19 Historical Facts That Ruined Our Lives

‘Parthenon temple looked like Disneyland’
19 Historical Facts That Ruined Our Lives

Whether they came from history class, Oscar bait or good old-fashioned faulty reasoning, we all have images in our heads of what the world has always looked like. People in the past were always serious, the good guys always won and the world was always black and white until about 1935, when some Pleasantville-adjacent event occurred that went completely undocumented for some reason.

Except, apparently, that’s not true — any of it. You might wanna sit down for this one, but it turns out it was just the film that people used to take photos and record movies that was in black and white. Your grandmother may very well have painted herself just as clownishly as the makeup influencers on TikTok.

Redditors revealed even more shocking revelations from history when user FlickTheSwitch167 asked r/AskReddit, “What historical fact have you learned that ruined everything you ever thought you knew about this life?”

wootmon12 1y ago Sporus A young slave boy Nero had castrated and then married
DudebroggieHouser 1y ago That Napoleon wasn't cartoonishly short. All those cartoons were a lie...
blaze1911 1y ago The real reason chainsaws were invented. Fuck that.
Daohor 1y ago That Oxford University is older than the Aztec empire.
two- 1y ago That when the pyramids were being built, mammoths were walking the earth. Woolly mammoths lived there until 1700 BC. The Great Pyramid was completed around 2560 BC.
studyinthai333 1y ago Edited 1y ago That up until the 1980s newborn babies used to get operated on without anaesthesia because it was believed they couldn't feel pain.
Nashy- 1y ago American breakfast was invented while my grandmother was alive (born 1912). It's perfectly fine to eat Mac n cheese and pork chops for breakfast but it feels so fkn wrong.
Knowing_Loki 1y ago That Paul Revere did NOT do the midnight ride. Не was captured. It was another dude altogether, but his name wasn't as poetic, I guess.
ipakookapi 1y ago Ruined in an interesting, not bad way: ancient Greek and Roman polychromy. The Parthenon temple looked a bit like Disneyland.
Kataphractoi 1y ago More of a fun one, but lighters predate strike matches by a couple centuries. They originated from repurposed flintlock pistols that ignited tinder shoved in the barrel that were set aflame by the trigger mechanism.
chinchenping 1y ago There are graffiti that got preserved in Pompei and Herculanum. Because they didn't have paper, public announcement were directly painted on the walls. Some of those graffiti are on par with what you can find on the toilet's wall of trucker's stop. i fucked the barmaid, Felix fucks like a god, Take of your clothes and show us your hairy privates
oohaaahz 1y ago 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 who 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 35 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 for time and perspective. We really are specks on this planet.
Manu82134 1y ago There was a Spanish explorer that first visited the Inca empire and saw lots of prosperous cities and a great civilisation, and told his peers about it when he returned home. But when other folks went to visit the siad cities they found nothing but jungle and thought the explorer lied about his story. The fact that blew my mind is that nowadays we discovered that his story was true and the people he encounterd died from diseases brought into the new world and the cities and civilization they build were consumed by jungle in the spam
UnicornBrainsRPointy 1y ago Victorian era London was a terrible place to be alive as a member of the working class. If I recall correctly. You could pay a penny to sit indoors on a bench but no sleeping! Two Pennies and you could swing your arms over a rope and sleep standing up or if you made hella money that day you could pay 4 Pennies and sleep in a coffin. The water is undrinkable and children expected working hours were 12 to 18 a day starting at 4 yrs old. By those standards a lot of us would look
FridayInc 1y ago Edited 1y ago Learning about the depth and breadth of slavery in human history was a real eye-opener. We have really detailed documents from more modern history to show WHY that idea is so heinous, but it's always been a significant part of cultures all around the world serving as anything from a social construct to the very currency of war and with autonomy ranging from that of livestock to that of a low caste. Evidence of slavery predates written records and is even included in the code of Hammurabi where it was already an established institution
1y ago Edited 1y ago Can't remember the exact quote but it went something like, If the entirety of human (Homo) history was condensed into a 500 page book, modern anatomical humans wouldn't show up until page 450, and homosapiens wouldn't build empires until page 490, the atomic bomb and the foundation of Rome would be on the final page and only a paragraph apart. And yet in all of this the vast amount of technological advancements from the discovery of the atom to the modern day would fit in the last few sentences, of the last paragraph of
HaggeHagglin 1y ago 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 due to most of it being lost under the sea.
cheeseburghers 1y ago Edited 1y ago When I learned that NASA had discovered over 100 billion GALAXIES and seeing the image to put into perspective that 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 United States. We are so incredibly small within the universe.
FireEnchiladaDragon 1y ago Old norse runes were found carved up like 20 feet in a cave- when they were translated, they just said this is very high God I love people aksjsj

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