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Hello, sweetness. We are time travellers pilgrims, here in your nation on business.
— R. A. Lafferty, And Read the Flesh Between the Lines
The term "Future Perfect" has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.
People in the future tend to misunderstand past culture in funny ways. The further one goes into the future, the more distorted history seems to become. Apparently, history is the one science that gets worse rather than better in the distant future (though sometimes the fall of civilization destroyed all the data). Also, as time goes on, language shifts and evolves, while the historical data might not. In three hundred years, how many people will know what a Cotton Gin was for? How many people will actually be able to identify one? How many people will think it's booze made from distilled cotton? How many people already do?
A little strange when it appears in societies that use Time Travel, since they could always just go back and check.
Compare And Man Grew Proud. Often occurs in concert with Days Of Future Past. When present-day writers get the past wrong, it's Anachronism Stew; similarly, when past writers predicted the then-future/now-past badly, that's Zeerust.
Examples:
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Comic Books
- Members of DC's Legion of Super Heroes, transported a thousand years into the past to 1990s America, mistake a fairly average wall for the Great Wall of China.
- A lampshading from the Post-Zero Crisis Legion of Super-Heroes. A museum curator in the 30th century tells visitors: "-and of all the surviving structures of the second millennium, we know the most about the Alamo. For example, it was here that Panamanian strongman George Washington wrote his classic poem, "The Raven"-"
- Transmetropolitan takes place in a future where no one even knows for sure what year it is. When Spider tells a presidential candidate who just quoted Tennyson's Ulysses that it was Bobby Kennedy's favorite poem, his campaign manager says, "I'm sorry, who?"
- When Buffy got sent to the distant future, she was shocked that all records of Slayers are gone, and no one has any knowledge of magic or demons. The Slayer of this timeline, Fray, has no idea where her powers came from. Also, terms are extremely different. For example, vampires are called lurks. While driving a flying car, Buffy tries to ask where the brake is, only for Fray to answer, "The what?"
Film
- In Woody Allen's Sleeper, future scientists question Woody Allen's character about a number of things from the 70s, and discuss their theories concerning those objects with him. Their ideas are almost entirely nonsense.
- Unfortunately, Woody's explanations don't help matters.
- The Time Masheen in Idiocracy. "1939, when Charlie Chaplin and his evil Nazi regime enslaved Europe and tried to take over the world." With dinosaurs.
- Particularly ironic in that, though Chaplin looked like Adolf Hitler, he was actually called (perhaps rightly?) a communist after his later films. And he was Jewish.
- In the opening of Star Trek V The Final Frontier, Spock roasts "Marsh Melons" over the campfire, with some explanation of how they are traditional when camping.
- This, along with a number of other wallbangers from the movie, was retconned in the Novelization. McCoy edited computer records of classic camping activities when he learned Spock was going with them. Spock realized the records had been altered, but played along so as not to spoil the experience.
Literature
- In Peter Ackroyd's The Plato Papers, set in the far future, the titular character is a Socratic orator as well as a student and teacher history. He specializes in studying our own age, which he loves to expound on. Most of the works of the great author Charles Dickens have been lost, except one: the novel The Origin of Species brilliantly satirizes the attitudes of the time while pretending to talk about natural phenomena. Most of what they know about the past land of "America" comes from a volume Tales and Histories retrieved from a casket labeled "E. A. Poe. American. 1809-1849". They believe that the inscription stands for "Eminent American Poet", indicating that "Poet" was a title given to historians as well as the writers of verse. It was a gloomy age— corroborated by other information that people of our time were obsessed with "webs" and "nets". They also uncovered an (ancient to them, far future to us) statue of a goddess inscribed with a map of the London Underground, from a time when the city of London was worshipped as a deity. (None of this gives away any plot, by the way.). The book works the other way around, as well, showing how different our conception of "reality" is from what is known in this far future time.
- In Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels (after which Psychohistorical Crisis is modeled), the Empire's inhabitants don't even know what planet humans evolved on.
- In William R. Forstchen's novels based on Wing Commander, a few references indicate that they take certain movie stars to have been the people they portrayed in their films (if memory serves, they think John Wayne was actually a cowboy) although there is some confusion about why the "historical evidence" (movies) is so self-contradictory. Additionally, the Kilrathi think Bugs Bunny is some kind of important figure, and sometimes insult him in an attempt to taunt human pilots, much to the amusement of the humans.
- That's most likely a reference to Enemy Mine, where the human jokingly quotes Mickey Mouse and the Drak never understands that he isn't really a human philosopher. In the movie, at least, this leads to a half-heartwarming, half-hilarious scene where the human, in an argument, exclaims, "Well maybe you forgot about what you said about Mickey Mouse!" and the Drak apologizes.
- In Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat series, the long-lost ancestral home of humanity is referred to as "Earth, or maybe Dirt". They're not all that convinced about the claim, either.
- In Donald Kingsbury's novel Psychohistorical Crisis the inhabitants of the Galactic Empire thousands of years in the future have a legend stating that slavery ended on Earth when the slave Lincoln went up to Mount Sinai to receive the Magna Carta from God. They also believe the Empire invented the metric system and had to force it on Earth. Oddly, they know a considerable amount about Sumerian culture because the stone tablets they wrote on have lasted much longer than the books and discs that we recorded our information on.
- David Macaulay's Motel of the Mysteries is the story of a group of far-future quasi-Victorian archaeologists who uncover the buried remains of a 20th-Century American motel and decide that it's a sacred burial site.
- In Eternity Road by Jack Mc Devitt, a future civilization studies the religious monuments of the past. Highways. They must have been of great spiritual significance, because the ancestors built them everywhere. They even call our civilization the "Roadmakers".
- A Canticle For Leibowitz has a fair number of these, such as the shopping list treated as a holy relic (in fairness, it was written by the martyred St. Leibowitz the Engineer, so it actually was a relic even though it was a shopping list), the difficulties a novice (i.e., member of a monastic novitiate) has in figuring out what "Fallout Survival Shelter" means, the barbarian nomads who swallow electrical resistors to commune with spirits, and the Renaissance scholar who reads RUR and takes it a little too much to heart...
- Robert Nathan's The Weans has future anthropologists give the titular name to the (now lost) American civilization, because all their most important artefacts are stamped with the word "US".
- Accounts of the Nacirema
 tribe are in a similar vein.
- Deconstructed in Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell, where historical records are actually altered by the ministry of truth to make the Party look good. They say they invented the airplane, for one thing.
- Will Self's The Book of Dave, in which the diary of a bitter current-day London cab driver becomes the holy book of a religion 500 years in the future. As he was divorced, the "Mummies" and "Daddies" live in separate housing, and their children switch between them .
- A timeline of the history of the galaxy presented in The Dune Encyclopedia, a companion text to the book series by Frank Herbert, provides a distorted description of Earth history as seen from the perspective of that era. The "Galactic Empire" is described as being founded by Alexander the Great, its capital moving several hundred years later to Madrid, then London, then to Washington as the result of a civil war. The "House of Washington" was the first to use "stone burners", i.e. atomic weapons.
- Not to mention Stilgar in Dune Messiah did not understood why "Emperor" Hitler was considered so historically significant, having killed "only" a few dozen millions of people.
- Which is weird, considering how many characters in the series have access to the memories of their ancestors and predecessors (in Duniverse terms, "Other Memory.") As Emperor Leto II writes in his journals after discussing an ancestor's conquests in ancient Israel and Babylon:
LETO II: Does anyone remember these names and places now? I have given you enough clues: Try to name the planet.
- In The Tenth Planet, set 5000 years in the future, one character recites "The legend of the Jesus Freak," a garbled and mish-mashed version of Christian beliefs, which included, among other things, "The Jesus Freak" resurrecting by giving himself a brain transplant.
- Mortal Engines. Plastic statues of Mickey and Pluto, "animal-headed gods of lost America."
- The present time of the Wheel Of Time series has apparently muddled up what little they remember of past ages. In one book Thom talks with Elayne about this trope, providing in story examples of likely false history and states that for all they know he could be remembered as the Chosen One instead of Rand, and be a fireball-throwing wizard. His last name is Merrilin, however, the series is not historical fantasy, and the world of Wheel Of Time is not linked to ours, a common misconception due to Jordan's appropriation of Earth's mythology.
- Then what of the stories of Mosk and Merc the Giants who strode the world and did battle with their lances of fire? Lenn who flew to the moon in the belly of an eagle, and Sayla who walked among the stars? These are stories that are mentioned to come from the First Age in the wheel of time. A general theme of the is cycles, and how the current events of the day can become legends "And legends fade into myths until the myths themselves are forgotten as the age that spawned them returns." He's trying to give the origins of our myths and showing us that our history has become their myths.
- The Anvilicious political work Ali Dubyiah and the Forty Thieves is a "historical fable" from perhaps a thousand years in the future, describing a certain early 21st-century American president and how his actions led to the fall of his empire and ultimately The End Of The World As We Know It. Major players are referred to with garbled names such as "Dick Chaingang", "Condi Pasta", and "Osama bin Hiden".
- Void Dogs has its share of Future Imperfect gags, such as the claim that The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer "‘twas first told by an Irishman, as called himself MacTwain."
- ... who (Mark Twain) actually uses this trope himself, in The Innocents Abroad, where he speculates what will become of President Grant "in the Encyclopedia for A. D. 5868, possibly":
"URIAH S. (or Z.) GRAUNT—popular poet of ancient times in the Aztec provinces of the United States of British America. Some authors say flourished about A. D. 742; but the learned Ah-ah Foo-foo states that he was a contemporary of Scharkspyre, the English poet, and flourished about A. D. 1328, some three centuries after the Trojan war instead of before it. He wrote 'Rock me to Sleep, Mother.'"
- In the tie-in novel to the cancelled game Starcraft: Ghost, Nova is noted to have learned that it was the Germans who performed the Kamikaze attacks back in WWII. Justified in that she lives on a Lost Colony and the ships that brought them there had faulty data banks. Furthermore, the colonists also took King Kong too literally, leading to the belief that giant apes exist on Earth.
- Though it should be noted that Germans actually did have a program that involved ramming planes into bombers near the war's end.
- In Charles Stross' Glasshouse the setting and catalyst for the plot is an experimental society based on the era before the Acceleration the knowledge of which is lost, having been stored on fragile and/or incompatible media. The idea being to use what is known to make a convincing simulation and study the interactions of its residents to fill in the rest. Naturally, there are obvious (to us today) inconsistencies.
- Not set in the future, but similar: in Rutherford's Sarum, a medieval scholar teaches his student that England had two great kings in centuries past. One was King Arthur, and the other was Old King Cole. Could be Truth In Television, depending on how feeble the state of knowledge actually was at the time.
- Harry Turtledove combined this trope with Crippling Overspecialization in "The Barbecue, the Movie, & Other Unfortunately Not So Relevant Material". In this short story, a time-traveling historian from thousands of years in the future is intimately familiar with the life and times of Genghis Khan, but when he is accidentally transported to the twentieth century, he mistakes the cars outside for cows.
- A somewhat milder version is used in the Honor Harrington books, where different planets retained different things in the transition from Earth to the "present" of the books. For example, Honor, while on Grayson, spots a large group of men walking through a park with blunt instruments, immediately assumes they're an angry mob, and is about to call in her police forces until her local Armsman points out they're just playing baseball. She's never heard of it, and asks if it's at all like golf, eliciting a bemused response from the Armsman. In another book, a Manticoran diplomat visiting the planet remarks on how novel Iced Tea is, and how he's looking forward to introduce it at his next dinner party.
- Alien Landscapes, a collection of art based on various SF stories, has as its premise that all said stories take places in the same universe. It contains a "future newspaper", one of whose articles describes a museum in a manner lampshading this trope. "A boot from... the planet Poland (location no longer known)", a primitive tracked vehicle called a "voleswakan", and "stylized phalluses... called Bishopricks... used in early risque versions of... chess" are listed among the exhibits.
- There's a bit in Starship Troopers where Simon Bolivar is identified as, amongst others, having married Cleopatra.
- Edgar Allen Poe helps make this one Older Than Radio, and is sometimes credited as the first modern, sci-fi use of this trope, in the short story "Mellonta Tauta", presented as a journal from the year 2848. The journal's writer details her conversations with a historian and her world's concept of ancient history, based on wildly inaccurate and overly literal interpretations of present day records: among other things, they think silk was made from earthworms that ate mulberries, that a Turkish philosopher named Aries Tottle invented science, and that America was founded by warring tribes of cannibals.
- In Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time this trope is rife. Although, they are at the end of time, so perhaps a little memory slippage and creative license is allowed.
- There is a book by Kir Bulyichev about a planet which suffered a collective Memory Wipe a couple of centuries ago. As a result: 1) The people there are mixing up words - some nobles call themselves "Moles" thinking it means "Wolves", and the king calls himself "Radiculitis" thinking it's "Elephant". 2) Said king uses an ancient dentist's chair for a throne, and his bodyguards use chamberpots for helms. 3) Forgetfulness is a religion. 4) A small society exists of outlaws who actually try to reconstruct the past - and while they are quite accurate, it takes a traveler from another planet to explain them what this device◊ is for.
- Deliberately invoked in Michael Resnick's future history novels where characters in (chronologically) later novels often display mistaken/imperfect/misbegotten ideas about "historical" events that took place in earlier books.
- Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality stories often contain throwaway references to knowledge that filtered down imperfectly from our times. The Instrumentality is headquartered, for instance, in a Terran city called Meeya Meefla — so called because nobody can remember what the original pronunciation of 'MIAMI FLA.' was.
- In The Book of the New Sun the protagonist carries around a book of the ancient legends of
Earth Urth. One of them is a mashup of the story of Romulus with the story of Mowgli (because they were both raised by wolfs) and another has the story of Theseus and the Minotaur mixed up with the real-life Battle of Hampton Roads (where one of the ships was called the Monitor.)
- Similar to the page quote, in the Island in the Sea of Time trilogy by S.M. Stirling, an academically-trained character shocks the others by informing them that within fifty or a hundred years, no-one will believe that the island really came back through time, no matter how well records are preserved: everyone will be scrambling to figure out theories that "prove" 20th century Nantucket developed by itself in the Bronze Age.
Live Action TV
- The Australian sketch comedy series 'The Comedy Company' featured a parody of David Attenborough who used this trope (played for humour of course) when examining modern society.
- Doctor Who "Trial of a Time Lord: The Mysterious Planet", where the Three Books of Knowledge are The Water Babies, a British children's book; Moby Dick; and a UK public information volume about geese. Also, in "End of the World", Cassandra confuses a dragon and an ostrich and misidentifies a jukebox as an iPod. She has an excuse, though... "The End of the World" is set in the year five billion. It seems at first to make her look like an idiot, though depending on how well history has been maintained, she might've done well to hit the right century.
- Some personal media players are officially called 'jukeboxes' by their manufacturers, so maybe the terms 'jukebox' and 'ipod' are all mixed up by then.
- In Red Dwarf, Holly identifies Plato as the inventor of the plate, while Rimmer thinks that Columbo discovered America and calls Marilyn Monroe "Mary Magdalene". However, this might be because Holly's computer-senile and Rimmer is an idiot, rather than because it's the future.
- Also in Red Dwarf, there's a cat race that evolved from Lister's pet cat over some 3 million years. They based their culture and religious beliefs on such oddities as Lister's laundry list (which they believed to be a star map). Also, based on Lister's plan to go to Fiji, they look forward to when Cloister the Stupid will return and bring them all to the promised land, Fuschal.
- In one episode, Lister confuses René Descartes with Popeye and manages to confuse Kryten as well. This is definitely a case of stupidity, though, as Rimmer knows the difference between the two.
- In the episode Tikka To Ride, they find themselves in Dallas in 1963. Lister asks if this is the place where "that American king was assasinated - what was his name?" Rimmer: "JFK." Lister: "No, it was John something - not Jeff Kay!"
- In Space Above And Beyond, a group of recruits on a training expedition on Mars come across a 1970s NASA probe which, when jostled begins playing the song "Blitzkrieg Bop", by the Ramones. One of the recruits, a self-proclaimed 20th-century rock afficionado, misidentifies it as being by "The Pink Floyd".
- A standing joke in the Buck Rogers TV series, in which a bemused Buck was constantly having to explain to eminent archeologists that a recently unearthed 20th century hair dryer isn't a prototype hand laser, or some such.
- The Babylon 5 episode "The Deconstruction of Falling Stars" illustrates the far-reaching consequences of the Interstellar Alliance's actions. One hundred years in the future, there's a revisionist movement to clear President Clark's name, and Sheridan's actions are severely downplayed at best. Fortunately, Delenn's still alive to smack some sense into everyone.
- Another four hundred years later, Delenn is also dead and the results are accordant.
- Oddly enough, one of the most perfect futures of all seems to fall into this trope at times. Star Trek characters often display a glaring degree of ignorance as to the workings of 20th century (or prior) Earth. This is particularly notable in the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that introduces the Holodeck, where even the ship's resident Red Shirt Historian is shown to be fairly clueless about how a 1930s era American city works.
- Another Star Trek example is in First Contact, which unusually does this to events that are in the past from the perspective of the crew, but our future (the 2060s). This crosses over with Shrouded In Myth, as it turns out that the much-idolised architect of warp drive, Zephram Cochrane, built the drive purely for reasons of making money.
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine presents an episode where Sisko has the senior staff play baseball on the holosuite. O'Brien decides to get into the spirit of things and researches the concept, only to find a traditional snack that had since passed into antiquity: chewing gum. Of course, he flavored it with Scotch.
- In Come Back Mrs Noah, even though it's only Twenty Minutes Into The Future, Ringo Starr is mis-identified as the inventor of the telephone.
- In an episode of Sliders, the gang lands on an Earth that has undergone "some kind of time warp" (they don't explain it any better than that) and find 1920s-style archeologists excavating modern-day sites. One of them finds an ordinary beer mug and believes it to be a ceremonial chalice, another is mystified at the sight of a parking meter.
- The possible tendency toward assuming something is religious in nature is referenced and lampshaded in an early episode of Stargate SG 1. Upon finding a village that is empty, with food still hot on the cooker, archaeologist Daniel Jackson mentions he thinks they might have left for a religious ceremony. Jack O'Neill goes, "Why is it always about religion with you? Maybe they just went to a swap meet."
- There's a That Mitchell And Webb Look sketch about and After The End quiz show devoted to trying to interpret the few remaining shreds of human culture.
- Questions include "What was water?" and "What is the name of this pre-event leader?" while displaying a picture of comedian Eric Morecambe. Prizes include 'fuel' and a traffic cone, named as 'we don't know, but they're everywhere'.
Manga & Anime
- The Maximals and Predacons in Beast Wars Transformers have a sort of mythical misconception about the Great War, especially how it got started. Partly justified in that the Maximal government has done a thorough cover-up and control of all info relating to Earth, where the bulk of the Great War was fought (for some odd reason)...but then Fridge Logic smacks you in the face with the fact that several of the original Transformers (including the rebuilt Ravage) are still around and would know a great deal about what really happened.
- They're robots, after all. Their own memories could have been edited.
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is set so far After The End that people aren't even sure whether humans actually lived on the surface of the earth before the story takes place.
Tabletop Games
- The role-playing game Paranoia, which takes place After The End in a dystopian domed city ruled by a paranoid supercomputer, features secret societies called "The Romantics" and "The Humanists", whose view of human history is a mish-mash of mixed-up bits from actual history and pop culture (for example, they believe Gandalf built Stonehenge).
- Diana: Warrior Princess and Elvis: The Legendary Tours. Each game is supposedly a reconstruction of our society by future generations of RPG nerds — with about the same relation to the 20th century AD that Dungeons And Dragons has to medieval Europe, or of course, the same relation Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys have to Greek antiquity.
- Another example is from War Hammer 40,000: some in the Imperium know about the "Old Age of Earth", but their information is sketchy. Cities such as Atlantys and Nova Yourk are cited as being the most legendary and ancient cities of Old Earth. Nations known as Jermani, Merica, Britania and Bania are said by scholars to have prospered and wilted during this time.
- Given that they have only very general records of the founding of the Imperium in the 31st century, it's fairly impressive that they even know Earth is the original human homeworld. Basically everything between those tidbits and the rise of the Empire is entirely lost.
- They do retain some basic information concerning one of the ends of the world-namely that Yndonesia was a major player in the war, that warriors clad in "thunder armor" were involved, and a few other details.
Theater
- In the musical 1776, John Adams complains of this:
Adams: It doesn't matter. I won't be in the history books anyway, only you. Franklin did this and Franklin did that and Franklin did some other damn thing. Franklin smote the ground and out sprang George Washington, fully grown and on his horse. Franklin then electrified him with his miraculous lightning rod and the three of them—Franklin, Washington, and the horse- conducted the entire revolution by themselves.
Franklin: I like it.
- Truth In Television (or Theater, I guess). Adams really wrote something similar to that (but without the horse).
- "The History of our Revolution will be one continued lie from one end to the other. The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin's electric rod smote the earth and out sprang General Washington. Then Franklin electrified him— and thence forward those two conducted all the Policy, Negotiations, Legislations, and War." —John Adams
Video Games
- Superhero League of Hoboken is set an unspecified length of time after "The Great Collapse", and thus things have gotten... strange. For one, George Washington and Johnny Appleseed have gotten conflated, and there's a cult based on Wheel Of Fortune.
- Despite surviving a fourth world war, the humans from the game Machines are.. absent, considering the machines started teraforming over a thousand years ago and they haven't been heard of since they could all be dead.
- The Legend Of Zelda: The Wind Waker has a legend of treasures at the bottom of the sea called the "Triumph Forks", they turn out to be pieces of the Triforce.
- In Fallout 3, you meet a caretaker of an American History museum in Rivet City who has made quite a few mistakes, even with the history that occurred before our timelines diverged. This is justified in-universe by the nuclear war (duh.), the fact that the best sources of info in the Capitol Wasteland are currently overrun with Super Mutants, the Brotherhood or both, and because other groups like the Slavers are actively attempting to destroy historical artifacts for their own ends.
Webcomics
Web Original
- In Pokegirls, there is a general lack of information about a lot of things pre-1990 (which is when The End Of The World As We Know It almost happened). In addition, Sukebe is believed by a majority of people to have been an actual wizard as compared to "just" a Mad Scientist with Magitek.
- Associated Space has the following exchange as two characters are debating strategy before an upcoming space battle:
Fatebane: Fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man. Admiral Patton punched right through the Western Wall and sank the Japanese fleet. And that was in the days of triremes… oar-powered ships that couldn’t fire back as well as coastal fortresses.
Nazar: And how many ships did he lose in that battle?
Fatebane: It’s the principle that matters! If she could do it, so can we!
- Was the legendary hero Chuck Norris a real person, whose actual actions became exaggerated and mixed up with tall tales over time? See the debate here.
- Cracked has "A History Channel documentary on the Beatles from the year 3000," viewable here. among other things, it attributes many songs to them, such as "Jimmy Crack Corn," "Don't Stop Believing," and "Battle Hymn of the Republic." It says they invented the concept of a song less than 3 hours long, and Scotty Pippin was the fourth Beatle, instead of Ringo.
- Their best album is "Sgt. Pet Soundsand the Spiders from Aja, they invented the "thumbs up" gesture and Mickey Mouse, and were the stars of I Love Lucy.
Western Animation
- Futurama seemed to have this problem too. Among other things, they mistook Ralph Kramden of The Honeymooners for a space pioneer because of his Catch Phrase "Bang! Zoom! Straight to the moon!" (as said on Futurama; see Beam Me Up Scotty), thought there were "Whalers On The Moon", and credited Gerald Ford with inventing the
automobile automocar. The Past-o-Rama theme park (supposedly based on the year 2000) in "The Lesser of Two Evils" is probably the best example; in a commercial, cowboys with surfer accents and hover-mopeds hunt mammoths with harpoons, and Albert Einstein and Hammurabi (who ruled Babylonia c. 2000 BCE) are seen disco dancing in a hot air balloon, and Hammurabi uses the catch phrase "Dy-no-mite!" from Good Times. Fry, who is actually from the past, is either not believed when he tries to correct the errors, or just makes them worse with his unique perspective (What were those booths on the road used for in your time? Bathrooms).
- An episode of The Batman features future archaeologists excavating the Batcave. They find a picture of a young Bruce Wayne with his parents, and logically, but of course, incorrectly, conclude that Thomas Wayne was Batman, and that young Bruce was "The Red Robin". They also conclude that Oracle's wheelchair (interestingly, Barbara Gordon's transformation from Batgirl to Oracle has not occurred yet in The Batman's continuity) belonged to Alfred. An interesting look at how perfectly reasonable assumptions on the part of archaeologists can be way off base.
Real Life
- In a real example, as an exercise in perspective in Archeology 101, our teacher explained how if future archeologists applied the same ideas to us as we do to past civilizations they could conclude that "Kellogg's" boxes were some kind of religious icons, because it's the same word written exactly the same way, along with depictions of various "gods" (cartoon animals) and "offerings" (cereals).
- That was the concept of the Swiss exposition "futur antérieur", with how archaeologists of the Fifth Millennium might interpret 20th century society based what few archaeological remains would be conserved. The expo proceeded to lampshade the guesswork and conflation which sometimes occur in the historical reconstruction, as well as our tendency to link every little artifact with religion. Highlights include conflating the victory pose of sportsmen and that of a crucified Jesus; garden dwarves interpreted as statues of important leaders or priests (pottery conserves well) and motherboards reconstructed as 3D city maps.
- Real archaeologists, however, are well aware of this principle and do not do this. In fact, determining the actual significance of old objects is nearly impossible to do without finding primary source documents (recorded writings from the time period which identify principles.
- Part of what made the Ventris decipherment of Linear B convincing, it seems, is that it didn't fill in a lot of blanks with the names of otherwise unknown deities.
- Which doesn't seem to stop amateurs
or anthropologists from producing a lot of guesswork, creating past cultures out of whole cloth and then having that nonsense filter back into the larger cultural consciousness via Pop Cultural Osmosis.
- The Bible, of all things, underwent this sort of thing in 17th century Japan. With Christianity outlawed and European missionaries expelled or worse, the few thousand Japanese Christians left had to worship in secret. Problem: there wasn't a Japanese translation of the Bible. So they wrote their own, with half-forgotten Catholic ideology and already badly-translated, misremembered stories that had been passed down: hence in "Beginning of Heaven and Earth", "Deusu" creates "Adan" and "Ewo" in a Japanese Garden of Eden. The "Biruzen Maruya" is impregnated when Deusu, in the form of a butterfly, flies into her mouth. Pontius Pilate is distilled into Ponsha and Piroto. Jisusu proclaims: "The person who eats his rice with soup every morning is the one who will betray me." Maruya's friend composes a prayer at the River Abe (Ah-beh) - "Maruya, full of grace, to you I bow." Consequently, the prayer becomes known as the "Abe Maruya."
- Weirdly, a combination of archaeology and a more careful attitude towards history can invert this trope: we now know more about the way people actually behaved in places like ancient Egypt than we did a few centuries ago. Of course, we're still probably getting a lot wrong, but looking at some of the misconceptions in old history books makes it clear that this trope can run both ways.
- A popular joke is that North Korean children learn that Kim Jong Il invented electricity, the bicycle, film, etc. Whether these children actually are told this or not is for the well-traveled to determine.
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