13 Things That Are Way Older Than You Think
History doesn’t line up the way we picture it in our heads. These timeline facts are real, they’re checkable, and they will absolutely mess with your brain.
1Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire
Teaching at Oxford was happening by 1096. The Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, wasn’t founded until 1325.
2Cleopatra lived closer to the Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid
The Great Pyramid of Giza was built around 2560 BC. Cleopatra lived around 69–30 BC — about 2,500 years later. The Moon landing in 1969 was about 2,000 years after her.
3Woolly mammoths were still alive when the pyramids went up
A small population survived on Wrangel Island, off the coast of Siberia, until around 4,000 years ago — well after the Great Pyramid was built.
4The fax machine was invented before the telephone
Scottish inventor Alexander Bain patented an early fax-style device in 1843. The telephone came along in 1876.
5Nintendo was founded in 1889
It started out making handmade playing cards in Kyoto, Japan — more than 80 years before its first video games.
6The first vending machine is about 2,000 years old
In the 1st century AD, Hero of Alexandria described a machine that dispensed a measured amount of holy water when you dropped in a coin.
7Sharks are older than trees
Sharks have been around for roughly 450 million years. The earliest trees showed up around 385 million years ago.
8Harvard is older than calculus
Harvard was founded in 1636. Newton and Leibniz developed calculus decades later, in the 1660s–1680s.
9T. rex lived closer in time to us than to Stegosaurus
Stegosaurus lived about 150 million years ago. T. rex lived about 68–66 million years ago. That’s a gap of over 80 million years — more than the time between T. rex and you.
10Betty White was born before sliced bread
Betty White was born in January 1922. Pre-sliced bread was first sold in 1928.
11Ketchup was once sold as medicine
In the 1830s, tomato “extracts” and pills were sold as cures for things like indigestion. The craze eventually collapsed — but ketchup stuck around.
12Bubble wrap was supposed to be wallpaper
Its inventors created it in 1957 as a textured wallpaper. That flopped, so they tried marketing it as greenhouse insulation, before it finally found its calling in packaging.
13The first selfie was taken in 1839
Photographer Robert Cornelius took a self-portrait in Philadelphia in 1839 — widely considered the first photo of a person ever taken by themselves.
