Once a rich European businessman asked a poor old-man passing on the street, “Tell me man, how can I change this society for you? I think I have enough money to do that.” In reply, the old-man said, “You can’t, I haven’t eaten for the last three days, though I have seen a lot of delicious foods everywhere I went. For me, you have to wipe out the word ‘possession’ from this society that you never can’t or will, because you are a rich person.” Possession ― the term that changed everything in this world, that puts life into a non-living object within seconds, and that takes thousands of lives without a second thought. To say, it drew a circle around every human-life.
Humankind didn’t change overnight, it followed the slow steps of possessions, evolving parallel. Through this long history, the world saw many rises and downs, many great and worst instances, of which, many have or could change the world entirely. Some are typically found written in our textbooks while some have been untouched for years, leaving behind some haunting questions that we never like to hear.
Here in this article, we have put forth some of those untouched topics that are, of course, highly debatable but their existence is as real we are living in this world. And which could be the rudiment to change your perceptions about the history and future of humanity.
1 | The Library Of Alexandria
The Library of Alexandria, in Egypt, was part of Musaeum, a science research center dedicated to knowledge. It was build during the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (Reign 284–246 BC). Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt fostered progress and knowledge collection. They gave scholarships to scientists, philosophers and poets to come and live in Alexandria. In exchange, rulers were getting advice on how to rule their vast country.
At its peak, The Library of Alexandria consisted of thousands of scrolls and books about mathematics, engineering, physiology, geography, blueprints, medicine, plays, and important scriptures. In ancient Egypt, any books found in ships coming into port, would be brought immediately to The Library of Alexandria and be copied. The original would be kept in the library and the copy given back to the owner.
Thinkers from all over the Mediterranean used to come to Alexandria to study. To say, The Library of Alexandria had the largest and most sophisticated collection of books in human history, and most of the major works of ancient civilizations up until that point was lost because the library was destroyed entirely.
The destruction of the library wasn’t caused by only burning, this is a myth. Fact is it declined gradually over the ages. However, the Library, or part of its collection, was accidentally burned by Julius Caesar during his civil war in 48 BC, but it is unclear how much was actually destroyed. Later, between 270 and 275 AD, the city of Alexandria saw a rebellion and an imperial counterattack that probably destroyed whatever remained of the Library, if it still existed at that time. If the library still survived to this day, society may have been more advanced and we would surely know more about the ancient world.
2 | Little Foot
In 2017, following an epic 20-year-long excavation in South Africa, researchers finally recovered and cleaned the complete skeleton of an ancient human relative: an approximately 3.67 million years old hominin nicknamed “Little Foot.” Researchers found that Little Foot could walk upright and its arms were not as long as its legs, meaning it had similar proportions to those of modern humans. But according to most scientists, Homo sapiens, the first modern humans, evolved from their early hominid predecessors only between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago. They developed a capacity for language about 50,000 years ago. The first modern humans began moving outside of Africa starting about 70,000-100,000 years ago. Read More
3 | The Mastodon Site Of San Diego
This mastodon site in San Diego might be evidence that humans lived in California way before the US existed ― or Native Americans, or most civilizations, for that matter. The San Diego site might be a shred of evidence that humans lived in California way before most civilizations, for that matter.
4 | The Sumerian King List
The origins of Sumerian civilization in Mesopotamia are still debated today, but archaeological evidence indicates that they established roughly a dozen city-states by the fourth millennium BC. These usually consisted of a walled metropolis dominated by a ziggurat—the tiered, pyramid-like temples associated with the Sumerian religion. Homes were constructed from bundled marsh reeds or mud bricks, and complex irrigation canals were dug to harness the silt-laden waters of the Tigris and Euphrates for farming.
Major Sumerian city-states included Eridu, Ur, Nippur, Lagash and Kish, but one of the oldest and most sprawling was Uruk, a thriving trading hub that boasted six miles of defensive walls and a population of between 40,000 and 80,000. At its peak around 2800 BC, it was most likely the largest city in the world. In simple words, Ancient Sumerians had influenced the world enormously as they were the reason behind the world’s first urban civilization.
Out of all the ancient discoveries from the Mesopotamia region, the “Sumerian King List” is truly the most enigmatic thing. It’s an ancient text in Sumerian language, dated back to the 3rd millennium BCE, which is a listing of all Sumer kings, their respective dynasties, locations, and times in power. While this may not seem like too much of a mystery, it’s what is inscribed along with the list of kings that makes it so puzzling. There are mythological elements embedded within it. Along with a who’s-who of Sumerians in power, the King List also incorporates events such as the Great Flood and the tales of Gilgamesh, stories that are often referred to as simple fables.
5 | Inca Libraries Of Quipu Records
Inca Empire dominated parts of the regions now known as Peru, Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia and Argentina for hundreds of years before the Spanish invaded in 1533, destroyed its cities, and burned its libraries of quipu records ― the Inca language “written” with knots and rope. Though we know a lot about Inca technology, architecture and advanced agriculture ― all of which are in evidence at major Inca city Machu Picchu ― we still can’t read what’s left of the tapestries that contain their written records. The most interesting part is that we don’t understand how they ran a vast empire without ever building a single marketplace.
6 | The Sumerian Planisphere
Though it was discovered more than 150 years ago, the Sumerian Planisphere has been translated only a decade ago, revealing the oldest documented observation of an extraterrestrial object that came from space and landed on the Earth’s surface ― a comet. The inscriptions on the tablet give a precise date and time at which the alleged meteor hit the Earth ― it was the 29th June of 3123 BC. According to the Planisphere, the event happened at Köfels, Austria. But there is no crater in Köfels territory, so to modern eyes it does not look as an impact site should look, and the Köfels event remains hypothetical to this day. Read More
7 | Toumaï
Toumaï is the name given to the first fossil representative of the Sahelanthropus tchadensis species, whose practically complete skull was found in Chad, Central Africa, in 2001. Dated around 7 million years ago, Toumaï is believed to be the oldest hominid known to date. For some anthropologists, Toumaï would even be a bipedal primate and would be one of the first ancestors of the modern human line. Read More
8 | Skull 5
In 2005, scientists discovered a complete skull of an ancient human ancestor at the archaeological site of Dmanisi, a small town in southern Georgia, Europe. The skull belongs to an extinct hominin that lived around 1.85 million years ago! Known as the “Skull 5,” the archaeological specimen is entirely intact and has a long face, large teeth and a small braincase, reaching the lower range limit of modern variation. But most scientists still believe that modern humans only evolved from the African continent, and that they didn’t migrate out until 0.8 million years ago. Read More
9 | Decline Of The Indigenous American Population
The Europeans’ arrival in the Americas caused the Native American population to drastically decline from approximately 12 million in 1500 to roughly 237,000 in 1900. The Spanish voyage of Christopher Columbus first discovered America in 1492. Contact with the Europeans led to the European colonization of the Americas, in which millions of immigrants from Europe eventually settled in the Americas.
The population of African and Eurasian peoples in the Americas grew steadily, while the indigenous population plummeted. Eurasian diseases such as influenza, pneumonic plagues, and smallpox devastated the Native Americans, who did not have immunity to them. Conflict and outright warfare with Western European newcomers and other American tribes further reduced populations and disrupted traditional societies. The extent and causes of the decline have long been a subject of academic debate, along with its characterization as a genocide.
10 | Computer Will Change The Humankind Beyond Our Imagination
A computer is a machine that can be instructed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations automatically via computer programming. Modern computers have the ability to follow generalized sets of operations, called programs. These programs enable computers to perform an extremely wide range of tasks.
A “complete” computer including the hardware, the operating system (main software), and peripheral equipment required and used for “full” operation can be referred to as a computer system. This term may as well be used for a group of computers that are connected and work together, in particular a computer network or computer cluster.
Early computers were only conceived as calculating devices that have been used to aid computation for thousands of years, mostly using one-to-one correspondence with fingers. Since ancient times, simple manual devices like the abacus, or also called the counting frame, aided people in doing calculations.
The Antikythera mechanism is believed to be the earliest mechanical analog computer. It was designed to calculate astronomical positions and eclipses for calendrical and astrological purposes. It was discovered in 1901 in the Antikythera wreck off the Greek island of Antikythera, between Kythera and Crete, and has been dated to around 100 BC.
Charles Babbage (1791-1871), the computer pioneer, designed the first automatic computing engines in the early 19th century. He invented computers but failed to build them. The first complete Babbage Engine was completed in London in 2002, 153 years after it was designed.
After working on his revolutionary difference engine, designed to aid in navigational calculations, in 1833 Babbage realized that a much more general design, an Analytical Engine, was possible. The input of programs and data was to be provided to the machine via punched cards, a method being used at the time to direct mechanical looms such as the Jacquard loom.
For output, the machine would have a printer, a curve plotter and a bell. The machine would also be able to punch numbers onto cards to be read in later. The Engine incorporated an arithmetic logic unit, control flow in the form of conditional branching and loops, and integrated memory, making it the first design for a general-purpose computer that could be described in modern terms as Turing-complete, a system of data-manipulation rules, a system which is able to recognize or decide one or more other data-manipulation rule sets.
By 1938, the United States Navy had developed an electromechanical analog computer small enough to use aboard a submarine. This was the Torpedo Data Computer, which used trigonometry to solve the problem of firing a torpedo at a moving target. In 1942, John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford E. Berry of Iowa State University developed and tested the Atanasoff–Berry Computer (ABC), the first “automatic electronic digital computer”.
Futurologists believe people who were born after 1970 could live forever. By the year 2050, humans will achieve immortality by uploading their minds to computers and then back into a different biological or synthetic body.
11 | An Ancient Folklore Saved Them During The 2004 Tsunami
Ancient folklore saved several native tribes on India’s Andaman and the Nicobar Islands during the 2004 Tsunami which resulted in 227,898 casualties. While many locals and tourists ventured curiously into the receding waters, the natives fled, citing a warning from their folklore: “huge shaking of ground followed by the high wall of water.” They all escaped to higher ground before the massive Tsunami struck the islands. No known historical event tells this story, so how did they know that it’s still a mystery.
12 | Who Built The Great Sphinx Of Giza?
The Great Sphinx of Giza, a giant limestone figure with the body of a lion and the head of a man wearing a pharaoh’s headdress, is the national symbol of Egypt — both ancient and modern — and one of the world’s most famous monuments.
Despite its iconic status, geologists, archaeologists, Egyptologists and others continue to debate the Sphinx’s enduring “riddle”: Exactly how old is it? The most common wisdom holds that the monolith is around 4,500 years old, and was built for Khafre, a pharaoh of Egypt’s Fourth Dynasty who lived circa 2603-2578 BC.
However, there are two convincing cutting-edge theories, of which, the first theory suggests that the Great Sphinx was built as long ago as 10,500 BC. While the other theory suggests it could be about 800,000 years old. If this is true, then who did actually build the Great Sphinx of Egypt? Read More
13 | 97% Of Human History Is Lost Today!
Modern humans first appeared about 200,000 years ago, but record-keeping didn’t begin until about 5,500 years ago. That means about 97% of human history is lost. Read More
