Universities pull the same trick on empires…
- Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire.
Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire — and not narrowly. Teaching at Oxford existed by 1096, while Tenochtitlan was founded in 1325 and the Aztec Empire proper in…
Companies you call modern are in on it too…
- Nintendo existed at the same time as the Ottoman Empire.
Nintendo was founded in Kyoto in September 1889, selling hand-painted hanafuda playing cards. The Ottoman Empire still had 33 years left to run — the company that makes Mario…
One more: a university older than the maths it teaches…
- Harvard is older than calculus.
Harvard is older than calculus. The college was founded in 1636, while Newton only began developing calculus in the mid-1660s and Leibniz published his version in 1684 — students…