6

A Person's Stupid Face Tells You Everything About Them

The 1500s-1700s were littered with pseudoscientific failures, but few were more overtly hilarious than physiognomy -- the idea that humans inherently possessed the personality traits of whatever animals they looked like. It's sort of like the Chinese zodiac, only more dickish.

Giambattista della Porta

Giambattista della Porta

S. WellsSome more dickish than others ...

5

If You Had No Idea What An Animal Looked Like, You Guessed

If you want to look up the difference between turtles and tortoises, or simply want to see photos of a recovering alcoholic turtle celebrating the New Year responsibly, you can Google it in milliseconds. But way back before the internet, society basically had to take some rando explorer's word for it. It didn't matter if that eyewitness was a drunken sailor or an 80-year-old half-blind missionary -- the word of someone who had been overseas and glimpsed a thing was often enough to establish textbook canon for the following hundred years.

4

Clitoral Orgasms Were A Sign Of Insanity

In medieval times, some believed that the uterus was a "sewer" -- a poison-filled organ which existed to spread disease, like by "wandering" up into a woman's body and causing hysteria. It was likely a rich topic of conversation for hacky ancient stand-ups. But well into the late 1800s, Sigmund Freud argued that clitoral orgasms were signs of mental illness, and that clitorises were a direct cause of lesbianism, which was in turn a direct cause of burning in Hell, as well as of Freud needing to take another one of his trademark 15-minute "not-jerking-off breaks."

Wellcome Library, London This was as closest thing to a Playboy you could get back then.

3

Rain Is Caused By Digging Holes

In the late 1800s, weather forecasting was more than an inaccurate science; it was outright fatal. Americans popularly believed that "rain follows the plow" -- the idea that farming a particular plot of land made it more likely for it to rain in that area. Unusually high rainfall throughout the 1870s and 1880s helped "confirm" this theory, which resulted in millions of settlers digging up giant plots of land across the American West in the hopes of pleasing the rain gods. On top of the science being entirely false, this rampant over-plowing contributed to the Dust Bowl. A lot of the land was poorly tended, and became a source of the blowing soil that drifted across the land. Many of the westward settlers were inexperienced farmers who'd been won over by a huge advertising campaign designed specifically to encourage people to buy land and farm it.

Chicago, St. Paul, and Milwaukee Railway "Montana: Come for the two horses, stay for the dust and famine!"

2

Poop Cures Everything

Most medieval doctors had no idea what was going on or what to do about it, so they would pull cures out of their asses -- literally. In medieval times, cures for diseases often called for the liberal application of shit. Anglo-Saxon medicine implemented the excrement of goats, sheep, horses, calves, oxen, and pigeons, mixed with different household ingredients. One headache cure, for example, called for a recipe of pigeon dung, incense, wheat flour, and egg white. Which are, incidentally, the exact same ingredients you'll find in a Cadbury Creme Egg.

Matthias Stom And now you know how the term "shithead" was born.

1

Humans Start Out As Tiny Versions Of Themselves

In the 1600s-1700s, the scientific and religious communities (not entirely separate) widely believed in the concept of "preformation," which stated, essentially, that all species had been made by God at the time of Creation, and animals "growing" was simply the unfolding of preformed parts. So every creature, including humans, were biological Russian nesting dolls. Oddly enough, they were kind of right about people coming from tiny reproductive cells located in the parents, buuuut they fudged the specifics a wee bit, believing instead that a tiny intact human was chilling inside of a sperm cell .

O. Hertwig

N. Hartsoecker Possibly at the helm of a tiny cockpit. Details are sketchy.

The idea was that humans came to life when the minuscule adult got sick of chillaxing and decided to enlarge. Scientists could not agree if the teeny person was located in the sperm or the ovum. Looking back today, it doesn't matter which was accepted, because both work equally well for our purposes: laughing at old-timey idiots.

Think Nana and Pop-Pop's loving 60-year monogamous relationship is quaint and old-fashioned? First off, sorry for that disturbing image, but we've got some news for you: the monogamous sexual relationship is actually brand new relative to how long humans have been around. Secondly, it's about to get worse from here: monkey sex.

On this month's live podcast, Jack O'Brien and the Cracked staff welcome Dr. Christopher Ryan, podcaster and author of 'Sex at Dawn', onto the show for a lively Valentine's Day discussion about love, sex, why our genitals are where they are, and why we're more like chimps and bonobos than you think.

Get your tickets here:

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