11.
People today live twice as long, on average, as people half a century ago. It was 33 in the middle ages and over 65 today.
While technically true, it’s not because people live twice as long.
It’s because less infants die. Without all the 0’s factored in, the average has risen, even though people live roughly the same amount of time.
Factor out infant mortality, and the increase is relatively minor, more like 60 vs 65.
12.
That corsets were uncomfortable for women and they moved organs and made women faint. Women wore corsets for hundreds of years, they were the precursor to the bra. They were for support, they were not solidly boned, they were actually quite flexible. All women wore them, high ladies of society, working women, old women, young women. They can actually be quite comfortable. The myths that most people know stem from very high ladies of fashion. Corsetry and tight lacing are two different things. Most women did not have 18in waists. Just like today, the women that were placed in ads are skinny and unattainable. People were not shaped differently.
13.
I still hear that a lot of people believe the pyramids were built by slaves. They were not, they were paid workers. They even had benefits like bonuses and health care and the more skilled workers were allowed days off. (In ancient Egypt they had four categories that all careers fell into which are: manual work, administration, priesthood, military service.)
14.
That humanity happily left the struggles of hunting and gathering to gratefully pick up sedentary agriculture.
Historical evidence suggests early states had to constantly round up farmers who decided that agriculture sucked and fled to be seminomadic or nomadic pastoralists and hunters. Thus early war’s focus on taking slaves, which usually were resettled closer to state centers and integrated culturally. Agriculture was forced on most of humanity, not picked up as an improvement.
Plenty of evidence also suggests that agriculture was much less energy efficient and ensured poor nutrition. Nomadic barbarians were often larger and healthier than antiquity farmers. Some anthropologists even think sedentary agriculture was a last ditch survival tool taken up during a climatological cataclysm and not seen as some technological progression by early humans.
Neat stuff.
15.
That the Nazi medical experiments/Japanese Unit 731 discovered anything of worth for modern medicine.
The medical experiments conducted during the Holocaust weren’t out to test or prove any hypothesis other than “Germans are better”. Almost every experiment involved killing prisoners in some convoluted way such as freezing in a tub of ice water, shocked with electricity until they died, or some other form of execution. The time it took for the prisoner, an emaciated, physically weak person to die and simply stated that it took a healthy, fit, normal German man longer to freeze to death and thus Germans were physically superior. In the end, it was just plain old murder wearing a scientist’s labcoat.
16.
That Edison was the one who invented the lightbulb but rather he just bought the blueprints from two men that I don’t remember the names of and then paid fifty people to finish it and took all the credit. Also the fact that he’s the one that we owe for many current inventions which were invited by Nikola Tesla. Mostly Edison was known as an inventor while in reality he was just a good business man who took all the opportunities that he could which some later on came back to bite his a** ( invention of the electric chair, and the experiments used to prove Tesla’s AC was dangerous so people would continue to use his DC system )
17.
The Romans only briefly held Britain, they had occupied it longer than the USA has been a country.
18.
That the Roman Empire fell in 476 AD and then it was the dark ages.
In reality, a peasant living through 476 probably wouldn’t have realized they were living through the end of one age and the start of another. The beginnings of feudalism had already started back during Diocletian’s reign, barbarians warbands and barbarian roman troops had been a fact of life for generations. The barbarian king who deposed Augustulus still considered himself a rightful representative of the Empire, etc. In some ways, the fall of Rome was sudden and traumatic (the population of Rome itself absolutely cratered in the 400’s, after all), but it was really more of a gradual, centuries long transition than a fall.
19.
That Napoleon was short, he was of average height by those times. French just used the different scale of measurement.
20.
Almost anything involving the Library of Alexandria.
No, the Library of Alexandria was not the sole repository of knowledge in the ancient world. There were many other great libraries such as the one in Pergamum as well as many, many other collections.
No, we did not lose countless important works that could only be found there. The Library worked on copying works, and any important writings could easily be found in other libraries around the world.
No, we wouldn’t be living in a utopia if it didn’t burn because it was the centre of learning. The Library was in serious decline for almost a century before it burned. When Ptolemy VIII banned all foreign scholars from Alexandria, they moved to other libraries, and as Ptolemaic rule became less stable and the position of head librarian became a political position the prestige of the Library faded.
No, Julius Caesar did not burn it down on purpose. While he was besieged in Alexandria his troops set fire to some ships on the docks and the fire accidentally spread. However, it is unsure of how much of the Library was truly destroyed, as we know the Mouseion survived, and at any rate we know much was rebuilt later, with Mark Antony supposedly gifting some 200,000 scrolls to the Library, and Claudius built an additional to it during his reign.
No, the Christian Crusaders did not burn down the Library because they hated knowledge. First of all they didn’t even attack Alexandria during the major Crusades (they would during a later minor one) besides they would be almost a 1000 years too late, as the last recorded evidence of the Library dates back to the middle of the 3rd Century, and any vestiges of the Library, which would have been a minor shell of its hight as Roman and Greek scholarship had long moved to other centres. At any rate what remained would have been destroyed during either Aurilian’s attack of the city in 272 CE or Diocletian’s in 297 CE.
