Amazing facts

Surprising coincidences in time, oddities, records and busted myths — things that make you go “really?” and want to share. Every fact has its own page: send the link to a friend.

✦ Amazing mode on the globe

Prehistory & Ancient Near East

• 34,000 BC · 2000 BC The mammoths painted in Chauvet Cave 36,000 years ago could still be seen alive in the age of the pharaohs: the last ones, on Wrangel Island, died out around 2000 BC.
• 9500 BC · 3000 BC Göbekli Tepe was built around 9500 BC, 6,500 years before Stonehenge.
• 9500 BC · 2560 BC The Shigir Idol from the Urals was carved about 11,500 years ago. When the Great Pyramid was built, it was already almost 7,000 years old, older than the pyramid is today.
• 5050 BC · 2560 BC Chinchorro fishermen on the Chilean coast were mummifying their dead by about 5000 BC; their mummies predate Egypt's by some two thousand years.
• 3300 BC · 3200 BC Ötzi died in the Alps around 3300 BC, about when writing appeared in Sumerian Uruk.
• 2600 BC · 2560 BC The Peruvian city of Caral, with its stepped pyramids, flourished in the same age as Egypt's pyramids — more than 4,000 years before the Incas.
• 2560 BC · 2000 BC When the Great Pyramid of Giza was built, woolly mammoths still lived on Wrangel Island — the last of them died out only around 2000 BC.
• 2560 BC · 31 BC · 1969 Cleopatra (born 69 BC) lived closer in time to the Moon landing (about 2,040 years) than to the building of the Great Pyramid (about 2,490 years).
• 2500 BC · 2334 BC Sargon of Akkad boasted that ships from Meluhha moored at his capital.
• 1754 BC · 44 BC · 313 About 1,710 years passed between Hammurabi's laws and Caesar's assassination — nearly as long as separates us from the Edict of Milan of 313.
• 1274 BC · 1945 Fifteen years after the Battle of Kadesh, Egypt and the Hittites signed one of the oldest known peace treaties.
• 1200 BC · 1936 The thylacine vanished from mainland Australia about 3,200 years ago, yet survived in Tasmania into the 20th century: the last one died in Hobart Zoo in 1936.
• 1050 BC · 863 Cyrillic is a distant descendant of the Phoenician alphabet: Phoenician gave rise to Greek, and Greek to the letters created almost 2,000 years later.
• 1000 BC · 210 BC The terracotta sculptures of Nigeria's Nok culture were being made centuries before China's Terracotta Army of Qin Shi Huang.
• 880 BC · 814 BC Around 880 BC, Lapita seafarers landed on Tonga — at nearly the same time the Phoenicians founded Carthage.

Classical antiquity

• 776 BC · 753 BC The Olympic Games are older than Rome: the first were held in 776 BC, and by tradition the city was founded only 23 years later.
• 650 BC · 612 BC The fire that destroyed Nineveh in 612 BC baked the clay tablets of Ashurbanipal's library — helping them survive to the present day.
• 563 BC · 551 BC · 530 BC By traditional dating, the Buddha, Confucius and Pythagoras were contemporaries: all three lived in the 6th century BC.
• 509 BC · 508 BC Rome expelled its last king in 509 BC and Athens got democracy from Cleisthenes in 508: republic and democracy were born almost side by side.
• 480 BC · 479 BC Confucius died in 479 BC — one year after the Greeks defeated the Persian fleet at Salamis.
• 323 BC · 322 BC India's Maurya Empire arose about a year after Alexander the Great died — and its founder, Chandragupta, is said to have met Alexander himself.
• 261 BC · 260 BC Almost simultaneously, Ashoka conquered Kalinga (261 BC) and repented the bloodshed, while China saw the Battle of Changping (260 BC), one of antiquity's bloodiest.
• 240 BC Around 240 BC, Eratosthenes measured the Earth's circumference in Egypt, while Chinese chroniclers made the first sure record of Halley's Comet.
• 202 BC In 202 BC, empires were decided at both ends of Eurasia: Scipio defeated Hannibal at Zama, and Liu Bang founded the Han dynasty.
• 36 BC · 31 BC The earliest known Long Count calendar date in Mesoamerica is 36 BC — just five years before the Battle of Actium.
• 79 · 200 A little over a century after Vesuvius buried Pompeii, across the ocean in Teotihuacan the Pyramid of the Sun rose — one of the largest pyramids in the world.
• 105 · 751 China had paper by the early 2nd century, but according to tradition it reached the Islamic world only after the Battle of Talas in 751, via Chinese captives.
• 165 · 166 In 166, men claiming to be envoys of the ruler of Rome — probably Marcus Aurelius — reached China.
• 232 · 1280 The colossal Taupō eruption of around 232 struck a New Zealand with no people at all: Polynesians would arrive more than a thousand years later.
• 301 · 313 · 330 Among the first Christian states were Armenia (traditionally 301) and Aksum in Ethiopia (around 330).
• 378 In January 378, a party from Teotihuacan arrived at the Maya city of Tikal, about 1,000 km away.
• 476 · 1453 The Eastern Roman Empire outlived the Western one by almost 1,000 years: Rome fell in 476, Constantinople only in 1453.
• 476 · 499 Twenty-three years after the Western Roman Empire fell, India's Aryabhata wrote that the sky only appears to move — it is the Earth that rotates.

Middle Ages

• 536 · 541 536 is called one of the worst years to be alive: volcanic haze dimmed the sun across the Northern Hemisphere, and five years later the Plague of Justinian began.
• 794 · 1868 Kyoto (Heian-kyō) was Japan's capital for more than 1,000 years — from 794 until the emperor moved to Tokyo after the Meiji Restoration.
• 800 When Charlemagne was crowned emperor in 800, Borobudur — the world's largest Buddhist temple — was being built on Java.
• 859 · 1096 Al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, the world's oldest operating place of learning, was founded by a woman, Fatima al-Fihri, 237 years before teaching began at Oxford.
• 862 · 863 According to the chronicle, the Varangians were invited to Rus' in 862, and in 863 Cyril and Methodius set out for Moravia with a Slavic alphabet.
• 868 · 1450 The oldest dated printed book, China's Diamond Sutra of 868, is almost 600 years older than the Gutenberg Bible.
• 987 · 988 Rus was baptised in 988, a year after Hugh Capet became King of France.
• 988 · 1021 Thirty-three years after the Christianization of Rus', Vikings were cutting wood in Newfoundland — tree rings date it precisely to 1021.
• 1014 · 1016 While Basil II was finishing off Bulgaria at Kleidion (1014), Rus' was getting its first law code, the Russkaya Pravda (1016).
• 1054 In July 1054, Chinese astronomers saw a new star; 12 days later came the schism in Constantinople.
• 1066 · 1910 The same Halley's Comet embroidered on the Bayeux Tapestry in 1066 returned in 1910 — when the Earth even passed through its tail.
• 1096 · 1325 Oxford University is older than the Aztec state: teaching at Oxford existed by about 1096, while Tenochtitlan was founded only in 1325.
• 1096 · 1147 Moscow is first mentioned in a chronicle in 1147.
• 1147 · 1150 Moscow is first mentioned in a chronicle in 1147 — around the time Angkor Wat was being completed in Cambodia.
• 1163 · 1185 When Prince Igor marched against the Polovtsians in 1185, Notre-Dame had been under construction for 22 years.
• 1215 · 1223 Eight years after Magna Carta, the princes of Rus first met the Mongols and were crushed on the Kalka River.
• 1238 · 1242 The Battle on the Ice (1242) came just four years after work began on the Alhambra in Granada (1238).
• 1240 1240: in summer Alexander beat the Swedes on the Neva; in December Batu took Kiev.
• 1299 · 1903 The Ottoman state, founded around 1299, still existed when the Wright brothers made the first airplane flight: the sultanate was abolished only in 1922.
• 1324 · 1325 In 1324, Mansa Musa gave away so much gold in Cairo that its value fell.
• 1337 · 1380 The Battle of Kulikovo (1380) fell in the middle of the Hundred Years' War, which had been raging for 43 years and had 73 more to go.
• 1347 · 1348 Ibn Battuta witnessed the Black Death: in 1348 he was in Damascus, where, he wrote, thousands were dying each day.
• 1377 · 1450 Korean monks printed the Jikji with movable metal type in 1377, some 70 years before Gutenberg's press.
• 1405 · 1498 Zheng He's first fleet sailed in 1405, 93 years before Vasco da Gama reached India.
• 1411 · 1429 Rublev's Trinity (1411 or 1425–1427) and Joan of Arc's relief of Orléans (1429) belong to the same generation.
• 1450 · 1564 Ivan Fyodorov's Apostol (1564), the first precisely dated Russian printed book, came out more than a century after Gutenberg's press.
• 1450 Machu Picchu and Gutenberg's press are the same age: around 1450 the Incas were building their mountain estate while Mainz printed its first books.
• 1450 · 1453 When Constantinople fell in 1453, Gutenberg was already printing in Mainz: the last Roman Empire vanished in the first years of the printed book.
• 1480 · 1492 The Horde's rule over Rus' ended with the Great Stand on the Ugra in 1480 — only 12 years before Columbus reached the Americas.
• 1480 · 1492 Rus threw off the Horde in 1480 and Spain completed the Reconquista in 1492: two centuries-long struggles ended almost together.
• 1485 · 1508 The Kremlin's present walls were built by Italian masters (1485–1495).
• 1492 1492: Granada fell in January, Columbus reached the Americas in October, and in November the Ensisheim meteorite fell in Alsace — one of Europe's oldest witnessed falls.
• 1494 · 1497 Ivan III's law code (1497) appeared three years after Spain and Portugal divided the world between them at Tordesillas.

Early modern & modern

• 1519 · 1521 While Magellan's expedition circled the globe, Cortés fought the Aztecs.
• 1521 · 1697 The last independent Maya kingdom fell only in 1697, 176 years after Tenochtitlan, when Peter the Great was already ruling Russia.
• 1543 · 1547 Ivan IV was crowned tsar in 1547, four years after Copernicus published that the Earth goes round the Sun.
• 1545 · 1571 Silver from Potosí (1545) made the Spanish peso the first truly global currency: from 1571, Manila galleons carried it across the Pacific to China.
• 1556 · 1584 Ivan the Terrible, the Mughal emperor Akbar and Elizabeth I were contemporaries: from 1558 to 1584 all three reigned at the same time.
• 1564 In 1564 Ivan Fyodorov printed the Apostol in Moscow, and Shakespeare was born in England.
• 1565 · 1572 Ivan the Terrible's Oprichnina (1565–1572) and France's St Bartholomew's Day massacre (1572) were bloody purges of the same decade.
• 1582 · 1918 In autumn 1582 Catholic Europe jumped from 4 to 15 October, while Yermak’s Cossacks were marching on the capital of the Khanate of Sibir.
• 1598 · 1605 While False Dmitry I ruled in Moscow (1605–1606), the first part of Don Quixote came out in Madrid.
• 1600 · 1601 Some scientists think the 1600 eruption of Peru's Huaynaputina caused the cooling behind Russia's Great Famine of 1601–1603, which helped spark the Time of Troubles.
• 1605 · 1616 Cervantes and Shakespeare died in April 1616 on nearly the same calendar date — but Spain used the Gregorian calendar and England did not, so over a week really separates them.
• 1610 In 1610 Galileo discovered Jupiter's moons — while in Moscow the Seven Boyars ruled and a Polish garrison entered the city.
• 1613 · 1627 The last aurochs, the wild ancestor of cattle, died in a Polish forest in 1627 — 14 years after Michael Romanov was elected tsar.
• 1613 · 1618 Five years after the Romanovs came to power (1613), the Thirty Years' War broke out in Europe.
• 1661 · 1662 The last confirmed sighting of a dodo was in 1662 — just as Louis XIV was beginning to rebuild Versailles.
• 1682 · 1683 Peter I became tsar in 1682; a year later the Ottomans were stopped at the gates of Vienna.
• 1687 · 1703 In the year St Petersburg was founded (1703), Newton became President of the Royal Society.
• 1689 The authoritative text of the first Russia–China treaty, Nerchinsk (1689), was in Latin: Jesuit interpreters handled the talks.
• 1709 The brutal winter of 1709, the 'Great Frost', struck all of Europe and wore down Charles XII's Swedish army before Poltava.
• 1741 · 1768 Steller's sea cow was discovered in 1741 and wiped out in just 27 years: the last was apparently killed in 1768, the year Cook set off on his first voyage.
• 1751 · 1762 Catherine II corresponded with Voltaire and Diderot and offered to publish the Encyclopédie, banned in France, in Riga.
• 1755 In January 1755 Moscow University was founded; that November an earthquake destroyed Lisbon and shook all of Europe.
• 1755 Moscow University was founded in January 1755.
• 1769 · 1820 Antarctica was first sighted only in 1820, by the Bellingshausen–Lazarev expedition — by then Watt's steam engine was already half a century old.
• 1775 · 1776 In January 1775 Pugachev was executed in Moscow; in April the first shots of the American War of Independence were fired.
• 1776 The Bolshoi Theatre and the United States are the same age: the theatre dates from March 1776, the Declaration of Independence from July of that year.
• 1804 1804: Napoleon crowned himself emperor, while the former slaves of Haiti, having beaten his army, declared independence — the first nation founded by a slave revolt.
• 1809 · 1859 · 1861 Darwin and Lincoln were born on the same day: 12 February 1809.
• 1815 Two months before Waterloo, in April 1815, Indonesia's Tambora erupted — its ash brought the 'Year Without a Summer' to Europe and North America.
• 1825 1825: the first public steam railway opened in England, and in St Petersburg the Decembrists marched onto Senate Square.
• 1835 · 1859 Darwin spent five weeks on the Galápagos in 1835, but did not publish On the Origin of Species until 24 years later.
• 1844 In May 1844 Morse sent the first telegram from Washington to Baltimore; ten days later the last pair of great auks was killed in Iceland.
• 1850 · 1861 China's Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) overlapped with the American Civil War and cost an estimated 20–30 million lives — many times more.
• 1859 · 1869 Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) and Mendeleev's periodic law (1869) are just ten years apart.
• 1861 Alexander II signed the manifesto freeing the serfs on 3 March 1861 (19 February Old Style); the very next day Lincoln became US president.
• 1861 1861: Russia abolished serfdom, and a united Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in Turin.
• 1861 · 1888 Russia abolished serfdom in 1861 and the USA slavery in 1865; Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, only in 1888.
• 1868 · 1905 Only 37 years after the Meiji Restoration, when Japan was just leaving its samurai order behind, it defeated Russia in the war of 1904–1905.
• 1868 · 1964 In 1868 Japan was still ruled by a shogun and samurai carried swords.
• 1869 1869: in March Mendeleev presented his periodic table, and in November the Suez Canal opened.
• 1883 The last quagga died at Amsterdam Zoo on 12 August 1883 — two weeks before Krakatoa's catastrophic eruption.
• 1889 The Eiffel Tower opened in spring 1889, and in June van Gogh painted The Starry Night at the Saint-Rémy asylum.
• 1893 · 1918 Women in New Zealand have voted in parliamentary elections since 1893, a quarter of a century before those in Britain, Germany or Russia.
• 1895 In 1895 Popov demonstrated a radio receiver in St Petersburg, and the Lumière brothers held the first paid film screening in Paris.

Contemporary

• 1903 · 1961 · 1969 Just 58 years separate the Wright brothers' first flight from Gagarin's, and 66 from the Moon landing — some who saw the first airplanes lived to see the Moon.
• 1908 1908: the Tunguska blast flattened 2,000 km² of Siberian forest, and the Messina earthquake killed some 80,000 people.
• 1914 Passenger pigeons once numbered in the billions, but the last one, Martha, died on 1 September 1914 — a month after World War I began.
• 1922 In November 1922 Howard Carter peered into Tutankhamun's tomb; just over a month later the USSR was founded.
• 1927 · 1952 The last wild European bison was killed in the Caucasus in 1927.
• 1936 The thylacine was granted protection on 10 July 1936; the last known animal died at Hobart Zoo on 7 September — just 59 days later.
• 1938 Three months after the Munich Agreement, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in Berlin discovered the fission of uranium.
• 1953 Spring 1953: the structure of DNA was published on 25 April, and on 29 May Hillary and Tenzing reached the top of Everest.
• 1956 In autumn 1956 the world watched two crises at once: the Anglo-French landing at the Suez Canal and Soviet tanks in Budapest.
• 1957 1957: the USSR launched the first satellite, and six countries signed the Treaty of Rome, the seed of the future EU.
• 1957 1957: Ghana became one of the first countries in sub-Saharan Africa to throw off colonial rule, and the USSR launched the first satellite.
• 1960 In 1960, 17 African countries gained independence — more than in any other single year in history.
• 1961 Gagarin flew into space in April 1961; that August, the Berlin Wall went up.
• 1977 Star Wars came out in May 1977, and in September France carried out its last execution by guillotine.
• 1984 · 1989 Tetris was invented in Moscow in 1984, five years before Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web at CERN.
• 1989 In 1989, the year Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web, the golden toad was seen for the last time in Costa Rica's forests.