30 Of The Weirdest And The Most Disturbing Facts From Known History, Shared By People In This Online Group

"Incest --- a game the whole family can play" (attributed to Cicero)

And if that isn't a reflection on a broken society, I don't know what is.

Exactly. In medieval spain the moors in Al Andalus actually prefered blond germanic slaves. So much that the word slave in spanish (and likely in english) "esclavo" comes from "eslavo" (as in an slavic person)

There were no human casualties. The "army" just retreated eventually.

Oh, the bitterest of all ironies.

"Long sausage full of teeth" is a good body plan.

One is titled : "How to cover a book in human skin and get away with it"

Gee, you mean nations commit horrible atrocities even on their own citizens? Gasp, shock, faint ----- and, yes, that was sarcasm.

Controlling women's wombs for thousands of years and still nothing has changed

here's a list: As of 2018, the countries with the most slaves were: India (18.4 million), China (3.86 million), Pakistan (3.19 million), North Korea (2.64 million), Nigeria (1.39 million), Indonesia (1.22 million), Democratic Republic of the Congo (1 million), Russia (794,000) and the Philippines (784,000).

The fact that some critical decisions that will affect the whole humanity are on the hands of a few people, is scary

Forced Vampirism

That’s insane. I remember watching Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon.

TIL how to spell Bazalgette. Always sounded like it should be Basiljet to me. First modern sewer system was in London, before that the River Thames was the sewer!

They also had a violent empire that had slavery and conquered, raped and pillaged their neighbours. Which is completely normal for the time. But everybody talks about the europeans as if we were the only ones to commit atrocities

Ireland hasn't recovered from the potatoes famine. There were 8 million in Ireland in 1841, now there are about 6.

I will never stip being shocked at the idiocy of doctors. Anybody with half a neuron knows that they feel pain. Since they show it. There was no reason to think otherwise except laziness

oh yeah i've heard of this, there were a lot of people that died there...

And the babies slept very quietly after their baths! But seriously, water was often contaminated in the ancient world, and alcohol killed bacteria so it might actually have been a good idea. Did you know that Roman army was able to conquer much of the known world because they carried huge vats of low-quality wine and mixed it with whatever drinking water they found? It killed enough pathenogenic microbia that the armies didn't get sick en masse in dubious areas.

In the Tuskegee Study, the U.S. government injected African Americans with syphilis so that they could find how it spreads and works its way through the body. And they just left them infected rather than giving them penicillin afterwards.

Clearly they used a Dutch oven.

And it took even longer from that point to now to work out that we still have dinosaurs in the form of birds and reptiles.

One way that chronobiologists and sleep researchers have used to identify and study circadian rhythms is to spend extended periods isolated from natural light, temperature fluctuations, or other stimuli that could signal the time of day. Today, some laboratories have special facilities to achieve this isolation, but early researchers used caves. Nathaniel Kleitman conducted the first cave experiment in 1938 when he and a graduate student spent 32 days isolated from the outside world in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky. The researchers imposed a 28-hour cycle on themselves consisting of ten hours of work, nine of leisure, and another nine hours of sleep. Bedtime shifted four hours later each day during the Mammoth Cave study. Despite the alternative schedule and the absence of external cues, Kleitman found that body temperature continued to fluctuate in an approximately 24-hour cycle, suggesting the existence of an endogenous clock.

We have done so much evil in such little time

If only he knew

Not correct. Spain was never part of the Holy Roman Empire. But we shared leaders.

Someone won a Nobel Prize by doing large-scale research on large historical and current famines, and found the same pattern in every one: There was always enough food to feed everyone, but in a famine, large numbers of people just had no access to the food. They were either deprived of food, or weren't given enough resources to afford food.

I think you mean wheat. There were many British land overlords who made there farmers grow it. The British basically let the Irish die.

More money selling the potatoes outside of Ireland then feeding their population.

No potatoes were exported. there were no potatoes, and there was no market for them had there been any. The potatoes were dying because of a blight, a fungus. and nobody was going to let a potentially diseased crop into their port. plus, there was no way to preserve potatoes for longer than eight months.if you left them in the ground that long, even they would soften and begin to sprout. the english could have solved the famine problem by sending wheat or bread into the irish countryside, or even through just giving the orish enough money to buy food already on the market, but the dsire of the landlords at the time was to give over grain farming and turn the land into pasture for the far more lucrative and less labor intensive beef production. getting rid of the "dependants" of their estates was a step in that direction, and the famine was a way to do it that they took advantage of.

Again with the inability to use a plural not a possessive. FFS. Add an s (or sometimes es) for plural. Don't use a f*****g apostrophe!!

Due to the blight many European countries were suffering from potato shortages and potatoes suddenly bought a high price on the market. The ports receiving the Irish potatoes (mainly in the Netherlands and Russia, if I remember) were dismayed to find the Irish potatoes already black and rotten upon arrival.

Technically incorrect. The English landlords who owned the farms in Ireland exported almost all of the cereal crops . The Irish people who worked the land for the English faced famine because the potato crop, which was grown to feed them, failed.

People like Charles Trevelyan who said “god brought the famine to teach the Irish a lesson” hoarded the food and had relief agencies shut down so the Irish “wouldn’t rely on the government for assistance” Basically “pull yourselves up by your bootstraps! No I don’t care if you’re dying, it’s your fault this happened” Sounds familiar

Was it Ireland, or their English lords forced them to sell potato?

Yeah the sad [or maybe not, to some] is they didn't have to. I'm not sure how to explain why I think that.

Oof

Potatoes*

The food was taken by the english.

The exportation was forced upon the Irish by the British. Such skulduggery is still going on. For example, in Nagpur India, they grow the most delicious oranges in the world. But the citizens of Nagpur never get to eat them because they are all exported—mainly to Europe.

The greed of the British government added to this famine

The British exported the potatoes and let the Irish starve or immigrate.

I heard the Brits nicked all our spuds as well as other foodstuffs, cattle etc and left us with the crap. It's not like that's all we ate. Might be wrong though but I've heard so many different things. Saying this as someone who's partner is English so absolutely not getting into that "them vs us" debate. 😁

...well yeah, that was the problem. They were allowed to keep the potatoes they grew.

It was deliberate genocide by the British

To England mostly.

There should be no question to non-Irish that the English monarch has killed thousands of our family and ancestors.

It's a folklore story passed down generations, like the Bible but believable.

Unrelated but the picture is beautiful

imagine like being putting your luggage through the scanner at the airport and inside they find trotsky