Thread by @cremieuxrecueil

Thread of some surprising things that are older than other things

Notre Dame predates the Maori settlement of New Zealand

Oxford is older than the Aztecs

The Great Pyramid of Giza was completed before Woolly Mammoths went extinct

The University of Bologna is quite literally older than "Time Immemorial" (1189, the beginning of the reign of King Richard I)

A bridge still in use in Trier is nearly a thousand years older than the Inca Empire

Socrates is about as old as the oldest Nazca Lines

Polynesians started settling the Hawaiian Islands about 500 years after the fall of Rome

Nintendo is older than sliced bread

The Taj Mahal is younger than Shakespeare

The Cherokee Alphabet postdates the U.S. Constitution

Alexander the Great got to India about 600 years before Bantu speakers got to South Africa

Cleopatra lived closer to the creation of the iPhone than to the construction of the Great Pyramid

Harvard is older than Hasidic Judaism

The fax machine predates the telephone

The start of the Great Wall of China predates Islam

The Sámi identity postdates Protestantism

You can probably think of a lot more than these examples. There really are so many things that feel modern, or dated to a particular era, that just aren't.

Göbekli Tepe was coextensive in time with the giant sloth

The grandson of the tenth U.S. president, John Tyler (born 1790), is still alive (born 1928).

The Last Samurai died twelve years after Abraham Lincoln

Order of these Supreme Court cases:

Katz 1967: electronic microphone placing outside a phonebooth needs a warrant

Kyllo 2001: thermograms of a residence need a warrant

Jardines 2013: dog sniffs on curtilage need a warrant

Ramos 2020: juries in criminal cases must be unanimous

The first vending machine might have been for holy water:

https://x.com/lefineder/status/1865865486463799512

The Battle of Hastings occurred after the Viking settlement of Greenland and before the Inuit arrived there.

h/t @ElonBachman

https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1831761312981954631

@ElonBachman Correction on the Hawaii arrival date.

Apparently that happened later than I was led to believe, so they arrived closer to 800 years after the fall of Rome.

pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…