Older Than They Think / Real Life

• 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, snotty teenagers, outrageous styles, unbelievably awful music, pop culture being stupid, consumerism, right-wing crackpots, left-wing crackpots, bad politicians, pollution, gang fights, corruption, it's all been done, repeatedly. In fact, every generation thus far in recorded history has believed it was witnessing the downfall of society that would end civilization and the world as we know it, so keep that in mind the next time people around you are panicking about the next flavor-of-the-month issue that's going to "ruin everything". See also History Repeats Itself.
  • One common crackpot idea is that "The '60s are to blame for all of modern society's ills". The main one being the drug subculture; but the Victorians had a far worse drug problem than anything that has existed since.
  • A subset of the '60s idea is "Baby Boomers (or former Hippies) are selfish entitled pricks interested only in accumulating wealth, who grabbed everything for themselves & are responsible for today's economic and environmental problems." That's almost the exact thing the hippie boomers said about their "Greatest Generation" forebears when starting (or reviving, in some cases) intentional communities, the organic food, environmental, Handmade Is Better, back to the land, and second-wave feminist movements. Of course, not all boomers were hippies (and vice versa); and Ronald Reagan, who has been seen as exemplifying wealth-grabbing and environment-destroying, was Greatest Generation and put in power by same.
  • Another belief is that the baby boomers complain about their marriages and make "Wife Bad" jokes constantly. But the Victorians made jokes about their Awful Wedded Life a lot more than the Baby Boomers. For that matter, if you go back and look at Greatest Generation humor, it's loaded with husbands and wives complaining about married life. Married... with Children was probably the first time this was the main focus of an American sitcom, but it's been a mainstay of British shows since The '50s. It is also a staple of Borscht Belt humour, but that may be less to do with venom than with Jews Love to Argue or Jewish Complaining.
  • When they refer to prostitution as "The World's Oldest Profession", they ain't kiddin'. Almost all the ancient civilizations practiced some form of sex-for-currency. Herodotus recorded prostitution in what is now the Persian Gulf in his book The Histories and the Code of Hammurabi has laws regarding the inheritance rights of prostitutes. Prostitution might even be older than human beings themselves. Bonobo chimps have been observed trading sexual favors for food, meaning it might go back millions of years.
• Graffiti are probably as old as walls to draw them on. Many intact graffiti have been found on the walls of Pompeii. Quite a bit of it involves sex, and is downright hilarious. NSFW.
  • Probably the earliest surviving artistic depiction of the crucifixion of Christ is from a piece of graffiti that was mocking a local Christian.
• Interracial relationships were far more prominent in the Americas during 15th and 16th Centuries than today. There would often be interracial relationships between Europeans, Africans, and Natives, and would produce many mixed and interracial people. These people formed the Mestizo and Mulatto populations that populate the countries in Latin America, and the Métis of Canada. Intermarriage and inter-relations occurred on a larger scale than most places in the world. (It was also not a given that being African / having black skin meant you were or should be enslaved, and it was easier for enslaved people to buy their freedom. There were many "free people of color".) Even in what is now the United States, many Native American groups welcomed the Anglos, at least at first, and intermarriage (including term marriage) was common. They believed the children would inherit the best traits of both peoples. In some countries, Asian immigrants have also intermarried among the groups. About 300,000 Cantonese coolies and migrants (almost all males) were shipped to Latin America, many had either intermarried or formed sexual relationships with females of different racial origin such as Native, African, Mulatto, European, Mestizo etc.^note This was the origin of the many races depicted in Encanto, which some right-wing critics decried as an overdone attempt at appeasing the "politically correct crowd". In reality, the designers had actually done their research about Colombia's extremely varied racial and ethnic groups.
• Multiculturalism^note broadly and generally speaking, any setting where people from different cultures co-exist rather than a single homogeneous culture for each nation was far more popular in the media of the 1960s than today. For complex reasons, it was even more popular in Communist Bloc media, even if only just to play up the exoticism of foreign continents. Decolonized African and Pacific Islands countries were seen in an idealized light, a few years removed from the forefront of progress. Frank Herbert claimed when writing Dune that people in the future millennia will speak an Anglo-Slavic hybrid language, as the Cold War Powers will finally mix together after much bloodshed.
  • The 60s? Try The Roman Empire. We know for a fact that there were African soldiers serving on Hadrian's Wall, and there are records of marriages between peoples as diverse as Britons and Syrians.
  • The Roman Empire? Try the Persian Empire. Achaemenid Persia ruled lands from Egypt and Thrace in the west to "India" (what is now Pakistan) in the east. It was a massive free-trade zone in goods, people, and ideas, in which the ruling Persians respected their subject peoples' customs and traditions (so long as they paid their taxes)^note If you didn't pay your taxes—or, heaven forfend, rebelled—they wouldn't be so nice. The Egyptians learned this the hard way. and religious practices (hence the Jews' favorable views of the Persians). They had complex infrastructure and a postal system. They identified men of merit from all over the empire and assigned them where needed (admittedly always under the supervision of a reliable Persian), and their armies drew from across the empire according to their expertise (e.g. having the Phoenicians on naval duty and the Greek city-states of Asia Minor supply heavy infantry).
  • The Persian Empire? Try the Egyptian Empire (better known as the New Kingdom). Ruling lands from Syria to Nubia, we have record of Nubian soldiers serving in the pharaonic armies in Syria and Canaanite/Syrians serving the Kings of the Two Lands in Nubia. What records we have (a lot less was written down in those days compared to Roman times) also suggest some intermarriage among Nubians, Egyptians, Canaanites, Syrians, and others under Egyptian rule; at the very least, Thutmose III had three wives from Syria/Canaan and Ramses II had a Hittite wife. Note that this makes multiculturalism comfortably Older Than Dirt.
  • If you look throughout world history: Multi-ethnic empires such as the Ottoman Empire, Mongol Empire, and the aforementioned Roman Empire have been more or less the norm and not the exception.
  • On the other end, while the concept of nation states are only 500 years old at most, the concept of ethnic nationalism is almost as old as multiculturalism. Greek historian Herodotus stated the main characteristics of Greek identity: kinship in blood, speech, religious worship, and customs. If you did not know who stated this, you would have probably assumed it was said by Richard Spencer or some other alt-right figure. The Greeks defined "ethnic" to refer to a "nation, people", while the concept of "foreigner" would exist during the Hellenistic Era. Citizens of these city-states identified themselves as belonging to a specific ethnic group, and their shared language, culture, and mythology played a crucial role in shaping their collective identity. Greek city-states often considered themselves ethnically distinct from one another, even when they shared a common Greek heritage. Similarily, the Hebrew people in the ancient Near East maintained a strong ethnic and religious identity and consider themselves to be the 'chosen people'.
• Someone on the webite The Escapist's forums declared that Charlie Brooker was ripping off Yahtzee's act. While they may not have known that Brooker had been doing the snarky-British-slating thing for a while, or that Screenburn and probably Screenwipe predate Zero Punctuation, it just sounds dumb given that Yahtzee has credited Brooker as an influence on his ZP style.
  • And that Brooker was reviewing video games for magazines in The '90s.
• Cosplay. There are early examples of a large number of young men dressing up as the title character from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther.
  • Dressing up as one's favorite character in public? Yeah, we've had that for some time now. It's called "Halloween" (or sometimes "Mardi Gras"). And nobody dares call them "nerds".
  • Sci-fi editor and writer Forrest J. Ackerman and Myrtle Jones were among the first people to cosplay at conventions — in 1939.
• The middle finger salute? It dates back to Roman times, where it was referred to as digitus impudicus. So, up yours, Brutus (or "Eff You, Brute", if you prefer)!
• 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.
• Globalization has been around for a very long time, whether it was in the Roman Empire, the Silk Road or the East India Company. 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, telephones, 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 (it did help that half the globe was owned by colonial empires). In fact, there were those at the time who thought that nothing could possibly reverse their progress... until a certain war broke out in 1914...
• Most people think that the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge is a new phenomenon that originated in the United States in June 2014. However, it actually originated in Wigan, Greater Manchester, United Kingdom, as far back as early August 2004, incidentally enough as a fundraising event, but for events relating to other disabilities (Down syndrome, multiple sclerosis, etc.).
• Bruce Lee is often the one credited for rejecting the traditional approach of martial arts and taking a more modern Combat Pragmatist view. While his influence can't be denied, he was not the first. Bruce Tegner (1929–1985) predated him by at least a few years. By the time Bruce Lee's books hit the market in the mid-to-late 1970s (after his death), Bruce Tegner had been putting out books since 1960. These books were known for criticizing traditional methods of martial arts training, debunking the stories of black belts being killers or superhuman and taking a practical, simplified approach of fighting for self-defense.
  • Forty years before that, William E. Fairbairn condensed down his childhood knowledge of boxing and wrestling, the kung fu he learned from the disowned Chinese Emperor's bodyguards, the jiu-jitsu he picked up from an expatriate Japanese martial artist, the close-combat instruction he got in the Royal Marines and his own experiences as a beat cop in 1920s Shanghai into a supremely brutal system he only referred to as "gutter-fighting". Fairbairn taught his system to the Shanghai police, American Rangers, Royal Commandos and the S.A.S. For those curious about Fairbairn's system, a manual can be found here.
  • And forty years before Fairbairn, there was William Edgar Barton-Wright, who condensed down boxing, wrestling, savate, jiu-jitsu, canne des armes and knife-fighting into a single, eminently practical self-defense system called Bartitsu. A small insight can be found here.
• Refrigerators. Most people think that they were first introduced in the 19th century, but human desire to store something for a long time in low temperature or to eat ice dates back to 18th century BC Euphrates. According to The Other Wiki, an earlier example of a more sophisticated ice storage in AD happened in 1396 in what is now Seoul, South Korea and the remains of the warehouse are still mostly intact.
  • Try the Persian Empire. TOW notes that Persian engineers were building structures known as yakhchāls as early as 400 BCE.
• This Very Wiki once listed the Consulting a Convicted Killer trope as a quite new trope which originated with Hannibal Lecter. It's definitely the Trope Maker, but there are a number of much older folk tales using it.
• Many would say that copper/nickel coins were first minted in the 19th century. True... unless you count the three Bactrian kings who minted them two thousand years earlier (most likely out of Chinese metal... these guys knew how to produce it a thousand and a half years earlier still).
• While people might think true smartphones were first invented in the late 2000s, the first true smartphone was actually the Simon Personal Communicator in 1993, which came with features such as a touchscreen and the ability to send and receive e-mails.
• Both e-mail and File Transfer Protocol have existed since 1971 within ARPANET, predating the publicly accessible internet itself. It took decades for computers and internet connections to become affordable for the common people, which induced companies to release more user-friendly devices and apps to use them.
• "E-Readers and eBooks":
  • The term 'e-reader" was actually used on the Game Boy Advance long before the Kindle and Nook hit market.
  • PDAs have many similarities to the Kindle (along with smartphones.)
  • While most people will say the Kindle was their first eBook, eBooks existed long before but E-readers made it far easier to market them on a commercial level. Not only that, but E-Readers were around in the late 90s and Sony even made E-readers in the early-mid 00s. The Kindle was the first commercially successful E-reader, in part due to its store architecture.
• During the Conquest of Granada in 1489, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand were the targets of an unsuccessful suicide attack by a supposedly loyal Muslim who infiltrated their campaign tent at night and stabbed them. Except as he learned later, it was not them but actually Isabella's handmaid Beatriz de Bobadilla and a cousin of Ferdinand who had traded tents shortly before. A year after the end of the war, Ferdinand was stabbed and almost killed by a mentally ill Stalker without a Crush called Juan de Cañamares, who had convinced himself that he was the real King of Aragon and that Ferdinand was an impostor. The war itself is notable for being the first known where field ambulances were used to recover the wounded from the battlefield.
• Drag racing (or more properly "street racing") on city streets^note real drag racing is a specific style on a straight track is both annoying and dangerous, but the concept of it dates far back in time where cars weren't even invented yet; races were done on horseback and carriage.
• The Serial Killer Dennis Nilsen is often called "the British Jeffrey Dahmer" due to their extreme similarities in M.O., victimology and even personal life (both served in a German military base before their crime sprees and had the same books on their shelf, according to John Douglas). However, Nilsen was arrested in 1983 and Dahmer almost a decade later, in 1991; it would arguably be more accurate to call Dahmer "the American Dennis Nilsen".
• Flashmobs appeared in MMORPGs long before they happened in real life. Since the players were already sitting at a computer, using a multitasking operating system, it was only a matter of time before people started using IRC (Internet Relay Chat) to coordinate actions. There are references to this happening in the pre-alpha of Ultima Online in 1996.
• The Air India Flight 182 Attack is often called "Canada's 9/11" due the extreme similarities in M.O., victimology and even their huge reactions were similar (both led to changes in aviation security and counterterrorism measures and increased prejudice against Middle Eastern & South Asian people). However, the Air India Flight 182 bombing occurred in 1985 and 9/11 almost two decades later, in 2001; it would arguably be more accurate to call 9/11 "the American Air India Flight Attack".
• Pornography. A lot of people think it's an invention that came about as a result of the Sexual Revolution taking place in The '60s (with the introduction of The Pill) and The '70s (as if there hadn't been prior Sexual Revolutions, e.g. in the 1860s, or the 1920s). Or they might associate it with (of course) the Internet age. But while relaxed decency laws starting in the 70's might have made the distribution of porn easier, with the Digital Revolution taking things even further, the truth is, pornographic artwork and literature have been around as long as sex itself has been around. Some archaeologists have suggested that the "Venus" figurines from the Paleolithic era might have been stone-age porn.
• Getting a weather forecast from your phone. That goes back to the days of the 900 Number, even earlier. Banks and other companies used to provide weather forecasts along with time-and-temperature services.
• In the 17th century, hackney carriages for hire in London were painted yellow with red wheels, to distinguish them from private coaches (which were usually black). Yes, "yellow cabs" predate the motor car (and very nearly New York!).
• The concept of the Phoneaholic Teenager was invented in The '80s or so, right? Wrong! The trope is as old as the telephone itself.
• Do you believe bar soap is a product of modern industrialization? Wrong. The modern recipe for bar soap was invented by Arabs during the High Middle Ages, and the famous Aleppo soap still uses those same ingredients (caustic soda, olive, and laurel oil). The modern recipe, mind you. Records of products similar to soap go back as far as 2800 BC Babylon (a solution of animal fats, water, cassia oil, and other natural ingredients). Yes, soap might literally be Older Than Dirt.
• "Members of the victorious outfits will be given individual trophies. A participation trophy also will be given each athlete playing in the series." Yeah, those Millennials, coddled by their parents and suffering such a huge sense of entitlement — oh, wait, that's actually from a 1922 newspaper article about a state high school basketball tournament in Ohio. By the time people started complaining participation trophies in The '90s, they'd long been a staple of competitions in America. Hell, the Olympic Games has a "participation trophy" spirit, with many athletes joyfully announcing they're just thrilled to be in the Games regardless of whether they win any medals, and carting home memorabilia of their time there. And even in the context of American high school sports, making the state tournament is (usually) a pretty big deal.^note For example, most states restrict their state football tournament brackets to top finishers in regionalized districts, or to a limited number of top teams throughout the state. In basketball, teams must survive at least one, and more often two, regional tournaments in order to reach the state tournament proper.
• The sight of a rebellious woman with multiple tattoos (including full arm-sleeves) can't be much older than The '70s and the advent of punk rock, right? Nope. Heavily-tattooed women who got inked as a rebellion against social norms and expectations goes all the way back to the Victorian Era. Even before that time period, women all over the world have been getting inked as long as men have ever since tattooing was invented for largely the same reasons: markers of tribal/cultural/etc. identity, rites of passage, rebellion against social norms, memorialization of loved ones, etc.
• Every year when a scant few Christmas promotions begin in October, you're bound to hear people saying, "They start the holiday crap earlier and earlier every year!" Except... they're not. November 1st may be the "soft start" for the holiday season, with Black Friday being the day retailers go all in, but for decades department stores like JC Penney have mailed out their holiday catalog as early as the first week of September, when it's technically still summer.
• Think Michael Medved's "bad movie" books and the Golden Raspberry Awards, for better or worse, popularized bashing poorly-received films? Wrong. The Harvard Lampoon had a yearly "Movie Worsts" feature that debuted way back in 1939, which cited what they considered the ten worst films of each year, as well as winners in various tongue-in-cheek categories (like "The-Please-Don't-Put-Us-Through-DeMille-Again Award", given to a failed Epic Movie). The Stinkers Bad Movie Awards debuted a few years before the Razzies, but also went the route of using satirical categories, however the Stinkers' categories often tended to just be mean-spirited without being clever (The Spencer Breslin Award, anybody?). Later on, the Stinkers Bad Movie Awards got rid of memberships and offered ballots by invitation only to those who had actually seen the films being nominated, unlike the Razzies who let any ordinary film lover vote even if they haven't even seen the films being nominated. Also, the Stinkers nominated Mr. Wrong for "Biggest Acting Stretch" because Ellen DeGeneres played a heterosexual woman, a move that reeks of Values Dissonance.
• Many more modern programming languages, like Java and C#, include garbage collection, where the program cleans up after itself, as opposed to C and C++, where you specifically had to deallocate memory. The first programming language with this feature was actually Lisp in 1959, which predates C by over a decade.
• Academic dishonesty didn't start in the 20th century. Chinese examiners were working to prevent cheating on the imperial civil service exams thousands of years ago.
• Fan discussions where people use pseudonyms based on the franchise can't possibly pre-date the internet, right? Lewis Carroll's puzzle-story A Tangled Tale was serialized in The Monthly Packet magazine in the 1880s, with subsequent issues including his correspondence with readers debating the answers. Many of the correspondents used pseudonyms, including "Mad Hatter", "Cheshire Cat" and "Shetland Snark".
• In a combination of this trope and Overshadowed by Controversy, the swastika has been entirely associated with Nazi Germany ever since The Holocaust and World War II, and referenced as a symbol of hatred and fear. The swastika was originally an ancient Sanskrit symbol representing divinity and spirituality in Indian religions like Buddhism and Hinduism, and has been and continues to be used in that context for millennia, though mostly in the East. The swastika was even used in the West as a symbol of good luck before the 1930s, when Hitler and the Nazis co-opted it.
  • Antisemitism itself is so deeply associated with Nazi Germany that several published historical accounts have had to point out that Hitler did not invent it. Antisemitism has existed for millennia and is one of the world's oldest forms of prejudice. Hitler is an exceptional case as he took this millennia-old prejudice to the extreme, culminating in attempted genocide.
• The phrase "white supremacy" is often thought to be fairly young; the sort of thing to be coined in the 20th century to refer to racist policies in retrospect. In point of fact, it actually goes back to at least the 19th century, and was treated as a mainstream political position like any other, with many Southern politicians proudly naming themselves white supremacists. As late as 1903, James K. Vardaman claimed on the campaign trail that "a vote for Vardaman is a vote for white supremacy," intending the phrase in an entirely positive fashion, and won the election, becoming Governor of Mississippi.
• The concept of 'Cancel Culture' — wherein someone loses their job or has their reputation destroyed after being involved in controversy — has frequently been talked about in the late 2010s as if it was a new thing (particularly since a surge in cancellations happening via Twitter and the rise of the #MeToo Movement). Not only do we have a trope for that in relation to media, it's been happening well throughout history:
  • Those who offended the ruling monarchs or people in charge would often be exiled or excommunicated. Celebrities weren't immune either; Joan Bennett saw her career almost die overnight in 1951 because her husband shot her agent, and Ingrid Bergman had to take her career to Europe after the backlash for cheating on her husband with married director Roberto Rossellini. What has changed are attitudes towards things like bigotry and sexual harassment becoming stricter (meaning the things one can actually or supposedly do to end up "cancelled" may not be the same as they once were) and the spread of social media where even celebrities tend to have accounts, ensuring that if they say or do something that the general public considers bad, many more people will see it and be able to spread the word. Even these factors have their predecessors, as the 1921 tragedy of Roscoe Arbuckle shows.
  • Also during the 1950s, the McCarthy witch hunts were in full swing, and numerous Hollywood figures were caught up in it and had their careers destroyed, either for actually being Communists, for having attended meetings out of curiosity, or in some cases merely for speaking out against the hearings. Look up "McCarthy hearings blackballing". Or go to our page on The Hollywood Blacklist.
  • Social media itself, its facilitation of sensationalized gossip and hatemongering, goes back long before modern digital information transmission. Humanity has had many culture-changing communication revolutions, back to the invention of writing itself. People's lives and reputations have been saved or broken. Marie Curie, hailed as a woman of genius after her discovery of radium, was harrowed by the press (there were hundreds of newspapers in France, of every possible outlook and reputation) when she and a married colleague, Paul Langevin, were found to be having an affair after her husband's death. Newspaper reporters and editors either defended the pair's right to their private lives or smeared them, with some portraying the Polish Marie as a foreign seductress, etc etc. It was the Belle Époque's version of Clinton–Lewinsky. Langevin actually challenged one particularly nasty editor to a duel (it was a draw).
• Flamethrowers. The earliest records of pressurized flammable liquids date all the way back to the Byzantine Empire, where it was used to set enemy ships on fire! There is even a trope for depictions of this weapon in media.
• The helicopter is widely believed to have been invented during World War II by Igor Sikorsky. Not true. In fact, the first manned flight in a helicopter took place in 1907, by a Frenchman named Paul Cornu. Sikorsky wasn't even the first person to put a helicopter into mass production — the German Focke-Achgelis company did this in 1941, a year before Sikorsky managed to. And to top it all off, the oldest "helicopters" of all, spinning tops from China, were created as long ago as 320 A.D.!
• Parental leave is often thought of as the result of 20th century workers' rights reforms. But in reality, it's been around for at least 500 years; Joseon king Sejong the Great enacted a law granting nobi women 100 days of maternity leave and their husbands 30 days of paternity leave.
• Automatic transmissions. The first was invented in 1940, but it did not become prominent in the United States until the 1980s, and manual transmissions remain dominant (as of 2024) in most of Europe.
• One reason why the 2019–20 Hong Kong protests drew such wide attention from democrats internationally is that they saw the 2019 Hong Kong Extradition Bill as a violation of the 1984 agreement between the UK and China, that Hong Kong would return to Chinese rule in 1997 but remain democratic, with its government (mostly) independent of the Chinese government until 2047. The 2019–20 protests were not the first time Hong Kong's citizens have clashed with the autocratic Chinese government since Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997. In fact, there has been democracy vs. autocracy tension between Hong Kong and mainland China since at least 2003, when Hong Kong citizens protested against Hong Kong Basic Law Article 23, and there had been several attempts by mainland China to reintroduce a national security law before the 2019–20 protests.
• Western woman who introduced Western culture to Thailand and got herself involved in Thai court politics. Was it Anna Leonowens of Anna and the King fame? No, it was Maria Guyomar de Pinha a century before. And, unlike Leonowens, Pinha is well-regarded in Thailand, being credited with introducing modern Thai desserts based on Portuguese convent sweets.
• Asians started moving to the Americas in the 19th century, right? Think again: the first recorded case of an Asian in Mexico dates to 1540, less than 20 years after the fall of the Aztec Empire.
• "Xmas" as a shorthand for Christmas is often thought to have been coined in the early 20th century at the earliest. Truth is, it was recorded in English-language writing as early as 1021. It wasn't intended to be secular, sacrilegious or "politically correct", either; it was used as a convenient abbreviation by monks ("X" standing for the Greek letter chi, which is the first letter of "Christ" in Greek).
• The concept of app versions of websites is, in fact, a return to form rather than anything new. Originally you basically needed a program on your home computer to do anything. You didn't log on to your bank's website, for example, you popped in the floppy disk with the bank's software on it and ran it natively. Then the internet got huge and it was realized that it was far more convenient for consumers to just use these services online rather than having to purchase software, and a lot of services moved to an online format. Then, with the increasing popularity of cell phones, companies began pushing app versions of their websites and encouraging you to use them rather than simply opening their website in your phone's browser. Round and round and round we go...
• A nearly 1000-year old Chinese military book, Wujing Zongyao, has instructions for many surprisingly "modern" weapons, including something that resembles a fragmentation grenade.
• Speaking of, grenades actually predate the invention of gunpowder. The first grenades were used by Byzantine soldiers, and they were stone or ceramic jars containing Greek fire that could be hurled at enemies.
• Anti-vaccine campaigns aren't a 21st century phenomenon springing from discredited doctors and the "alternative medicine" movement. They were around during the late 19th century. When The Spanish Flu was ravaging the world, people were told to mask up, wash their hands and stay six feet apart. Then as now, this was met with politicized resistance and ridicule.
• While the term "Streisand Effect" was coined near the beginning of the 2000s, the idea that suppressing information only serves to draw attention to it was recognized long before Barbra Streisand filed a lawsuit to suppress a photograph of her house in 2003 with predictably disastrous results. One of the earliest known examples in history is when the Ancient Greek Herostratus decided to achieve Fame Through Infamy by setting the second Temple of Artemis on fire. In response, a law was passed forbidding Herostratus' name be mentioned in oral or written form, with similarly disastrous results.
• The castle as most people imagine it, a large square fortress made of stone, and an iconic emblem of medieval Europe. Several have been excavated in Egypt dating back to the early Middle Kingdom period circa 1900 BCE, right
• The Euro wasn't the first attempt at creating a single European currency; that honor goes to the Latin Monetary Union all the way back in 1865, which at its peak actually saw a substantial chunk of Europe adopt it. To a smaller extent, the Scandinavian Monetary Union is also a contender, having been founded in 1873.
• The banding together of five Native nations—Cayuga, Oneida, Onondaga, Mohawk, Seneca—in the area of modern New York State into the Iroquois Confederacy (Haudenosaunee) is often assumed to be a union brought on as a way to counter the incursion of European colonialism in the 1600s, but most historians now think it started before 1500, which makes it one of the oldest governmental entities in the modern world. Some historians think a key to assigning a start date for the Iroquois is a story about the sky darkening before a battle that the nations took as a sign to unite, possibly a total solar eclipse. There was one in the area in 1451, but there was also one four centuries earlier, in 1142, and one group of scholars has been pushing for that earlier date. Others reject it, though, noting that 1451 fits in better with numerous other changes among many Native American tribes that could be attributed to the start of the Little Ice Age. The sixth Iroquois nation, the Tuscarora, didn't join until 1722, after getting invited to emigrate from their established home in the Carolinas.
• Graphics card history tends to be littered with this:
  • A lot of people think ray tracing was some kind of new way to render graphics when NVIDIA introduced real-time ray tracing in consumer hardware back in 2019. Perhaps for real time graphics, but the algorithm is possibly older than the more popular rasterization technique. In fact, a lot of early first person games used the most basic form of it (called ray-casting) to render graphics. And over the years it got used for a variety of lighting effects but simplified so it wouldn't hurt performance as much. For example, screen-space reflections use ray tracing.
    • People also seem to think that NVIDIA got into ray tracing recently when the cards came out, when they've been at it since at least 2010 with their Design Garage tech demo
  • Hardware accelerated tessellation (where polygons can be generated onto the model by the GPU itself) may have been standardized in 2009 with the advent of DirectX 11, but GPU company ATi was at it since at least 2003 with the Radeon R300 (popularly used in the Radeon 9600-9800 series).
  • Using two or more consumer grade GPUs to increase graphics rendering power? Started in 2005 with NVIDIA's SLI and ATI's CrossFire right? Nope, 1998 with 3dfx's Voodoo 2, also called SLI (though the acronym meant something different).
• The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) is near-universally associated with the anti-Communist paranoia of 1950s America—but it was actually founded in 1938, a year before the official outbreak of World War II (anti-Communism was a potent force in the United States long before the 1950s). It helps that HUAC wasn't exclusively founded to investigate suspected Communists: during World War II, they also investigated suspected Nazi sympathizers and American fascist groups.
• While the fact that dogs are the oldest domesticated animal isn't a surprise for many, what may be a surprise is their domestication occurring many thousands of years or even tens of thousands of years before any other animal. The oldest undisputed domestic dog discovered is about 14,000 years old and genetic evidence suggests it occurred between roughly 27,000 and 40,000 years ago. This would long predate agriculture as well, and the earlier date would put it around the same time as the extinction of other human species. Domestic dogs existing in the same world as Neanderthals is quite plausible.
• Some media critics' (as well as certain audiences') general prudishness towards nudity and sexual content in art. While most people assume this is a new trend that emerged in the mid-2010s, in actually critics have been lambasting art that contains anything sexual almost since their inception. The Hammer films of the 50s and 60s, exploitation movies of the 70s and slasher movies of the 80s were all heavily criticized for their sexual content by critics of the time. The most common rationale for said critiques was to proclaim them to be "harmful" to women and children, which to this day remains a commonly cited argument as to why sexual content supposedly needs to be removed from works of art.
• The United States and the Muslim world:
  • On the surface, it would be easy to assume that the United States' relationship with the Muslim world began in the 20th century, when the United States began to play a more active role in global affairs after spending much of the previous 19th century expanding westwards across North America due to Manifest Destiny and defining its sphere of influence as the Western Hemisphere under the Monroe Doctrine.^note These events aside, there was also the practical issue of much of the Muslim world (with the major exceptions of the Ottoman Empire and Persia) being colonized by European colonial powers during the 19th century, leaving the United States with relatively few Muslim-majority polities to engage in diplomacy with during that period Likewise, it would be understandable to think that 20th century developments in the Middle East and larger Muslim world such as the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia, Iran, United Arab Emirates, and other Gulf states, the decolonization of much of the Muslim world, and the Arab–Israeli Conflict would have compelled the United States to play a more active role in those regions. In reality, not only did the Founding Fathers recognize the importance of engaging with the Muslim world as early as before the American Revolution, and were relatively tolerant of Islam by the standards of their time (to the point where Thomas Jefferson owned a copy of The Qur'an to study Islam), but had, after securing the independence of the United States, actively fought wars against and even made allies with some Muslim-majority polities.^note Morocco, in fact, was the first sovereign nation to recognize the independence of the United States during the Revolution.
  • In addition, the presence of Muslims in the United States itself, especially among African-Americans. At face value, it would be understandable to think that Islam began to gain a following in the United States during the 20th century, largely due to the Nation of Islam (particularly Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali^note though both would later convert to orthodox Islam, and even those conversions helped bring Islam more into the American mainstream) and increased immigration from then-newly independent Muslim-majority countries due to the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. In fact, not only were there Muslims of African descent living in the Eastern Seaboard of what is now the United States at the time of the American Revolution (albeit as slaves)^note In fact, it has been established that George Washington himself owned Muslim slaves at his plantation estate of Mount Vernon, despite congratulating the Moroccan government for their aforementioned support for the United States during the Revolution, but some had been brought to — of all places — Arizona and New Mexico in the 16th century during the Spanish colonization.
• The "death drop", a dance moved popularized by vogue dancers and drag queens, is based on how actors are trained to "die" onstage (or on camera if there isn't a mat out of frame): bending a leg behind them and using that to brace their fall and minimize the risk of injury. It's an old acting technique, but being co-opted by the LGBT community is not a huge stretch.
• Due to the fact that slavery was legal in a lot of societies prior to the 19th century, especially those big empires that tend to form our sources, it's common to view the disdaining of slavery as a new concept. However, there are accounts at the very least disdaining the institution that go back about as far as the institution itself. Even in classical Greece, a place where chattel slavery was about as normalized as you'd ever find it, Aristotle's Politics mentions there being people who considered it to be "against nature" (though he goes on to call them naive morons). Laws existing in the defense of slaves go back to the Bible at bare minimum, and the first society for which we have definite records of abolishing the practice is no less than medieval France, which banned it on the mainland in 1315 (though it continued it in some form overseas until 1848). Though the idea that a society can and should get rid of slavery in all its forms took a while to become a mainstream opinion, it would be wrong to call it a new one.
• The word "facebook" (or "face book") has been around since at least the 1960s; it was originally a colloquial term for a student directory used in certain colleges and universities, which tended to include names and photos of students living on campus. The social networking site got its name from the term: Mark Zuckerberg originally designed it as a tool to help college students socialize with other students on their campus, envisioning it as a digital version of the "facebooks" of yore.

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