Historical facts I consistently forget

In rough chronological order

• Humans seem to have reached Europe, Australia, India, and China all before they reached non-Mahgreb West Africa. And then they kept moving back and forth between all these places, especially from Eurasia to Africa. (This is all on shaky evidence.)

• Cleopatra lived closer in time to us than to the building of the Egyptian pyramids. And the pyramids were built when there were still wooly mammoths walking the earth.

• Sedentarity of cultures != agriculture (!= pottery?). Cultures living in one place came first. Then agriculture developed, with pottery coming and certain tools coming at the same time or after. (Or maybe even before in Japan?)

• Humans lived in small bands for most of history and only very recently found ways to live in close proximity to millions of other humans without going nuts and doing awful things.

• Humans were smelting ore to get metal like copper, tin, and lead before any settled civilization existed. Tin and Lead especially. Of the seven metals used by humans in antiquity - gold, silver, copper, tin, lead, iron, and mercury - only gold is metallic in its native form.

• Humans were basically everywhere on earth except Iceland, other cold northern islands, New Zealand, and other pacific islands by 10,000 years BCE, and then didn’t get to these islands for ages.

• The idea of artificial intelligence has been around since the ancient Greeks. Pandora is an AI built by Hephaestus, and there are lots of AIs in Jason and the Argonauts, e.g. Talos.

• Aristotle wrote about the slavery vs. automation tradeoff.

• Thinkers from every era had metaphors for the brain based on the technology of their time: civic institutions and aqueducts in antiquity, later as steam engines, later as computers.

• People lived in thatched huts for hundreds of years in the midst of stone temple and aqueduct ruins.

• Benin City existed.

• Medieval people bathed plenty and weren’t gross all the time.

• The word Slav and the word slave are connected, though people debate which came first.

• Oxford University was founded >300 years before the founding of the Aztec Empire.

• There were dancing plagues in the 1500s.

• From the middle ages until the 1600s, European (and maybe other regions’) city dwellers were buzzed or drunk during basically all waking hours. Alcohol was the only safe form of hydration before water purification.

• Equations and the equals sign in mathematics don’t show up until the 16th century. It was a slow transition from math-in-prose to math-in-symbols.

• Reading silently was not the norm - or even something most people could do - until possibly the 1800s.

• The European colonization of the Americas (1600s through 1820s) came and went before Africa was colonized (1880s through 1970s). (This is in terms of land conquered, not necessarily people affected. There were European colonies all around the coast of Africa from before 1492.)

• There are many extant, thousand-year-old religions whose internal teachings are unknown, having never been revealed to outsiders.

• The practice of medicine was arguably net harmful for all of human history until between 1865 and 1950, and yet persisted all that time.

• Nintendo was founded the same year (1889) Vincent Van Gogh painted Starry Night.

• The steam engine was developed way before the principles of thermodynamics.

• Factories used to be tall, like the many tall historic factory buildings seen in New York City, because of needing to “plug into” a vertical central power shaft.

• India and the USSR had strong relations during the cold war, and India and Russia are still close.

• A surprising number of nuclear weapons were lost in the 20th century and have not been recovered, despite us knowing roughly where they are, and despite many being close to population centers.

• Net migration seems to have been from the US to Mexico - not the reverse - since 2009.