10 Timeline Facts That Will Completely Break Your Brain

The Great Pyramid of Giza was completed around 2560 BC. Cleopatra was born in 69 BC, some 2,491 years after the pyramids. The Moon landing happened in 1969 AD, only 2,038 years after Cleopatra.

When Cleopatra visited the pyramids, they were already older to her than she is to us. She was essentially a tourist at ancient ruins. The pyramids were as remote to her as the Roman Empire is to us.

We picture woolly mammoths as primordial creatures from the deep Ice Age. Cave paintings and fur coats. But a small isolated population survived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic until around 1650 BC.

That means woolly mammoths were still alive while the Egyptians were building their pyramids, while the Babylonians ruled Mesopotamia, and while Stonehenge was still in active religious use. The extinction of the mammoth is not prehistoric. It is ancient history.

Nintendo was founded in Kyoto in 1889, as a playing card company. The Ottoman Empire, which had ruled for over 600 years, did not collapse until 1922. Nintendo predates the fall of the Ottomans, the Russian Revolution, and both World Wars.

The company that makes Mario is older than the Republic of Turkey, the Soviet Union, and commercial aviation. It has outlasted empires.

In every museum, you see T-Rex and Stegosaurus displayed as contemporaries. They were both dinosaurs, so we assume they coexisted. They did not. Not even close.

Stegosaurus roamed Earth around 155 million years ago. T-Rex appeared roughly 68 million years ago. That is roughly an 87-million-year gap. T-Rex is actually closer in time to us than it is to Stegosaurus. When T-Rex was alive, Stegosaurus was already ancient history.

Alexander Bain patented an early facsimile device in 1843. The American Civil War did not start until 1861. The telephone was not invented until 1876.

Humans could theoretically transmit documents electrically before they could make a phone call. The fax machine sat in technological limbo for over a century, not reaching widespread office use until the 1980s. It is one of the most delayed technology adoptions in history.

Teaching at Oxford University began around 1096 AD. The Aztec Empire was not founded until 1428 AD, more than three centuries later. The Aztec Empire rose, flourished, and was destroyed by the Spanish all while Oxford was already an ancient institution.

Oxford has been continuously educating students for longer than the Aztec civilization existed at all. Students were sitting exams at Oxford before Tenochtitlan was even built.

Hamida Djandoubi was guillotined in France on September 10, 1977. Star Wars had opened in American theaters four months earlier, in May 1977. American audiences were watching Luke Skywalker battle Darth Vader while France was still executing people with an 18th-century blade.

France did not abolish the death penalty until 1981. The guillotine, symbol of the Revolution, outlasted disco, Concorde's maiden voyage, and the first Apple computer.

Irene Triplett was born in 1930 to Mose Triplett, a Civil War veteran who had fought for both the Confederacy and the Union. She received a monthly pension check from the US Department of Veterans Affairs, a benefit tied directly to her father's military service in 1865. She collected that check until she died in May 2020.

In 2020, the year of COVID-19, when TikTok had 800 million users and SpaceX was launching astronauts, the United States government was still writing checks for a war that ended 155 years earlier. The American Civil War had a living financial dependent in the same year as the first global pandemic of the smartphone era.

Irene was not unique in kind, only in longevity. The veterans' pension system creates these long chains. A young woman marries an elderly veteran, and the government's obligation extends to her lifetime. Helen Viola Jackson, who married a Union Army veteran in 1936 when she was 17 and he was 93, died in December 2020 at the age of 101. She was the last widow of any Civil War veteran. Living connections to events we picture as ancient history are almost always closer than we think.

The last verified veteran of the American Civil War died in 1956. The first nuclear bomb was tested in July 1945. This means men who had fought with muskets and cannon, who had lived through a war decided by cavalry charges, were still alive to learn about the atomic age.

A soldier who had enlisted at 16 in 1864 would have been 97 years old when the Trinity test took place. The distance between the musket and the atom bomb fits inside one human lifetime.

Around 1000 AD, the Norse navigator Leif Erikson landed at what is now L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. A small Viking settlement stood there for a few years. By 1492, when Columbus set sail, nearly five centuries had passed. And the first permanent English colony at Jamestown did not follow until 1607, another 115 years later.

Norse sagas described the voyages, but European memory of them faded. The continent had to be "discovered" again. The gap between the first and second European arrivals in the Americas is longer than the entire gap between Columbus and the American Civil War.