Trees are not that related to each other. Woody plants evolved multiple times over earths history. And while e.g. beeches are closely related to oaks related, they are more closely related to strawberries than to e.g. ashes. Black locust tree is more closely related to beans or peas than to birches (which are again related to oaks and beeches). Apples are even more closely related to strawberries than to oaks. That broke my mind during Covid. All conifers are somewhat closely related though.
edit: typo
I once turned down a gangbang that would have been me and 6 girls because I felt a little hung over… That was 25 years ago, and Im still not over how monumentally fucking stupid that was.
Could have been six child support cases… Avoided!
Thats a good one, but I usually try to sooth myself by thinking it was a ploy to steal my kidneys… YEah, they were after my kidneys… They were after my kidneys… Im going to be crying about that one on my deathbed lol
Bro, I think they were definitely gonna steal your kidneys! Good job weasling out of it, bullet dodged!
Prior to their win in 2016, the Chicago Cubs hadn’t won a world series since before the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
That’s a good one. I should really learn more about the Ottoman Empire.
Terrorism used to be cool. It wasn’t about killing as many people as possible, but was aimed at wealth and wealthy
We could bring this back.
Uuuh… When was that? Got some examples?
Communists, factory workers, Union strikes… All of Irelands history. The Robin Hood cartoon is about local terrorism as well 🤷♂️
Narodniks and Mark Twain
And this time period was supposedly The Enlightnement, which jack shit of was taught in the school I went to as a kid. Sounds cool as fuck.
Now I’m just imagining Nintendo in the early 1900s attempting to sue every other card manufacturing company for copyright infringement.
Here’s some wild river history for you:
The great lakes are super big, have huge flow rates, Superior is famously super deep since it’s a continental-rift lake that was widened by glacial retreat … But they only formed like 14,000 years ago when the glaciers retreated…
The river Tyne in England is 30 million years old, just when Antarctica was separating from Australia and South America.
The river Thames is 58 million years old, that’s just after the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs.
The Rhine is at least 240 million years old … From the Triassic era if not earlier.
And then there’s 3 rivers in Appalachia that are ~ 320 million years old… The French Broad river, the Susquehanna river, and (ironically) the New river. They’ve been continuously flowing since the carboniferous period, literally when Pangea first started forming and before any bacteria or enzymes could break down trees (which eventually compacted and became all the coal in the mountains that formed alongside them).
The New river also formed a beautiful gorge where we humans built an awesome bridge and some scenic overlooks. If you find yourself driving through that southern region of WV, it is worth a detour!
https://www.nps.gov/neri/planyourvisit/nrgbridge.htm
It’s a national park now too!
🎵Almost Heaven, West Virginia
Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River
Life is old there, older than the trees
Younger than the mountains, growin’ like a breeze🎶
Crazy those lyrics are literal facts. Also, you win the thread.
Life is old there, older than the trees
Younger than the mountains, growin’ like a breeze
The first part is correct, but technically both the river and life in that area predate the mountains, and all of them predate the continent by hundreds of millions of years, which is wild in its own right.
Ok but he said Susquehanna River. Not Shenandoah.
Great song though.
He sings Shenandoah.
https://genius.com/John-denver-take-me-home-country-roads-lyrics
Edit: Even better source:
Sorry you’re confused. We are referencing this comment in which masterspace mentions the Susquehanna River. Not the Shenandoah River. Somehow it made shalafi excited and his brain substituted Susquehanna for Shenandoah which reminded him of the John Denver song, which yes is a lovely song, I belt it out loud every time I drive alone through West Virginia.
Artistic license
Funfact regarding the New River:
The Cartographers charting the river had it marked by the direction it flows, NE-W, eventually this just stuck as the name.
before any bacteria or enzymes could break down trees (which eventually compacted and became all the coal in the mountains that formed alongside them).
Building off of this, the difference between coal and oil is that coal comes from carbon that was buried before the bacteria existed to break it down, and oil after. There will eventually be more oil, but there will never be more coal
TIL I’ve shot rapids in a 320m year old body of water
Columbus’ contact resulted in a 92% loss of population in North, Central, and South America. Mexico City area only just re-reached its pre-contact population estimate in the 1960s.
“1491” is a good read.
The sheer amount of people, knowledge, and culture lost in the Americas due to European invasion and their treatment of the native peoples makes me so sad.
It is the greatest loss of human knowledge that we know of. Certainly the largest in the last 4000 years. It puts the burning of the Library of Alexandria to shame. Entire civilizations, and the sum of all their knowledge, gone. Wiped out. Practically erased from history. The Aztecs had a full writing system and a long recorded history, all burned to ash by the Spaniards just for the hell of it; only scraps remain.
From ChatGPT:
Several Indigenous civilizations in the Americas had their written records deliberately destroyed, while others relied heavily on oral knowledge that disappeared when communities were decimated. Here’s a clear breakdown of both types:
Civilizations Whose Records Were Intentionally Destroyed
Aztec (Mexica) Empire
- Type of records: Pictorial and glyphic codices on history, astronomy, tribute, law, and religion.
- Destruction: After the conquest, Spanish authorities, most famously Bishop Juan de Zumárraga and later Diego de Landa, burned almost all Aztec codices as “idolatrous.”
- Survival: Fewer than 20 pre-conquest or early-contact codices survive.
Maya Civilization
- Type of records: Highly developed writing system; texts on astronomy, mathematics, calendars, history, and ritual.
- Destruction: Inquisition-era clerics burned “thousands” of books and idols; Diego de Landa’s auto-da-fé in 1562 is the most notorious.
- Survival: Only four confirmed pre-conquest Maya codices remain (Dresden, Madrid, Paris, Grolier).
Mixtec Civilization
- Type of records: Rich pictographic histories of dynasties, genealogies, wars, religious rituals.
- Destruction: Many codices lost to Spanish burnings and suppression of Mixtec priest-scribes.
- Survival: A few extraordinary codices remain (Codex Zouche-Nuttall, Codex Vindobonensis).
Inca Empire (Tawantinsuyu)
- Type of records: Not written in books, but quipus—complex knotted-string recording systems for census, tribute, calendrics, and possibly narrative information.
- Destruction: Colonial authorities destroyed many quipus, and forced conversion efforts suppressed quipu-keepers (khipukamayuqs).
- Survival: ~1,000 quipus remain, but most without context.
Taíno (Caribbean)
- Type of records: Primarily oral, but also ceremonial carvings (zemis), sacred objects, and chronicled songs.
- Destruction: Spanish campaigns wiped out most of the population within decades; much material culture was destroyed or lost.
Muisca (Colombia)
- Type of records: Mostly oral histories and sacred textiles and objects.
- Destruction: Spanish suppression of temples and ceremonial items erased much of their intellectual heritage.
Civilizations Whose Knowledge Faded With Their Communities
These relied heavily on oral traditions or fragile local materials. When communities were devastated by disease, enslavement, and forced assimilation, their knowledge systems could not survive intact.
Mississippian Cultures (e.g., Cahokia)
- No writing system; history was preserved orally.
- Collapse accelerated by population loss after contact, long before written ethnography could record their traditions.
Ancestral Puebloans, Hohokam, Mogollon
- Sophisticated sciences (astronomy, hydrology, architecture) maintained through oral knowledge.
- Much was lost after displacement, missionization, and cultural fragmentation.
Wari, Tiwanaku (pre-Inca Andes)
- No writing system; relied on knot-based or symbolic systems.
- Knowledge of state organization and ritual life vanished after the societies collapsed long before Spanish arrival, and then post-contact disruptions erased remaining memories.
Nahua, Zapotec, Purepecha, and many others
-
These groups had writing or semi-writing systems, but much of what we know today survives only in fragments because:
- manuscripts were burned,
- priestly classes were suppressed,
- or oral lineages were broken.
The Scale of Loss
Across the Americas, scholars estimate:
- hundreds of languages vanished, each carrying unique worldviews and knowledge systems;
- countless scientific, agricultural, ecological, and medical traditions were lost or fragmented;
- many civilizations’ histories and lineages were erased or only partially reconstructed through archaeology.
It truly was a civilizational-scale knowledge collapse—yet also a story of survival, because many Indigenous peoples continue to preserve, revive, and rebuild these traditions today.
Fuck ChatGPT.
Lol
Don’t care
Then Cortez finished the job when he explored from Florida to Texas. He also introduced wild hogs to the continent, which introduced trichinella parasites to native fauna. Truly one of the most ecologically destructive events in the past thousand years.
follow it up with “Guns, Germs, and Steel”
That is historically not accurate.
The weird part about that is that Columbus was the third expedition to the American continent from the European continent.
First was a single Irish/Celtic(?) monk in the 800s. Second was Leif Erikson and his crew of “Vikings” in the 1100-1200s. Neither one of those caused widespread disease in the Americas, despite the fact that the monk made it as far as The Great Lakes, and Leif Erickson’s expedition was cut quite short with them engaging in battle with the first natives they saw, resulting in the death of Leif Erikson as well as a few of his companions.
Who was the monk?
Brendan the navigator, 6th c., but the story about “Saint Brendan’s island” is not proven to be about America AFAIK. Or true. It’s a legend about a blessed island that may be a religious myth.
There’s a ton of legends of sailors finding a vanishing island, an island of plenty, the island of apples, that various theories have attached to the Canaries or Azores and such IINM. Saint Brendan is just one among those, so it’s hard to assume it’s fact.
Also, Leif Erikson was in year 1000. And there is a strong suspicion that diseases did play a big role and made it a shitshow.
I like this one (not mine):
- The samurai were abolished as a caste in Japanese society during the Meiji restoration in 1867
- The first ever fax machine, the “printing telegraph”, was invented in 1843
- Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865
=> There was a 22 year window in which samurais could have sent a fax to Abraham Lincoln.
And still they didn’t warn him
Historians refuse to debate the great Anti-Lincoln samurai fax conspiracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_submarines
And they could’ve done it from french submarines.
Ooooh that’s a good one
Was there a phone line network intact enough to send a fax from Japan to the United States…?
Wouldn’t have been phone at that point, it’d be wired telegraph. Which I don’t need to elaborate did not go from Japan to the United States but there were exiled Samurai kicking around in Spanish territory for a bit even into the 1800s so possibly one of them could’ve visited the US and sent Lincoln a Fax. Also I think the king of Siam tried to give the Union war elephants during the Civil War which is much weirder.
Missed opportunity.
Men’s clothing keep getting shorter and shorter in the late Middle Ages/early modern period to the point where at court, their dicks could be seen. The solution was cod pieces, some of which were elaborate, bejeweled, erect penises. This trend ended in England when Elizabeth I fully came into her role as “the virgin queen”
The way you phrased that, it’s like the queen wouldn’t fuck so dicks went out of style.
Did someone say codpiece?
The Appalachian Mountains are older than trees, dinosaurs, the Atlantic Ocean, and Pangea
Life is old there, older than the trees
Younger than the mountains, growin’ like a breeze
country road… … take me home…
Pretty sure sharks are older than trees too
And almost certainly the oldest mountains in the solar system
There are older mountain ranges on earth than the Appalachians. The oldest on earth are likely the Barberton Mountains coming in at a whopping 3.4 billion years old.
Older than bones…
Fun fact II: there was a period of earth’s infancy where the seas werr full of iron. Green in colour, mostly from volcanic activity.
Then up pop some photosynthetic bacteria who start farting out oxygen. The oceans start to rust. The rust falls to sediment and the farting contines. The ocean depletes of iron and the farting contines. The oxygen starts to fill up the sky and the farting continues. Some say it still goes on to this day. But what happened to the iron?
Well not uluru specifically but that’s what Australia’s distinctive colouration is. Ancient fart rusted sea iron
- John Tyler, 10th president of the US (1790-1862), had a grandson, Harrison Ruffin Tyler (Nov, 1928) who just recently died in May of 2025.
- The last survivor from the 1800’s was Emma Morano, born 11/29/1899 Civiasco, Italy. Died 04/15/2017 in Verbania, Italy. So most people reading this had a chance to speak to someone born in 1899.
- All of Napoleon Bonaparte’s 4 brothers lived into the age of photography (1826) and had their photo taken with a camera. His youngest brother Jérôme sat for many photo sessions. Only one of his 3 sisters, Caroline, lived into the era but never had a photo taken. Napoleon Bonaparte (08/15/1769 - 05/05/1821), didn’t live into the age of photography.
- Humans are the only animals capable of appreciating art. Yes, chimps and elephants can make their own art, but they have no interest in it after they’re done with it.
Did 1899 skip December for some reason?
Edit: Or do you mean the last surviving person, or longest-lived person, born in the 1800’s?
Every 1899 years there’s a leap month
Or do you mean the last surviving person,
She was the last surviving person born before 1900.
In this vein,
In July 1938, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave a speech at Gettysburg to mark the 75th anniversary of the battle. 25 veterans from the original battle attended. They were filmed, on movie film, walking in the parade.
(This vignette opens the Ken Burns documentary)
I’ve personally seen behavior from cats and bears that appear to contradict your last statement but only anecdotal.
Last statement feels presumptuous
A few months ago my mother was cleaning the home of grannie who died, and there it was found. An old cookbook, handwritten by grannie, the book it self had a stamp on it (as in caved in leather) that it was made in 1910. from the words of my grandfather this book was given to grandmama by grand grandma.
The mindblowing thing is that this handwriting book which survived both world wars, the fall of communism and the turmoil afterwards, still has easier to follow instructions than most recipes today I see, also no about me and my life section
Ironic that you didn’t post a recipe and only an about me and my life section.
recipe or gtfo
- Behead a large chicken.
Perfect, already done!
Arise, chicken
Like … With yeast, or the dark arts?
Yes.
https://justtherecipe.com/ <-- pretty good scraper that removes all the mommy blog fluff
The one time you might have wanted a touch of personal trivia with your goulash recipe… Good grief!
Paramount Pictures was created 1 month before Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated.
And look at them now… Scrubbing their backloga of anything that paints Nazis in a bad light.
Wouldn’t want to upset the new owners ;)
Gaumont was created in 1895.
The last American Civil War pensioner passed away in May 2020.
Her father served. He fathered her at 82, in 1930.
Possible… But unlikely in practice. Male sperm starts decreasing in quantity and quality after 30.
And the timing means they still had literal milkmen…
