Recent Discoveries That Proved We Got History All Wrong

The trouble with history is that pretty much everything that happened before the 20th century had to be written down, and people are terrible eyewitnesses. We may never really know what happened even during very well-documented historical events like The Alamo or the Battle of Bosworth because historians often embellished details, recorded fiction as fact, or wrote down only what the ruling class wanted people to know. And before humans developed a written language, well, all those moments are lost in time, like tears in rain. (Thanks, Roy Batty.) But every now and then some new, tantalizing details emerge from the archaeological record, or from a previously neglected document, or even from someone's DNA. And sometimes those details are so surprising that they completely change our understanding of history.

This is sort of like saying that Columbus didn't discover America or that dogs and cats like each other. Except oops, Columbus totally didn't discover America, and some dogs and cats do like each other, though mostly just in Internet memes. The idea that the first Americans crossed the Bering land bridge is beloved in grade school history classes, but there's new evidence that it's probably not true.

A study published in 2016 pointed out that during the time of the first crossing, Beringia didn't have the resources needed to support a large population of migrants. Animals and plants didn't start to make homes in Beringia until around 12,600 years ago, and the first crossing was more than 1,000 years before that. Instead, it is likelier that the first migrants crossed into the Americas by traveling along the now-submerged Pacific coastline.

If you're still totally bummed that Beringia wasn't on the itinerary of the first Americans, don't worry — it's still pretty likely that other groups used that route, just much later on.

The word "dinosaur" means "terrible lizard," and it's not because dinosaurs liked to hang around in bars late at night and use cheesy pickup lines on girl dinosaurs. It's because people thought they were big lizards.

When the first dinosaur fossils were discovered in the 1600s, no one really knew what to think. According to the BBC, 17th-century museum keeper Robert Plot identified one fossil as the thigh bone of a huge human, proof that giants once walked the Earth. One hundred years later, another guy came along and gave Plot's fossil the unfortunate Latin name Scrotum humanum, which you'd understand if you looked at Plot's original illustration of his find. Incidentally, in the 1990s two British scientists had to beg the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature to permanently erase the name from the list of official dinosaurs, which has absolutely nothing to do with this story but was too good to leave out.

By the 1850s, scientists knew that dinosaurs weren't gigantic humans or terrifyingly large scrotums, but they couldn't imagine them any other way than stocky and low to the ground like iguanas. And with that assumption came another one: dinosaurs were lizards, so they were cold-blooded. In 2014 that someone finally decided to research the question — a team of biologists used a formula of growth rate, body temperature, and size to conclude that dinosaurs must have been somewhere in between. They couldn't exactly regulate their body temperature, but they weren't lumbering and sluggish, either.

The Inca civilization was the largest-ever empire in the Americas, but it was terrified of its own vulnerability. According to The Guardian, the Incas lived in a volatile environment where natural disasters were regular events, and they believed they had to take drastic measures to protect their civilization. While we modern people usually just blame whoever is president and then sit around complaining for four years, the Inca decided they'd better kill a bunch of little kids to appease the gods.

Contrary to popular assumption, Inca child sacrifices were not ripped from the arms of their parents — they were usually the children of wealthy families who offered them up willingly because there was a certain prestige to it. In death your kid became a god, and you got to be a mom god, and that was pretty cool if you overlooked the whole death-of-your-beloved-child part of the equation. 

Up until recently it was pretty hard to fathom how children could go happily to their deaths, even if they were brainwashed into thinking they could have bottomless french fries and unlimited video games in the afterlife. In 2013, Gizmodo reported that Inca sacrifices were given coca leaf and corn beer in increasing quantities for up to a year before the sacrifice, and then they were loaded up with more beer until they passed out. That made it easy to put them into their ritual tombs, where they quietly and complacently froze to death.

Egyptian kings, ancient curses, buried treasure, mummified erections — the story of King Tutankhamun has everything ... except murder. The boy king did not meet his end at the hands of a political rival or a jealous lover, instead dying in a pretty damned boring and ordinary way.

The thing about Tut is that he's not famous for building the pyramids or bringing monotheism to Egypt or anything like that, he's famous because he was buried with a buttload of treasure and no grave robbers were ever clever enough to figure out where it was, until 1922 when some white guy broke in and then subsequently died from a mummy-cursed mosquito bite. Before that there wasn't a lot written about Tut, and his cause of death was pure speculation. Because he died so young, some people thought he must have been murdered — theories ranged from a blow to the back of the head courtesy of a political rival to poison. Then, according to The Guardian, researchers had to rain on everyone's murder mystery parade with DNA tests and CT scans, which revealed that the king suffered from severe malaria and an infected, broken leg. And the poor kid wasn't just sick, he also had a cleft palate and a club foot, which were inherited conditions — the genetic testing also revealed that his parents were brother and sister. So the real story here is not how King Tut died, but that he was a Targaryen, or possibly one of Cersei's kids.

Modern humans have long been thought to be the only creatures with a concept of abstract art. Surely no other creature could possibly be advanced enough to throw a can of paint at a wall and then pretend it was so much more than a temper tantrum. Evidently all this time we were wrong — according to Science Magazine, our ancient ancestor Homo erectus also appears to have had some ideas about abstract art.

In 2007, a graduate student studying ancient mollusk shells found a zig-zag design carved into a 500,000-year-old fossil. Tests confirmed that the etchings were thousands of years old — they were made before the shell was buried in sediment, and microscopic analysis confirmed they were etched by one person during a single session. The findings do have some critics, however. The shells were discovered alongside Homo erectus fossils, but because the objects were deposited at the site during a flood it's impossible to definitively say that Homo erectus had anything to do with the carvings. Still, the age of the shell suggests the engraving predates the earliest known example of abstract art by at least a couple hundred thousand years. Even though it was really more like a doodle than like Jackson Pollock's Number 25, it does show that human ancestors had some idea of design, or at the very least were capable of fidgeting when bored.

Shakespeare called him a "poisonous bunch-backed toad," which would have been pretty mean if it was true and he'd lived to hear the insult. As it turns out, Richard III was not hunchbacked and couldn't have been used as an ingredient in poison darts. Today we know that being hunchbacked has nothing to do with personality, but remember this was a time when people dumped their chamber pots into the river, so they weren't exactly predisposed to political correctness. Still, the "bunch-backed" description persisted from Tudor times right up until Richard's skeleton was found buried under a parking lot in 2012.

At first, the skeleton's profoundly curved spine made everyone think that Shakespeare had been right, but according to CNN, researchers later showed that the king's scoliosis wouldn't have troubled him much and certainly wouldn't have been obvious to most people. There's also no evidence that he limped, had a permanently tilted head, or a face like a toad — in fact his contemporaries described him as "the most handsome man in the room after his brother." So what's with the whole hunchback thing? Richard's Tudor successor didn't really have much claim to the throne, and to protect it he had a pretty strong interest in making himself look like the better man for the job. Clearly, a hunchback with a "poisonous" personality would have been a lot worse than the guy who founded the Tudor dynasty and fathered Henry VIII. He did, in fact, have a poisonous personality, but that's another story.