* Globalization has been around for a ''very'' long time, whether it was in the Roman Empire or the Silk Trade. But one would be surprised to know that, according to historians, economists and other experts, this sort people recognize today (and which pundits like Thomas Friedman promote) had been achieved...by the late 19th-Century (with telegraphs, radios and railroads being the internet of their day). Some go further to state that in some aspects like labor, travel and immigration, "Globalization 1.0" was ''even more'' integrated than "2.0" today. In fact, there were those at the time who thought that nothing could possibly reverse their progress...[[FromBadToWorse until]] [[WorldWarI a certain war broke out in 1914]]...
* One could think that "war games" in the style of paintball and airsoft are a relatively new invention. In fact, it goes at least as much back as 1909, where they used [[http://io9.com/5927036/in-1909-you-could-fake+murder-your-friends-in-a-wax-bullet-duel wax bullets]] and protective gear not much unlike the modern ones.
* Despite generally being thought of as a "modern" concept, universal religious toleration has a surprisingly long history. The revered Mughal emperor [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akbar#Religious_policy Akbar]], for example, had views on religion that would seem unusually open-minded in some quarters ''today'', let alone in 16th-century India. Among other things, he openly defied the idea of "one true religion" in his philosophical writings, and he went to great lengths to staff his court with scholars of practically every known faith, frequently encouraging philosophical discourse between them so that they could find common ground.
-->"Now it has become clear to me that it cannot be wisdom to assert the truth of one faith over another. ... In our troubled world, so full of contradictions, the wise person makes justice his guide, and learns from all."
* The AmericanCivilWar wasn't the first time in the United States' history that the country faced a serious threat of secession. About fifty years before that, [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartford_Convention#Secession during the War of 1812]], there was serious talk within the Federalist Party of ''New England'' seceding from the Union. What, you thought the "Yankees" were always the ones ''against'' secession?
* The basic idea of a {{Macekre}} predates Carl Macek by over a century-- the earliest translators of Creator/JulesVerne into English were infamous for their numerous misinterpretations of the text when they didn't [[CutAndPasteTranslation rewrite, add, or delete entire scenes]], and often [[DubNameChange changed the names]] and [[WeAllLiveInAmerica nationalities]] of characters willy-nilly. The translations were so bad that they ruined Verne's reputation as a writer in the English-speaking world for a century, much like how anime has a bad reputation thanks to people like FourKidsEntertainment. See [[http://jv.gilead.org.il/evans/VerneTrans(article).html here]] for more information.
* Wireframe computer graphics are less than 60 years old...the key word being "computer graphics". Wireframe-style ''illustrations'' date back [[http://f12arch531project.wordpress.com/2012/11/06/renaissance-wireframe/ at least as far as the Renaissance]].
* Fast-food drive-through windows are a double example. They are both OlderThanTheyThink in that several chains (including In-N-Out Burger and Jack in the Box) claim to be the first to have them as far back as the 1940s and 1950s. However, they are ''also'' NewerThanTheyThink in the sense that the "big" chains such as UsefulNotes/McDonalds and Burger King did not use them extensively until the 1970s. (In fact, the first [=McDonald's=] with a drive-thru window was made entirely out of necessity — it was near a military base, and was installed entirely so that they could serve soldiers who were not allowed to leave their cars while in fatigues.)
* WarrenHarding did not invent the Word "Normalcy". He only popularized it.
* Gunpowder was introduced in Europe by the Mongols in the 13th century; the stereotypical KnightInShiningArmor of the 14th-15th centuries actually coexisted with cannons and, near the end of its reign, even with primitive handguns. This makes the trope FantasyGunControl in MedievalFantasy settings look very nonsensical.
* Santa Fe, New Mexico is one of the oldest cities in what is now the United States, having been established by Spanish explorers in 1610.
* The term "cold war" was coined in the fourteenth century by Spanish writer Don Juan Manuel, who said "War that is very fierce and very hot ends either with death or peace, whereas a cold war neither brings peace nor confers honor on those who wage it." He was talking about the uneasy peace between Christians and Muslims.

15th May '13 11:05:19 AM Naram-Sin

Send Naram-Sin a PM notification explaining the badness of natter: natter-fy

as the replier bellow says, use of wormhole as meaning "worm's hole" in the 17th century is not an example. deleted

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* DistressedDude is not a result of feminism. Many a FairyTale features an heroine rescuing one -- or several. (Who killed the witch in ''Hansel and Gretel''? [[SarcasmMode I'll give you a hint: it wasn't Hansel.]])
 Writing a prequel to tell the story of the father of the main character of a previous work? [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Rabelais/ François Rabelais]] did this 500 years before George Lucas with ''Gargantua'', the prequel to ''Pantagruel''.
* Likewise, remakes, reboots, sequels and prequels were not invented by Hollywood. It was common practice in ancient Greece and in 17th century France among classical authors to base their plays on well-known episodes of the Trojan war or to write their own version of the existing work of a more ancient author. Moliere's ''The Miser'', for instance, is a remake of a latin play, ''Aulularia'', by Plautus, with some dialogues lifted almost verbatim! The public wanted to see how a new author was going to use the subject material; it didn't matter that the later was not new.
* What about fanboys [[FanSequel writing their]] [[ContinuationFic own sequels]] and prequels [[{{Fanfiction}} to their favorite works]]? Well, there's ''Literature/TheAeneid'', a ContinuationFic of ''Literature/TheIliad'' and ''Literature/TheOdyssey'' written by Roman fanboy Virgil centuries after [[Creator/{{Homer}} the original author]]'s death. Or ''Literature/ParadiseLost'', a {{fanfic}} of Literature/TheBible that explores the events leading up to Genesis...and [[DracoInLeatherPants gives Satan an unusually sympathetic and charismatic portrayal]].

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* Many people thought that the accusations that BarackObama was born in Kenya/Indonesia was the first time a US president accused of being not constitutionally eligible on the grounds of not being a "natural-born citizen". However, the first president with that dubious honor is actually ChesterAArthur who was rumored to have been born in a certain British colony we now call Canada.
* The beginning of Barack Obama's "Forward"-themed 2012 presidential campaign was accused by detractors of being based in Socialism (the word "forward" allegedly having Socialist leanings), coupled with an appearance in Milwaukee's Master Lock factory in front of a blue flag reading "Wisconsin 1848" supposedly represented a labor union, made controversial by labor unions falling out of favor in U.S. conservative circles - "Forward" has been Wisconsin's official motto since 1851, and while the state flag was edited to include "Wisconsin" and "1848" for clarity in 1979, the coat of arms as a central part of the representation of Wisconsin dates back to 1881, with 1848 as the year Wisconsin became a state.

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* The surge in education about the health risks of tobacco in the last two decades? [[TheHouseOfStuart King James VI]] [[http://www.laits.utexas.edu/poltheory/james/blaste/ tried to beat them to it by a few hundred years]].
* The [[FlippingTheBird middle finger salute]]? It dates back to [[http://www.listener.co.nz/commentary/the-internaut/flip-bird-middle-finger-insult-mia-history/ Roman times]], where it was referred to as '''digitus impudicus'''. So, up yours, Brutus!
* ''Young Stalin'' by Simon Sebag Montefiore mentions that the Tsarist secret police were worried about people flying planes full of explosives into public buildings, and started to keep an eye on flying schools. ''90 years before 9/11''
* Creator/HieronymusBosch and PieterBruegelTheElder made a number of very interesting [[{{Surrealism}} surrealist]] paintings... roughly 400 years before the surrealist movement appeared.
* The Yin-Yang symbol of duality is one of the most iconic of all Chinese designs, right? Wrong. And if you're thinking its origins are Japanese or Hindi, you'd be wrong there too. The Chinese started using it, according to the other wiki, in or around the 12th century CE. The Celts were using this symbol as early as 4th century BC... 16 hundred years earlier... and they weren't the first. The Romans were using it a century earlier... and they might have gotten it from the Etruscans. This has been your Mind Blowing for the day.
* The first bioweapons were used by the Mongols, who were known to throw plague-infected corpses over enemy walls to infect the soldiers.
** The Romans had a tamer version: They'd find the enemy's water supply and throw dead animals inside.

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* DistressedDude is not a result of feminism. Many a FairyTale features an heroine rescuing one -- or several. (Who killed the witch in ''Hansel and Gretel''? [[SarcasmMode I'll give you a hint: it wasn't Hansel.]])
* Except for maybe nuclear proliferation and e-mail spam, any problem that seems to be unique to the modern age has been around since the dawn of civilization. War, famine, pestilence, pornography, right-wing crackpots, left-wing crackpots, bad politicians, pollution, gang fights, corruption, its all been done, repeatedly.
** One common crackpot idea is that "TheSixties are to blame for all of modern society's ills". The main one being the drugs subculture; but the Victorians had a ''far'' worse drug problem than has ever existed since.
* If you ask someone when was color photography invented, a typical answer would be something like "I don't know, maybe in the 50's?" The answer would be correct, except that it refers to the wrong century. Color photography was first developed in the 1850's.
* The word "earthling" was first used in 1595.
* {{LEGO}} has had specialized parts and sets devoted to building one particular thing (as opposed to big boxes of random generic bricks) since the early fifties, no matter what that guy in his late twenties who just walked into a toy aisle for the first time in years and thinks TheyChangedItNowItSucks says.
* Supercenter stores (discount department store/supermarket combinations). Although UsefulNotes/{{Walmart}} started opening Supercenters in 1990 (after a false start in 1987), the concept actually dates back to Meijer in 1962 (incidentally, the same year that the first Walmart, UsefulNotes/{{Kmart}}, Target and [[FollowTheLeader many competitors thereof]] opened).
* [[KnightInShiningArmor Cataphracts]] were sporting shiny armor waaay before anyone in Europe had the idea and most certainly [[FollowTheLeader copied it.]]
** Plus, the Byzantines copied them from the Persians.
* Many people thought that the accusations that BarackObama was born in Kenya/Indonesia was the first time a US president accused of being not constitutionally eligible on the grounds of not being a "natural-born citizen". However, the first president with that dubious honor is actually ChesterAArthur who was rumored to have been born in a certain British colony we now call Canada.
* The Masamune is a classic PublicDomainArtifact, referring not just to a single sword but to the collected works of a famous swordsmith of that name who lived in the 13th and 14th centuries, although legends surrounding them have sprung up since then[[note]]most famously as "holy" blades to contrast with the "demonic" Muramasa; these legends do often refer as if to a single blade rather than a set, at least in english translations[[/note]]. Nevertheless, people on ThisVeryWiki have mistaken it for an original creation associated solely with VideoGame/FinalFantasyVII.
* The surge in education about the health risks of tobacco in the last two decades? [[TheHouseOfStuart King James VI]] [[http://www.laits.utexas.edu/poltheory/james/blaste/ tried to beat them to it by a few hundred years]].
* The [[FlippingTheBird middle finger salute]]? It dates back to [[http://www.listener.co.nz/commentary/the-internaut/flip-bird-middle-finger-insult-mia-history/ Roman times]], where it was referred to as '''digitus impudicus'''. So, up yours, Brutus!
* ''Young Stalin'' by Simon Sebag Montefiore mentions that the Tsarist secret police were worried about people flying planes full of explosives into public buildings, and started to keep an eye on flying schools. ''90 years before 9/11''
* The Surgeon's Photograph, taken in 1934, is widely cited as the origin of the Loch Ness Monster myth, when in fact the Loch Ness Monster stories started in the 6th century C. E..
** The St. Columba story is mentioned in almost every retelling of the Loch Ness legend.
* Christianity in Korea dates back long before the Americans arrived in the 1950s - in fact, it goes back to the Joseon Dynasty during the early 1600s, when the writings of a Jesuit missionary visiting China made their way to Korea.
** Similarly, Chritianity in India did not come with the British Empire. Tradition says it was brought by Thomas--yes, the very apostle who wanted to see the scars of Christ.
* Creator/HieronymusBosch and PieterBruegelTheElder made a number of very interesting [[{{Surrealism}} surrealist]] paintings... roughly 400 years before the surrealist movement appeared.
* The term "electric blue" dates back at least as far as 1884 (according to TheOtherWiki), and appears in a SherlockHolmes story ("The Adventure of the Copper Beeches", pub. 1892).
* Writing a prequel to tell the story of the father of the main character of a previous work? [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Rabelais/ François Rabelais]] did this 500 years before George Lucas with ''Gargantua'', the prequel to ''Pantagruel''.
* Likewise, remakes, reboots, sequels and prequels were not invented by Hollywood. It was common practice in ancient Greece and in 17th century France among classical authors to base their plays on well-known episodes of the Trojan war or to write their own version of the existing work of a more ancient author. Moliere's ''The Miser'', for instance, is a remake of a latin play, ''Aulularia'', by Plautus, with some dialogues lifted almost verbatim! The public wanted to see how a new author was going to use the subject material; it didn't matter that the later was not new.
* What about fanboys [[FanSequel writing their]] [[ContinuationFic own sequels]] and prequels [[{{Fanfiction}} to their favorite works]]? Well, there's ''Literature/TheAeneid'', a ContinuationFic of ''Literature/TheIliad'' and ''Literature/TheOdyssey'' written by Roman fanboy Virgil centuries after [[Creator/{{Homer}} the original author]]'s death. Or ''Literature/ParadiseLost'', a {{fanfic}} of Literature/TheBible that explores the events leading up to Genesis...and [[DracoInLeatherPants gives Satan an unusually sympathetic and charismatic portrayal]].
* The term "wormhole" first appeared in Shakespeare's works!
** To Shakespeare and others a "wormhole" was simply a hole made by a worm.
* The beginning of Barack Obama's "Forward"-themed 2012 presidential campaign was accused by detractors of being based in Socialism (the word "forward" allegedly having Socialist leanings), coupled with an appearance in Milwaukee's Master Lock factory in front of a blue flag reading "Wisconsin 1848" supposedly represented a labor union, made controversial by labor unions falling out of favor in U.S. conservative circles - "Forward" has been Wisconsin's official motto since 1851, and while the state flag was edited to include "Wisconsin" and "1848" for clarity in 1979, the coat of arms as a central part of the representation of Wisconsin dates back to 1881, with 1848 as the year Wisconsin became a state.
* MegaCorp might sound like something that will happen in the near future, but an actual MegaCorp has been established as early as the 17th century: [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company The Dutch East India Company]].
* The term "hipster" originated in the early 1940s, referring to those with an interest in jazz. In fact, the term "hippie" is derived from "hipster".
* When you tell people about [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hydroxlarge.jpg Hydrox cookies]], most people would probably say that's it's just a cheap [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Oreo-Two-Cookies.jpg Oreo]] knockoff, but actually Hydrox started in 1908 four years before oreo.
* The Yin-Yang symbol of duality is one of the most iconic of all Chinese designs, right? Wrong. And if you're thinking its origins are Japanese or Hindi, you'd be wrong there too. The Chinese started using it, according to the other wiki, in or around the 12th century CE. The Celts were using this symbol as early as 4th century BC... 16 hundred years earlier... and they weren't the first. The Romans were using it a century earlier... and they might have gotten it from the Etruscans. This has been your Mind Blowing for the day.
* In-line skates go back to the late 18th century, predating parallel roller skates. They were revived as "Rollerblades" in the '80s.
* The first bioweapons were used by the Mongols, who were known to throw plague-infected corpses over enemy walls to infect the soldiers.
** The Romans had a tamer version: They'd find the enemy's water supply and throw dead animals inside.

15th May '13 10:33:49 AM Naram-Sin

Send Naram-Sin a PM notification explaining the badness of natter: natter-fy

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** A representational democracy, where parliamentary representatives were elected on local level (according to one man - one vote rule) and the chief of state was elected by common vote was used between 1573-1795 in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (with the caveat that only nobility had the right to vote, but since Polish nobility was so ridiculously numerous it still made a percentage of potential voters higher than in the First French Republic).
* When the state of Arizona passed a tougher immigration law in 2010, the move was seen as largely controversial. One oft-stated reason was how unprecedented it was and so un-American in general. In actuality, most of Arizona's law mirrors the federal immigration law that had been on the books for ''70 years''.
** To elaborate: Most of the Arizona law was right out of the federal requirements for immigration. However, it was not quite identical. One of the main things that made the more intelligent critics of the AZ law go bananas was the requirement that ''state'' law-enforcement officials ask for documentation when stopping/arresting suspects. It makes a certain amount of sense to have federal law enforcement to do this, since federal law typically involves things moving across state lines and international borders (like drug smuggling) or things harmful to federal interests (like attacking federal officials and facilities), which often involve undocumented foreigners (think cartels and terrorists). Moreover, federal trials are ''expensive'' while deportation proceedings are not, so the US Attorney needs to know this to save Uncle Sam some money. On the other hand, state law enforcement is charged with day-to-day law and order, so it's no more likely that the offender is undocumented than not, meaning that the Arizona law had to include a bit that amounted to permission to engage in racial profiling (otherwise, you'd have to ask ''everyone'' to show their papers). Moreover, deportation hearings are federal matters, so while the state might save money, it shifts the burden for processing those undocumented the state does catch--which would be a ''lot'' more, since you're working off traffic violations and petty theft rather than smuggling--to the federal government. This, combined with the fact that [[AmericanFederalism immigration law is clearly assigned to the federal government by the Constitution]], combines to get at the feds' main complaint about the bill: it's a state usurpation of federal power.

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* The term "decimal" was the name of the base-ten number system for hundreds of years ''before'' the invention in the 17th century of the point-fraction notation with which it's most usually associated. Not surprisingly, since "decimal" is actually the adjective form of the Latin noun ''decem'', "ten".
** The official term for what's usually known as a "decimal" is actually "decimal fraction". As in, a fraction with the denominator being a power of ten.
** The fractional point is itself an example of this trope. Although not introduced to the decimal system until the 17th century, the ancient Babylonians (who had a sexagesimal -- base 60 -- system which was positional (like the decimal system, unlike the Roman system) and thus used 60 "digit" symbols valued 0 to 59) had a fractional point following which symbols represented 60ths, 3600ths and so on.
* The famous story about Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) quickly adding up a series of numbers by matching the first and last one, while apocryphal in and of itself, is supposed to demonstrate his genius - but the method already appears in the Tosafot, a group of commentators on the Literature/{{Talmud}} who lived four hundred years earlier.
** He also first came up with the '[[KineticWeaponsAreJustBetter recent]]' [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coilgun concept]] of MagneticWeapons.
* Parts of special relativity were known well before AlbertEinstein's 1905 paper. The [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transform Lorentz Transform]] was first derived in 1887 by [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woldemar_Voigt Woldemar Voigt]].

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* While the United States might be the first country/empire/kingdom to celebrate and proudly admit to being a melting pot, this has been going on since the rise of city-states albiet on a less global scale. The city of Rome itself was founded by runaway slaves and criminals from all over the Italian peninsula and as the Roman Republic and Roman Empire expanded it added Etruscan, Carthaginian, Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Egyptian, and Persian blood to the mix.
** CyrusTheGreat in the 6th Century BC enthusiastically encouraged multiculturalism throughout the empire he founded, the Achaemenid Persian Empire.
** The history of England itself has been described as being constantly shaped by migrations and diversity ever since 1066, whether they were from France and Germany or the later colonial domains of TheBritishEmpire. In fact, multiculturalism across Britain could be traced to as far back as Roman times, where it's found that legionaries and citizens of African descent resided on the isles...and stayed, making Black British the oldest minority group ''predating the Anglo-Saxons.''

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* Who first turned "it stinks" into a CatchPhrase, [[WesternAnimation/TheCritic Jay Sherman]], or [[Series/MysteryScienceTheater3000 Joel Robinson]] riffing on that guy from ''PodPeople''? Kolenkhov from ''YouCantTakeItWithYou'' beat both of them by several decades.
* Many people have started to use the term "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" jokingly in reference to recent {{Geico}} commercials use of the term. The commercial shows the figure of speech being shown as literal for comedic effet. Most people however, think that the term came from the commercial and have to idea that it actually means anything.
* The word [[http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/misunderestimate misunderestimate]] has a pedigree that goes back long before the time of George W. Bush.
** The word "truthiness", though commonly believed to be a coinage of StephenColbert, in fact dates back to 1824, albeit with a slightly different meaning.
* Amazing though it may seem to those familiar with the works of UweBoll, the [[UsefulNotes/BritishEnglish Britishism]] "bollocks" is ''not'' an eponym.
* The TotallyRadical adjective "groovy" is most commonly associated with TheSixties, but it dates back to the 1940s.
* The slang term "phat" is often thought to have been created recently, some time in TheNineties. In reality, the term has been in use since at least 1963 and was already being used to describe something desirable back then.
* The concept of a backronym is much older than most people think; indeed, the word "backronym" itself is a neologism -- the correct, much-longer-established word is "acrostic". As early as the second century A.D., Christians were using the Greek word "ichthys", meaning fish, as an acrostic for "Iesous Christos Theou Huios Soter" which translates to "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior".
* Most people think AbrahamLincoln coined, "A house divided can't stand," but actually {{Jesus}} did.

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* TheInternet itself is older than most people think. Most people would not have heard of it before the mid-1990s, and thus assume that was roughly the time it came about. The World Wide Web dates from 1991, but it is actually just one of many applications built on top of the actual Internet. Unfortunately, an exact date for the birth of the Internet cannot be given, since it was a continuous development over several decades. Some years which may be considered candidates for this include:
** 1968, When Arpanet was started
** 1969, When the first message ever was sent via Arpanet
** 1974, When the technical core concepts of the Internet were formulated at Stanford University
** 1981, When the Internet Protocol version 4, which is dominant to this day, was introduced
*** For that matter, the Internet itself can basically be seen as "Telegraph 2.0" with a visual display.
* Based on comments on Website/YouTube on the Max Headroom Incident, you'd think that the idea of trolling on the internet is only about 15 years old and that the internet was invented around 1994 (see above for details). Truth is, it dates back to the late 80s at the very least, but back then it was an initiation process for newbies where someone would ask a question everyone knew the answer to for purpose of weeding out the newbies and only the newbies would answer, it was called "trolling for newbies". {{Snopes}} is someone who participated in this early form of trolling. However, the direct ancestor to what's known as trolling today dates back even further, to at least the late 70s, but until the term "trolling" evolved, these people were known as "griefers". Evidence of this behaviour can be found as early as 1981 on Google Groups archives of Usenet.

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* Celebrity endorsement of products was common for popular Roman gladiators. The writers of the ''Film/{{Gladiator}}'' movie considered including that in the script, but thought [[RealityIsUnrealistic it wouldn't fly]].
* Someone on the webite ''The Escapist'''s forums declared that CharlieBrooker was ripping off [[WebAnimation/ZeroPunctuation Yahtzee's act]]. While they may not have known that Brooker had been doing the [[DeadpanSnarker snarky]]-[[TheMeanBrit British]]-[[AccentuateTheNegative slating]] thing for a while, or that ''Screenburn'' and probably ''{{Screenwipe}}'' predate ''WebAnimation/ZeroPunctuation'', it just sounds dumb given that Yahtzee has credited Brooker as an influence on his ZP style.
* Cosplay. There are early examples of a large number of young men [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorrows_of_Young_Werther#Cultural_impact dressing up as the title character]] from Creator/JohannWolfgangVonGoethe's ''Literature/TheSorrowsOfYoungWerther''.
* Rosa Parks was not the first black woman to refuse to give her seat to a white man. Elizabeth Jennings Graham is widely recognized as the first person to do this back in 1854 (although it was a streetcar, not a bus). In 1946, Irene Morgan did the same thing on an actual bus. On March 2, 1955 Claudette Colvin did the same thing. On October 21st of the same year, Mary Louise Smith also did this. Rosa Parks refused her seat on December 1st.
* The United States engaged in wars at a distant land against a Muslim faction. WarOnTerror? How about the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_Wars Barbary Wars]] in the early 19th century?

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* The famous story about Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) quickly adding up a series of numbers by matching the first and last one, while apocryphal in and of itself, is supposed to demonstrate his genius - but the method already appears in the Tosafot, a group of commentators on the Literature/{{Talmud}} who lived four hundred years earlier.
** He also first came up with the '[[KineticWeaponsAreJustBetter recent]]' [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coilgun concept]] of MagneticWeapons.
* Celebrity endorsement of products was common for popular Roman gladiators. The writers of the ''Film/{{Gladiator}}'' movie considered including that in the script, but thought [[RealityIsUnrealistic it wouldn't fly]].
* Someone on the webite ''The Escapist'''s forums declared that CharlieBrooker was ripping off [[WebAnimation/ZeroPunctuation Yahtzee's act]]. While they may not have known that Brooker had been doing the [[DeadpanSnarker snarky]]-[[TheMeanBrit British]]-[[AccentuateTheNegative slating]] thing for a while, or that ''Screenburn'' and probably ''{{Screenwipe}}'' predate ''WebAnimation/ZeroPunctuation'', it just sounds dumb given that Yahtzee has credited Brooker as an influence on his ZP style.
* Cosplay. There are early examples of a large number of young men [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorrows_of_Young_Werther#Cultural_impact dressing up as the title character]] from Creator/JohannWolfgangVonGoethe's ''Literature/TheSorrowsOfYoungWerther''.
* Who first turned "it stinks" into a CatchPhrase, [[WesternAnimation/TheCritic Jay Sherman]], or [[Series/MysteryScienceTheater3000 Joel Robinson]] riffing on that guy from ''PodPeople''? Kolenkhov from ''YouCantTakeItWithYou'' beat both of them by several decades.
* TheInternet itself is older than most people think. Most people would not have heard of it before the mid-1990s, and thus assume that was roughly the time it came about. The World Wide Web dates from 1991, but it is actually just one of many applications built on top of the actual Internet. Unfortunately, an exact date for the birth of the Internet cannot be given, since it was a continuous development over several decades. Some years which may be considered candidates for this include:
** 1968, When Arpanet was started
** 1969, When the first message ever was sent via Arpanet
** 1974, When the technical core concepts of the Internet were formulated at Stanford University
** 1981, When the Internet Protocol version 4, which is dominant to this day, was introduced
*** For that matter, the Internet itself can basically be seen as "Telegraph 2.0" with a visual display.
* Many people have started to use the term "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" jokingly in reference to recent {{Geico}} commercials use of the term. The commercial shows the figure of speech being shown as literal for comedic effet. Most people however, think that the term came from the commercial and have to idea that it actually means anything.
* The use of the asterisk in baseball scoring. Modern fans think it means the player may have (or was caught) cheating, but this only happened at the TurnOfTheMillennium in part to [[http://www.adcouncil.org/newsDetail.aspx?id=241 an anti-steroids campaign]] and [[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33718-2004Dec3.html commentaries]] [[http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/27/weekinreview/27barra.html?_r=1 advocating]] this use. It used to mark a [[http://www.baseball-almanac.com/score2b.shtml great defensive play]], and was once used to denote that Roger Maris had 8 more games to play than Babe Ruth did.
* The word [[http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/misunderestimate misunderestimate]] has a pedigree that goes back long before the time of George W. Bush.
** The word "truthiness", though commonly believed to be a coinage of StephenColbert, in fact dates back to 1824, albeit with a slightly different meaning.
* Amazing though it may seem to those familiar with the works of UweBoll, the [[UsefulNotes/BritishEnglish Britishism]] "bollocks" is ''not'' an eponym.
* Rosa Parks was not the first black woman to refuse to give her seat to a white man. Elizabeth Jennings Graham is widely recognized as the first person to do this back in 1854 (although it was a streetcar, not a bus). In 1946, Irene Morgan did the same thing on an actual bus. On March 2, 1955 Claudette Colvin did the same thing. On October 21st of the same year, Mary Louise Smith also did this. Rosa Parks refused her seat on December 1st.
* Most people assume that the ZombieApocalypse started with George Romero's ''Film/NightOfTheLivingDead'' in 1968, but it can be directly traced to Richard Matheson's ''Literature/IAmLegend'', published in 1954. Romero himself admitted that ''Night of the Living Dead'' was just a rip-off of Matheson's book.
** Before that, the Mesopotamian goddess Inanna/Ishtar was threatening to cause {{Zombie Apocalypse}}s when she didn't get her way in ancient myths.
* Certain signature moves in ProfessionalWrestling are attributed to current wrestlers who use them but in fact were actually around long before said wrestler started using them as a signature. Examples:
* Another ProfessionalWrestling one: the Bella Twins have a gimmick of wearing the same gear and switching with each other during matches to win. Kurt Angle did this twice, using his brother Eric first at Survivor Series 2000 and again on Smackdown in 2003. Though Kurt and Eric weren't twins so it was used mostly as a distraction so Kurt could quickly sneak out a win.
** The Killer Bees (Jim Brunzell and B. Brian Blair) did that in the 80s with masks. The rule of "in a tag match, the legal man must make the pin" was enforced far more then.
* While the United States might be the first country/empire/kingdom to celebrate and proudly admit to being a melting pot, this has been going on since the rise of city-states albiet on a less global scale. The city of Rome itself was founded by runaway slaves and criminals from all over the Italian peninsula and as the Roman Republic and Roman Empire expanded it added Etruscan, Carthaginian, Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Egyptian, and Persian blood to the mix.
** CyrusTheGreat in the 6th Century BC enthusiastically encouraged multiculturalism throughout the empire he founded, the Achaemenid Persian Empire.
** The history of England itself has been described as being constantly shaped by migrations and diversity ever since 1066, whether they were from France and Germany or the later colonial domains of TheBritishEmpire. In fact, multiculturalism across Britain could be traced to as far back as Roman times, where it's found that legionaries and citizens of African descent resided on the isles...and stayed, making Black British the oldest minority group ''predating the Anglo-Saxons.'' 
* The United States engaged in wars at a distant land against a Muslim faction. WarOnTerror? How about the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_Wars Barbary Wars]] in the early 19th century?
* Parts of special relativity were known well before AlbertEinstein's 1905 paper. The [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transform Lorentz Transform]] was first derived in 1887 by [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woldemar_Voigt Woldemar Voigt]].
* Based on comments on Website/YouTube on the Max Headroom Incident, you'd think that the idea of trolling on the internet is only about 15 years old and that the internet was invented around 1994 (see above for details). Truth is, it dates back to the late 80s at the very least, but back then it was an initiation process for newbies where someone would ask a question everyone knew the answer to for purpose of weeding out the newbies and only the newbies would answer, it was called "trolling for newbies". {{Snopes}} is someone who participated in this early form of trolling. However, the direct ancestor to what's known as trolling today dates back even further, to at least the late 70s, but until the term "trolling" evolved, these people were known as "griefers". Evidence of this behaviour can be found as early as 1981 on Google Groups archives of Usenet.
* A couple of examples from the automotive industry:
** In the 00's, GMC introduced an Envoy with a sliding roof and remarked on their innovation in print ads. Shortly afterward, Car And Driver pointed out that Studebaker had the same feature on a station wagon in [[TheSixties the 60's]].
** In the mid-80's, government regulations forced auto manufacturers to install a third brake light into their cars. The folks at Chrysler probably had a good laugh since they had used third brake lights on their cars in the 40's. (Although theirs were mounted on the trunklid instead of the rear window.)
* The TotallyRadical adjective "groovy" is most commonly associated with TheSixties, but it dates back to the 1940s.
* The slang term "phat" is often thought to have been created recently, some time in TheNineties. In reality, the term has been in use since at least 1963 and was already being used to describe something desirable back then.
* When the state of Arizona passed a tougher immigration law in 2010, the move was seen as largely controversial. One oft-stated reason was how unprecedented it was and so un-American in general. In actuality, most of Arizona's law mirrors the federal immigration law that had been on the books for ''70 years''.
** To elaborate: Most of the Arizona law was right out of the federal requirements for immigration. However, it was not quite identical. One of the main things that made the more intelligent critics of the AZ law go bananas was the requirement that ''state'' law-enforcement officials ask for documentation when stopping/arresting suspects. It makes a certain amount of sense to have federal law enforcement to do this, since federal law typically involves things moving across state lines and international borders (like drug smuggling) or things harmful to federal interests (like attacking federal officials and facilities), which often involve undocumented foreigners (think cartels and terrorists). Moreover, federal trials are ''expensive'' while deportation proceedings are not, so the US Attorney needs to know this to save Uncle Sam some money. On the other hand, state law enforcement is charged with day-to-day law and order, so it's no more likely that the offender is undocumented than not, meaning that the Arizona law had to include a bit that amounted to permission to engage in racial profiling (otherwise, you'd have to ask ''everyone'' to show their papers). Moreover, deportation hearings are federal matters, so while the state might save money, it shifts the burden for processing those undocumented the state does catch--which would be a ''lot'' more, since you're working off traffic violations and petty theft rather than smuggling--to the federal government. This, combined with the fact that [[AmericanFederalism immigration law is clearly assigned to the federal government by the Constitution]], combines to get at the feds' main complaint about the bill: it's a state usurpation of federal power.
* The concept of a backronym is much older than most people think; indeed, the word "backronym" itself is a neologism -- the correct, much-longer-established word is "acrostic". As early as the second century A.D., Christians were using the Greek word "ichthys", meaning fish, as an acrostic for "Iesous Christos Theou Huios Soter" which translates to "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior".

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15th May '13 9:33:36 AM Naram-Sin

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* ''[[http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_junkandhow.htm The Junk and the Dhow]]'' by Creator/RudyardKipling gently covers a lot of proudly reinvented bicycles with this trope and then dances on it.

[[folder: Chronology]]
* The term "decimal" was the name of the base-ten number system for hundreds of years ''before'' the invention in the 17th century of the point-fraction notation with which it's most usually associated. Not surprisingly, since "decimal" is actually the adjective form of the Latin noun ''decem'', "ten".
** The official term for what's usually known as a "decimal" is actually "decimal fraction". As in, a fraction with the denominator being a power of ten.
** The fractional point is itself an example of this trope. Although not introduced to the decimal system until the 17th century, the ancient Babylonians (who had a sexagesimal -- base 60 -- system which was positional (like the decimal system, unlike the Roman system) and thus used 60 "digit" symbols valued 0 to 59) had a fractional point following which symbols represented 60ths, 3600ths and so on.
* What is usually called the "Christian" or "Gregorian" calendar was introduced, in substantially its present form, in 45BC -- some 80 years before the birth of Christianity, and ''over 1700 years'' before the Gregorian reform; which in any case was little more than a minor tweak in the frequency of leap-years (decreasing the cumulative error in the calendar from about 1 day in 128 years, to about 1 day in 4000), whereas the Julian reform which gave us the present shape of the calendar was an actual major reform.
* Similar to the above, while the the seven-day week gets a JustSoStory in Literature/TheBible, it actually predates Judaism. It comes from early pagan religions, and each day is devoted to one of the seven celestial objects visible with the naked eye - the sun, moon, and five planets. This is most evident in the English names for the first two[[note]]"first two" in the Judeo-Christian tradition; the international standard [=ISO=] 8601 prescribes that the week begins with Monday[[/note]] -- '''Sun'''day and '''Mo(o)n'''day (the others come from the names of pagan gods - Tuesday is "Tyr's Day", Wednesday is "Woden's Day", etc.). Many scholars think that the reason Christians moved their sabbath from Saturday to Sunday is that most Romans were sun-worshipers, and thus worshiped on Sun Day, and Constantine encouraged Christians to worship on the same day as their neighbors to seem less like outsiders.
[[/folder]]

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[[folder: Science]]
* The concept of evolution is very old. Creator/{{Aristotle}} wrote down theories of natural selection. Charles Darwin's own grandfather also worked on evolution theories. Darwin was the first who clearly explained all the important elements of evolution, as well as a workable concept.
** Though even he didn't complete the process, because he assumed that the popular notions of genetics of his day were right. If traits blended as was commonly assumed, evolution as he described it would not work. Alas, though Mendel published at the same time, his work was not rediscovered and integrated to produce the feasible neo-Darwinism until half a century later. Darwinism was on its last legs before that discovery, because it was too obvious to too many scientists that it did not and could not work.
* The word "evolution" does not appear in ''On the Origin of Species'', and the word "evolve" only appears once at the very end ("[E]ndless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."). Darwin avoided the word because, at the time, the word "evolution" referred to [[LamarckWasRight Lamarck's]] ideas. Darwin preferred the phrase "descent with modification".
* Medieval science, especially at the University in Paris, was a lot more advanced than it gets credit for. Jean Buridan had a theory of inertia similar to Newton's (though with circular motion) by the mid-1300s, and unlike Newton said that God had no need to interfere in celestial motions. Nicole Oresme had theories of, among other things, probability, the subconscious, music, gravity, and, supposedly, evolution. He also had the same proof of uniformly varied motion as Galileo about 250 years before Galileo did, and used "Cartesian" notation about 300 years before Descartes -- and used it to invent analytical geometry, too. What ruined it? The Hundred Years War in France made the Italian schools, where Aristotle's physics had never been questioned, dominant.
* Atomic theory goes back at least to the 4th century BC with the Greek philosophers Leucippus of Miletus and Democritus of Abdera.
** The four classical elements -- Fire, Earth, Water, and Air -- correspond pretty well to the four major states of matter of modern physics -- Plasma, Solid, Liquid, and Gas, respectively.
* Quantum physics is often treated as ''[[PhlebotinumDuJour the next big thing]]'', while it actually &#8236;dates back to the ''nineteenth century'' [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_quantum_mechanics]]. Justified as we still have a rather poor understanding of it and scientist believing in a major breakthrough being 'just around the corner' since the mid-eighties.
** Quantization dates back to the 19th century, but almost all of what we know as "quantum mechanics" (quantum states, operators, etc.) is less than a hundred years old. Many important developments are much more recent. For instance, the six quark model dates only to 1973.
* Pythagorean Theorem was an already known fact long before Pythagoras' time.
* Not only was the true shape of the Earth known since ancient times, the actual ''size'' was known as well (about 25,000 miles), and not due to Columbus. In fact, Columbus' expedition was rejected several times because he had severely ''underestimated'' the distance to Asia, and his potential patrons knew it.

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[[folder: Settings]]
* Gay bars. There were certainly fewer of these than there are today, [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_bar but people had them]]. Remember TheRoaringTwenties?
** Likewise, leather bars date to the return of U.S. soldiers in WWII largely on the West Coast taking up residence in biker bars - both masculine types of gay men dating back to time immemorial.
* Shopping malls were the product of 50s American suburban consumerism, right? Providence, Rhode Island opened an indoor shopping center called the Westminster Arcade in 1828. Cleveland, Ohio opened its own Arcade in 1890 (here's what it looked like [[http://www.shorpy.com/node/7402 in 1901]]), and before them indoor markets were built in England and Russia.
** It's true. The Brits called them "market halls."
** If a shopping mall is a covered area containing a number of stores, there was [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burlington_Arcade one]] in London as early as 1819.
*** The ''bazaars'' or ''Souqs'' of the Islamic and Indian empires were shopping malls in all but name and their modern descendants, judging by what goods they sell, are the counterpart of Western malls.
*** And in Rome before the birth of Christ.
* The internet would lead you to believe that the FurryFandom is some new fad (or something of the [[TheNineties 90s]]), but really, it's actually older than the internet we know of today. The first furry convention was actually held in 1982, but, there were "furries" known back in the [[TheSixties 60s]], (and a lot of old cartoons from the 20s to the 40s had mostly {{Funny Animal}}s as characters).
[[/folder]]

[[folder: Technology]]
* The titular ''Theatre/GotzVonBerlichingen'' referenced bellow in Terms and Phrases has an iron prosthetic hand. Their history goes back centuries.
* Folding chairs are really old. [[http://img269.imageshack.us/img269/1071/p1020418n.jpg Really really old]].
%% If anyone knows the history of that chair, it looks awesome. Example should be expanded, though.
[[/folder]]

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[[folder: Toys]]
* Troll dolls weren't introduced in TheNineties, they were re-introduced. These toys actually date back to 1963.
* When Dubreq (makers of the Stylophone) introduced the Super Stylophone circa 1971, it flopped (as could have been predicted, since it lacked both the qualities which made the original such a hit -- cheapness and simplicity). So they withdrew it, only to reintroduce it four years later as a "new hi-fi synthesiser" -- a description almost hilariously wrong on all three counts, since "hi-fi" is not applicable to non-imitative sound ''generation'', and it was a divider organ, not a synth.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Web Original]]
* Some would think TheOtherWiki was the first wiki site. The term originates with the PortlandPatternRepository, and several other wikis, including everything.com and [=h2g2=] (based on ''Franchise/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy''), also predated the better-known encyclopedia.
* Uncyclopedia has a running gag about Kitten Huffing. Ween mentioned inhaling kitties in a song (Marble Tulip Juicy Tree) in 1989!
** Also mentioned in a 1996 ''FatherTed'' episode; a man was allergic to cats, and inhaled kittens to punish himself for his sins.
[[/folder]]

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* Medieval science, especially at the University in Paris, was a lot more advanced than it gets credit for. Jean Buridan had a theory of inertia similar to Newton's (though with circular motion) by the mid-1300s, and unlike Newton said that God had no need to interfere in celestial motions. Nicole Oresme had theories of, among other things, probability, the subconscious, music, gravity, and, supposedly, evolution. He also had the same proof of uniformly varied motion as Galileo about 250 years before Galileo did, and used "Cartesian" notation about 300 years before Descartes -- and used it to invent analytical geometry, too. What ruined it? The Hundred Years War in France made the Italian schools, where Aristotle's physics had never been questioned, dominant.
* Atomic theory goes back at least to the 4th century BC with the Greek philosophers Leucippus of Miletus and Democritus of Abdera.
** The four classical elements -- Fire, Earth, Water, and Air -- correspond pretty well to the four major states of matter of modern physics -- Plasma, Solid, Liquid, and Gas, respectively.
* The term "decimal" was the name of the base-ten number system for hundreds of years ''before'' the invention in the 17th century of the point-fraction notation with which it's most usually associated. Not surprisingly, since "decimal" is actually the adjective form of the Latin noun ''decem'', "ten".
** The official term for what's usually known as a "decimal" is actually "decimal fraction". As in, a fraction with the denominator being a power of ten.
** The fractional point is itself an example of this trope. Although not introduced to the decimal system until the 17th century, the ancient Babylonians (who had a sexagesimal -- base 60 -- system which was positional (like the decimal system, unlike the Roman system) and thus used 60 "digit" symbols valued 0 to 59) had a fractional point following which symbols represented 60ths, 3600ths and so on.
* What is usually called the "Christian" or "Gregorian" calendar was introduced, in substantially its present form, in 45BC -- some 80 years before the birth of Christianity, and ''over 1700 years'' before the Gregorian reform; which in any case was little more than a minor tweak in the frequency of leap-years (decreasing the cumulative error in the calendar from about 1 day in 128 years, to about 1 day in 4000), whereas the Julian reform which gave us the present shape of the calendar was an actual major reform.
* Similar to the above, while the the seven-day week gets a JustSoStory in Literature/TheBible, it actually predates Judaism. It comes from early pagan religions, and each day is devoted to one of the seven celestial objects visible with the naked eye - the sun, moon, and five planets. This is most evident in the English names for the first two[[note]]"first two" in the Judeo-Christian tradition; the international standard [=ISO=] 8601 prescribes that the week begins with Monday[[/note]] -- '''Sun'''day and '''Mo(o)n'''day (the others come from the names of pagan gods - Tuesday is "Tyr's Day", Wednesday is "Woden's Day", etc.). Many scholars think that the reason Christians moved their sabbath from Saturday to Sunday is that most Romans were sun-worshipers, and thus worshiped on Sun Day, and Constantine encouraged Christians to worship on the same day as their neighbors to seem less like outsiders.
* Shopping malls were the product of 50s American suburban consumerism, right? Providence, Rhode Island opened an indoor shopping center called the Westminster Arcade in 1828. Cleveland, Ohio opened its own Arcade in 1890 (here's what it looked like [[http://www.shorpy.com/node/7402 in 1901]]), and before them indoor markets were built in England and Russia.
** It's true. The Brits called them "market halls."
** If a shopping mall is a covered area containing a number of stores, there was [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burlington_Arcade one]] in London as early as 1819.
*** The ''bazaars'' or ''Souqs'' of the Islamic and Indian empires were shopping malls in all but name and their modern descendants, judging by what goods they sell, are the counterpart of Western malls.
*** And in Rome before the birth of Christ.
* The internet would lead you to believe that the FurryFandom is some new fad (or something of the [[TheNineties 90s]]), but really, it's actually older than the internet we know of today. The first furry convention was actually held in 1982, but, there were "furries" known back in the [[TheSixties 60s]], (and a lot of old cartoons from the 20s to the 40s had mostly {{Funny Animal}}s as characters).
* Folding chairs are really old. [[http://img269.imageshack.us/img269/1071/p1020418n.jpg Really really old]].
%% If anyone knows the history of that chair, it looks awesome. Example should be expanded, though.
* Quantum physics is often treated as ''[[PhlebotinumDuJour the next big thing]]'', while it actually &#8236;dates back to the ''nineteenth century'' [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_quantum_mechanics]]. Justified as we still have a rather poor understanding of it and scientist believing in a major breakthrough being 'just around the corner' since the mid-eighties.
** Quantization dates back to the 19th century, but almost all of what we know as "quantum mechanics" (quantum states, operators, etc.) is less than a hundred years old. Many important developments are much more recent. For instance, the six quark model dates only to 1973.
* These days Creator/{{IBM}} might well be thought of as a computer hardware company, but it actually predates electronics by a long way. The name dates from 1924 (it had been CTR, or Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation before), while the company itself dates from 1911, and was an amalgamation of several existing companies, which date to 1885, 1900 and 1901.
** Early products included cheese cutters, meat choppers, and scales.
** This is actually the case with many modern big companies specializing in modern hardware and software. For example, Nokia is one of the biggest producers of cellphones in the world. It was founded in 1865. Or how about Nintendo? Surely the company that gave us the NES and Mario cannot be all that old? Perhaps from the 1970s? Nope, founded in 1889.
* ''[[http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_junkandhow.htm The Junk and the Dhow]]'' by Creator/RudyardKipling gently covers a lot of proudly reinvented bicycles with this trope and then dances on it.
* Pythagorean Theorem was an already known fact long before Pythagoras' time.
* Not only was the true shape of the Earth known since ancient times, the actual ''size'' was known as well (about 25,000 miles), and not due to Columbus. In fact, Columbus' expedition was rejected several times because he had severely ''underestimated'' the distance to Asia, and his potential patrons knew it.
* Speaking in the [[ThirdPersonPerson third person]] is OlderThanFeudalism. Julius Caesar refers to himself in the third person throughout his history of the Gallic Wars (a tendency parodied by ''{{Asterix}}'').
* The expression "no go" sounds like some "hip," mid-20th-century urban expression. In fact, its roots ''are'' urban - but it was being used on the East Coast as early as 1838! (Read all about it at [[http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/503/what-does-ok-stand-for 'What does "OK" stand for?']].) And for that matter, by the 1840s it was already considered funny to deliberately misspell the word as [[XtremeKoolLetterz "know go"]].
* [[LikeIsLikeAComma Using the word "like" as a meaningless place-holder while you try to think of a more appropriate expression]] (similar to "you know" or "whatever") is often thought to have originated with teenagers in the [[TheEighties 1980s]]. It is in fact much older. MarilynMonroe uses the expression when talking with Tony Curtis in the beach scene in ''SomeLikeItHot'', which was released in 1959 - and, for that matter, is ''set'' in [[TheRoaringTwenties 1929]]!

15th May '13 9:11:38 AM Naram-Sin

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[[folder: Religion]]
* Many people believe that theistic evolution was created after Darwin's ''On the Origin of Species'' proposed the concept of Evolution as a way to fit Genesis with current science. Few know that the Roman Catholic Church accepted a concept very close to theistic evolution nearly 500 years before ''On the Origin of Species'' was ever published. St. Thomas Aquinas likened God's creation to a farmer who planted a seed and observed the plant growing and changing over time. The works that featured this concept are actually the reason he is honored as a saint.
* The concept of "X" as an abbreviation for Christ (e.g. "Xmas") is OlderThanFeudalism, dating from the Roman persecutions of early Christians who'd use the Greek letter &#967; (chi), the first letter of Christ written in Greek, as code.
* The traditional concern about Christmas becoming too "commercialized" is as old as the modern conception of the holiday itself. For instance, Harriet Beecher Stowe complained about as much in her 1850 book, ''The First Christmas in New England''.

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[[folder: Mythology and Folklore]]
* Though [[AlienAbduction abduction of humans by aliens]] wasn't commonly reported before the 1960s, people would tell tales of having been abducted by witches on broomsticks (OlderThanPrint) or spirits/ghosts/demons (OlderThanFeudalism). Alien abductions and sightings bear uncanny resemblance to the fairy encounters of the old myths. The phenomenon of [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis sleep paralysis]] only goes halfway in explaining the experiences, but clearly something in the human brain has a habit of creating illusions of otherworldly encounters.
** There were some "UFO" sightings [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO#Pre-modern_reports as far back as the 19th century]], with alien "balloons" and "airships" instead of "flying saucers."
** And then there is Agobard of Lyons, who wrote about the peasants belief in flying ships coming from "Magonia, the land beyond the clouds inhabited by wizards" and how they ruined crops and kidnapped people only to return them to the same place after some time (maybe even years). All this ''right in Carolingian times'' (roughly 800AD to 1000AD).
** Crop circles are often considered a recent occurrence, and in fact many people assume they're all a hoax because two Englishmen admitted to faking a ton of them in the nineties. However, reports of crop circle-like phenomena go back at least to the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mowing-Devil Mowing Devil]] in 1678.
* Tiamat as a dragon is both OlderThanTheyThink ''and'' NewerThanTheyThink. In the original mythology, she wasn't a dragon, but ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons'', contrary to common citation, didn't invent this misconception, although it did popularize it greatly. It actually owes to a misinterpretation of the ''Literature/EnumaElish'' -- which prominently identifies her as the mother of dragons and sea serpents -- combined with conflation with the related Ugaritic deity Lotan, who '''was''' a dragon.

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[[folder: Names]]
* The name ''Franchise/{{Conan|TheBarbarian}}'' was not invented by Creator/RobertEHoward. It is an old Irish name dating back to TheDarkAges, which is where the Irish-descended Creator/ArthurConanDoyle and Series/{{Conan}} O'Brien derive it from.
* The name "Wendy" is commonly attributed to J.M. Barrie's ''PeterPan'' and it's true he popularized the name, but the name was recorded as being used in the US as early as the 1820s, about twenty years after Barrie was born.
** "Wendy" has an alternative etymology. "Gw-" names are common in Welsh; a typical opening prefix is ''Gwen-''. ''Gwenda'' is perectly possible, and King Arthur's wife in Welsh was ''Gwyneddfa" - Guinevere. ''Gwendolyn ''is a girls' name that can be shortened to something sounding like "Gwendy", or sometimes "wendy".
** Barrie got it from his friend Margaret Henley. About three at the time (she died at five), she called him "my fwendy" and then "my wendy". Since Barrie popularized it, it's also become a nickname for "Melinda". Small children are responsible for a lot of nicknames, eh.

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[[folder: Politics]]
* The idea of "glasnost", namely partially opening up a system to protect its ultimate survival, predates Gorbachev by over a century.
* Thanks to a certain John O'Sullivan (the man who also gave us the phrase "manifest destiny"), a lot of people think the United States was a "great experiment in liberty." They forget that the founding fathers were looking to the concepts of democracy/representative democracy found in the Greek ''poleis'' and the Roman ''Republic'' (which dates back to 509 BC). There's a ''reason'' why so much architecture in Washington DC mimics Greco-Roman style.
** A form of representative democracy has been practiced by the Iroquois Confederation since the sixteenth century, while a similar system (the Alting) also existed in Iceland since 930 -- though in their original forms, they may have been closer to oligarchies, as they were councils of warrior-elites.
%% I would object to the troper who stuffed a first-person rant here "objecting" to the use of the term "oligarchy." Which is why I've removed it.
%% I switched a third subpoint to a secondary because it stood well enough on its own.
** A representational democracy, where parliamentary representatives were elected on local level (according to one man - one vote rule) and the monarch was elected by common vote was used between 1573-1795 in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (with the caveat that only nobility had the right to vote, which still made the percentage of voters higher than in First French Republic).

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[[folder:Religion]]
* Many people believe that theistic evolution was created after Darwin's ''On the Origin of Species'' proposed the concept of Evolution as a way to fit Genesis with current science. Few know that the Roman Catholic Church accepted a concept very close to theistic evolution nearly 500 years before ''On the Origin of Species'' was ever published. St. Thomas Aquinas likened God's creation to a farmer who planted a seed and observed the plant growing and changing over time. The works that featured this concept are actually the reason he is honored as a saint.
* The concept of "X" as an abbreviation for Christ (e.g. "Xmas") is OlderThanFeudalism, dating from the Roman persecutions of early Christians who'd use the Greek letter &#967; (chi), the first letter of Christ written in Greek, as code.
* The traditional concern about Christmas becoming too "commercialized" is as old as the modern conception of the holiday itself. For instance, Harriet Beecher Stowe complained about as much in her 1850 book, ''The First Christmas in New England''.

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[[folder:Other]]
* Many of the symbols, rituals and other aspects of Nazi Germany actually dated back from as far as thousands of years before Nazi Germany was even established. Unfortunately, this led to [[SymbologyResearchFailure these symbols]] [[SmallReferencePools becoming taboo]] and (at least partially) falling out of use. The most famous example is the swastika, which is actually a major symbol in several cultures, including the religions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Christianity and until Hitler co-opted it, it didn't in fact have anything to do with racism -- though the swastika can "spiral" both clockwise and counterclockwise while the Nazi version only runs counterclockwise, both versions are now associated by many with the Nazis.
** Mussolini and Hitler were often openly saying that they imagined their countries as modern versions of, correspondingly, the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, which has made elements of both taboo. In Italy, the fasces (an ancient Roman symbol) have been removed from many emblems due to the fascist connotations, and the Roman salute has also suffered a similar fate.
** Speaking of the swastika, prior to the rise of Nazism the swastika was used in its "good luck" context in architecture for many buildings and as an emblem in several European armed forces (most notably the inter-war and early WWII Finnish Air Force). These mostly copied the original look of the swastika, while the Nazis made their version deliberately different from the others. Still, the unfortunate connotations with the Nazi regime have made the swastika a banned symbol in Europe (though you can routinely see it in its original form in various Asian countries, where the connotations with the Nazi version aren't as strong).
** In the early 20th century, in the US, the swastika was widely used as a good luck sign (alongside the horseshoe, the four-leaf clover and the wishbone) on everything from playing cards to coins to souvenir spoons!
** Prior to the rise of Nazism, the US Pledge of Allegiance involved stretching out one's hand towards the flag, similar to the Ave salute. This gesture was dropped by [=WW2=], for obvious reasons.

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[[folder: Terms and Phrases]]
* Adam from ''Series/MythBusters'' is known for popularizing the line "I reject your reality, and substitute my own", even to the point of wearing a T-Shirt reading that (a custom-made gift from a fan in Romania) on the show. However, the line actually comes from the 1985 Richard Moll sci-fi horror movie ''The Dungeonmaster''. This line is the only good thing to come from it.
* The standard linguistic joke of spelling "fish" G-H-O-T-I ("gh" as in "rough", "o" as in "women", and "ti" as in "nation") is usually attributed to Creator/GeorgeBernardShaw. While Shaw was interested in spelling reform, this particular joke can be dated back to at least 1855 -- the year before Shaw was born.
* The phrase "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" has been attributed to everyone and everything from U2 to one of those Murphy's Law books. It's been definitively dated back to Irina Dunn in 1970, while she was a student at the university of Sydney, Australia. It was a paraphrase of an even older phrase, "Man needs religion [or "God"] like a fish needs a bicycle."
* TheOtherWiki goes into the usual humorously serious detail on how "YourMom" jokes are older than people think; used, for example, by Shakespeare.
* [[InSovietRussiaTropeMocksYou "In Soviet Russia" jokes]] are older than Yakov Smirnoff. In fact, ColePorter would have you know they're older than the ColdWar.
* The word "Aryan" to refer to the prehistoric people who spoke Indo-European has been dropped for "Proto-Indo-European." While [[HistoryMarchesOn the work of historical linguists]] might have had something to do with it, the fact that ThoseWackyNazis are ''all over'' the connotations for that word most certainly has a hand as well. The word "Aryan" is very old. It appears in the oldest text in Indic, the ''Rigveda'', the oldest portions of which date from approximately 1500 BC, and in the oldest text in Iranian, the ''Avesta'', dating from around 1000 BC. [[NewerThanTheyThink What is new]] is applying the word to non-Indo-Iranians, which started in the 19th century.
** Bonus fact: "Aryan" and "Iran" come from the same word meaning "noble". The relation is more obvious if you pronounce "aryan" correctly: arr-yahn (nearest IPA for English /&#593;&#633;.j&#593;n/)
* The phrase "trick out" seems like an example of modern, urban slang. Actually, John Austin used it in ''The Province of Jurisprudence Determined'', first published in 1832, and the phrase is probably much older. It's even used in the modern sense of [[http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=trick+ out "to adorn or decorate in an extravagant or gaudy manner"]].
* Another unexpectedly old phrase: "I guess". ''Creator/GeoffreyChaucer'' used it, in the modern sense, in ''Literature/TheCanterburyTales''.
* There are many, many turns of phrase from This Very Wiki which are OlderThanTheyThink. LampshadeHanging is chief among these. There was an amusing example on KangarooCourt where someone assumed the PhoenixWright localization team were tropers because they used that phrase. And, if this wiki is the context in which you've learned the words "deconstruction", "subversion" or even "trope", it's advisible to look them up in a dictionary before trying to use them elsewhere.
* In his 1773 drama ''Theatre/GotzVonBerlichingen'', writer Creator/JohannWolfgangVonGoethe attributes a 1520-ish use of the German variant of "kiss my arse" to the eponymous Swabian knight.
** Chaucer's Miller's Tale (d. 1400): "[[MiddleEnglish But with his mouth he kiste hir naked ers]]" -- and this is not YeOldeButcheredeEnglishe.
* People from Spanish and Portugese-speaking countries often [[FlameWar accuse]] U.S. citizens of calling themselves "American" out of ignorance [[InsaneTrollLogic and]]/or deliberate arrogance -- as if Americans knowingly decided to call themselves that just to spite everyone else in North and South America. What they don't realize is that the demonym "American" has been used to mean "person of European descent living in British America" in the English language since at ''least'' the 1640s, as recorded in ''The English-American: A New Survey of the West Indies'' by Thomas Gage. That's over a full ''century'' before the Declaration of Independence, people.
** The United States was the ''first'' country established out of European colonies in either North or South America. Considering that (what are now) American citizens had been called Americans for over a century by 1776, and there were no other independent but culturally European countries in the Americas established at the time, "United States ''of'' America" is ''way'' less presumptuous than detractors claim.

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* Though [[AlienAbduction abduction of humans by aliens]] wasn't commonly reported before the 1960s, people would tell tales of having been abducted by witches on broomsticks (OlderThanPrint) or spirits/ghosts/demons (OlderThanFeudalism). Alien abductions and sightings bear uncanny resemblance to the fairy encounters of the old myths. The phenomenon of [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis sleep paralysis]] only goes halfway in explaining the experiences, but clearly something in the human brain has a habit of creating illusions of otherworldly encounters.
** There were some "UFO" sightings [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO#Pre-modern_reports as far back as the 19th century]], with alien "balloons" and "airships" instead of "flying saucers."
** And then there is Agobard of Lyons, who wrote about the peasants belief in flying ships coming from "Magonia, the land beyond the clouds inhabited by wizards" and how they ruined crops and kidnapped people only to return them to the same place after some time (maybe even years). All this ''right in Carolingian times'' (roughly 800AD to 1000AD).
** Crop circles are often considered a recent occurrence, and in fact many people assume they're all a hoax because two Englishmen admitted to faking a ton of them in the nineties. However, reports of crop circle-like phenomena go back at least to the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mowing-Devil Mowing Devil]] in 1678.
* Graffiti is pretty damn old -- Pompeii (yes, ''that'' one) was famous for it. Quite a bit of it involves sex, and is downright [[http://www.homepagedaily.com/Pages/article6340-graffiti-from-pompei.aspx hilarious.]] {{NSFW}}.
** In the show ''The Naked Archaeologist'', host Simcha Jacobovici once presented evidence that non-pictorial written language was first invented by Jewish rebels in Egypt as a code their enemies couldn't read, and part of his evidence was graffiti in an ancient Egyptian work camp reading "El [God] save me." So our alphabet could have been created ''specifically for'' graffiti.
** The theory that the alphabet was invented by the Jews in Egypt is also rather old - there is a [[http://www.ozon.ru/context/detail/id/1932521/ 1903 Russian book]] claiming that.
* Tiamat as a dragon is both OlderThanTheyThink ''and'' NewerThanTheyThink. In the original mythology, she wasn't a dragon, but ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons'', contrary to common citation, didn't invent this misconception, although it did popularize it greatly. It actually owes to a misinterpretation of the ''Literature/EnumaElish'' -- which prominently identifies her as the mother of dragons and sea serpents -- combined with conflation with the related Ugaritic deity Lotan, who '''was''' a dragon.
* There are many, many turns of phrase from This Very Wiki which are OlderThanTheyThink. LampshadeHanging is chief among these. There was an amusing example on KangarooCourt where someone assumed the PhoenixWright localization team were tropers because they used that phrase. And, if this wiki is the context in which you've learned the words "deconstruction", "subversion" or even "trope", it's advisible to look them up in a dictionary before trying to use them elsewhere.
* In his 1773 drama ''Theatre/GotzVonBerlichingen'', writer Creator/JohannWolfgangVonGoethe attributes a 1520-ish use of the German variant of "kiss my arse" to the eponymous Swabian knight.
** Chaucer's Miller's Tale (d. 1400): "[[MiddleEnglish But with his mouth he kiste hir naked ers]]" -- and this is not YeOldeButcheredeEnglishe.
** Also, the self-same "Götz" had a iron prosthetic hand, which makes those OlderThanTheyThink as well.

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[[folder: Settings]]

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** Likewise, leather bars date to the return of U.S. soliders in WWII largely on the West Coast taking up residence in biker bars - both masculine types of gay men dating back to time immemorial.
* The name ''Franchise/{{Conan|TheBarbarian}}'' was not invented by Creator/RobertEHoward. It is an old Irish name dating back to TheDarkAges, which is where the Irish-descended Creator/ArthurConanDoyle and Series/{{Conan}} O'Brien derive it from.
* Although the modern popular conception of the kilt associates it exclusively with Scotland (where it is even NewerThanTheyThink), the kilt is actually one of the oldest known garments, predated only by the loincloth. Depictions of kilts have been found in early Dynastic Egypt (roughly 3000 BC), where they were one of the most commonly worn garments among the upper classes (slaves and laborers wore loincloths). They were typically short and made from linen. Wool kilts were the most common male garment in Minoan-period Crete (2700-1450 BC), and were adopted by Mycenaean Greece (1600-1100 BC).
** The standard uniform of the historical Greek military's ''Evzone'' troops was a white kilt known as a ''fustanella''. The elite ceremonial Proedriki Froura (Presidential Guard) unit still wears the traditional fustanella as part of their uniform.
* Many people think that eating international cuisine is something that came about in the 1980's. England's first Indian restaurant opened in 1837, the year Victoria ascended the throne. Granted, India wasn't exactly foreign to Britons then...
* Thanks to a certain John O'Sullivan (the man who also gave us the phrase "manifest destiny"), a lot of people think the United States was a "great experiment in liberty." They forget that the founding fathers were looking to the concepts of democracy/representative democracy found in the Greek ''poleis'' and the Roman ''Republic'' (which dates back to 509 BC). There's a ''reason'' why so much architecture in Washington DC mimics Greco-Roman style.
** A form of representative democracy has been practiced by the Iroquois Confederation since the sixteenth century, while a similar system (the Alting) also existed in Iceland since 930 -- though in their original forms, they may have been closer to oligarchies, as they were councils of warrior-elites.
%% I would object to the troper who stuffed a first-person rant here "objecting" to the use of the term "oligarchy." Which is why I've removed it.
%% I switched a third subpoint to a secondary because it stood well enough on its own.
** A representational democracy, where parliamentary representatives were elected on local level (according to one man - one vote rule) and the monarch was elected by common vote was used between 1573-1795 in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (with the caveat that only nobility had the right to vote, which still made the percentage of voters higher than in First French Republic).
* Speaking of the United States, people from Spanish and Portugese-speaking countries often [[FlameWar accuse]] U.S. citizens of calling themselves "American" out of ignorance [[InsaneTrollLogic and]]/or deliberate arrogance -- as if Americans knowingly decided to call themselves that just to spite everyone else in North and South America. What they don't realize is that the demonym "American" has been used to mean "person of European descent living in British America" in the English language since at ''least'' the 1640s, as recorded in ''The English-American: A New Survey of the West Indies'' by Thomas Gage. That's over a full ''century'' before the Declaration of Independence, people.
** Related: the United States was the ''first'' country established out of European colonies in either North or South America. Considering that (what are now) American citizens had been called Americans for over a century by 1776, and there were no other "European-style" countries established at the time, "United States ''of'' America" is ''way'' less presumptuous than detractors claim.
* The name "Wendy" is commonly attributed to J.M. Barrie's ''PeterPan'' and it's true he popularized the name, but the name was recorded as being used in the US as early as the 1820s, about twenty years after Barrie was born.
** "Wendy" has an alternative etymology. "Gw-" names are common in Welsh; a typical opening prefix is ''Gwen-''. ''Gwenda'' is perectly possible, and King Arthur's wife in Welsh was ''Gwyneddfa" - Guinevere. ''Gwendolyn ''is a girls' name that can be shortened to something sounding like "Gwendy", or sometimes "wendy".
** Barrie got it from his friend Margaret Henley. About three at the time (she died at five), she called him "my fwendy" and then "my wendy". Since Barrie popularized it, it's also become a nickname for "Melinda". Small children are responsible for a lot of nicknames, eh.

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** Likewise, leather bars date to the return of U.S. soldiers in WWII largely on the West Coast taking up residence in biker bars - both masculine types of gay men dating back to time immemorial.
[[/folder]]

[[folder: Theatre]]
* StepfordSuburbia is a subversion of [[TheFifties 1950s]] sitcoms, right? ''Trouble In Tahiti'' dates this cynical genre back to 1952.
[[/folder]]

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