Field
Civilizations
Marks, farms, and the machines that feed us.
24 entries
Writing is five thousand years old
True writing — a system that can record language, not only tallies — appears in southern Mesopotamia around 3200 BCE.
Farming began after the ice
The first durable agricultural economies appear in the Fertile Crescent about 11,500 years ago, after the last glacial period.
Half of us eat from the air
Industrial ammonia synthesis (Haber–Bosch) now supplies the reactive nitrogen for roughly half of the protein in the global diet.
A living language keeps an old grammar
Lithuanian is among the most conservative living Indo-European languages, retaining archaic phonology and morphology that illuminate the parent tongue.
Cleopatra lived closer to us than to the pyramids
Cleopatra died in 30 BCE. The Great Pyramid was finished about 2,500 years before that. The Moon landing was about 2,000 years after.
Oxford is older than the Aztec Empire
Teaching at Oxford is recorded from 1096. The Aztec Empire, as a triple alliance, was founded in 1428.
The oldest complaint we have is about bad copper
A clay tablet from Ur, about 1750 BCE, records a customer named Nanni berating the merchant Ea-nasir for sending low-grade copper.
The Greeks built a computer
The Antikythera mechanism is a geared device from the second or first century BCE that computed calendars and the positions of the Sun and Moon.
The size of the Earth was known in antiquity
Eratosthenes, in the third century BCE, measured Earth’s circumference from the angle of the Sun at two cities and the distance between them.
Roman concrete heals itself
Ancient Roman marine concrete contains lime clasts that dissolve into cracks and recrystallise, sealing them. The process has been reproduced.
A war lasted about thirty-eight minutes
The Anglo-Zanzibar War, on 27 August 1896, ran from roughly 9:02 to 9:40 in the morning. It is the shortest war on record.
Towns are older than the wheel
Permanent settlements such as Jericho were inhabited thousands of years before the first wheeled vehicles, which appear around 3500 BCE.
Chess is larger than the observable universe
The number of possible chess games is on the order of 10 to the 120. The number of atoms in the observable universe is on the order of 10 to the 80.
A spoken language was brought back from books
Hebrew, used for scripture and scholarship for centuries, was rebuilt as a daily spoken language in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Mammoths were still alive when the pyramids were new
Woolly mammoths survived on Wrangel Island until about 2000 BCE, centuries after the Great Pyramid was finished.
The Norse reached America five centuries before Columbus
A Norse site at L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, was occupied in 1021. It is the archaeological anchor for the Vinland sagas.
The Hundred Years' War lasted 116 years
The conflict called the Hundred Years' War ran from 1337 to 1453.
The Great Wall cannot be seen from the Moon
The Great Wall of China is not visible to the naked eye from the Moon. From low orbit it is hard to pick out at all.
Napoleon was not short
Napoleon's height was about 1.68 to 1.70 metres — short by some standards now, ordinary for a Frenchman of his time.
The metre was a slice of the planet
The first definition of the metre, in 1791, was one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator, along the meridian through Paris.
Zero became a number, not just a gap
A placeholder for an empty column is ancient. Treating zero as a number you can add and subtract, with rules, is later. The clearest early statement is Brahmagupta's, in 628.
Maize cannot scatter its own seed
The wild ancestor of maize shatters its seed head and sows itself. The cob does not. The kernels wait to be picked. Without people, the plant does not travel.
The export banana is one clone, and the last one died of a fungus
The banana of international trade, Cavendish, is propagated by cuttings, so each plant is genetically the same plant. The clone it replaced, Gros Michel, was wrecked commercially by Panama disease.
The remote Pacific was settled without a compass
Navigators in oceangoing canoes reached islands scattered across millions of square kilometres, steering by stars, swell, birds and clouds. The magnetic compass was not part of the kit.