Mind blowing stuff in this old Kottke thread:
https://kottke.org/14/02/unlikely-simultaneous-historical-events
"What are two events that took place in the same time in history but don’t seem like they would have? "
-There were no classes in calculus in Harvard’s curriculum for the first few years because calculus hadn’t been discovered yet.
-The last use of the guillotine was in France the same year Star Wars came out.
-Oxford University was over 300 years old when the Aztec Empire was founded.
@paulgp the 10th president of the United States, John Tyler, born in 1790, has a living grandson, Harrison Tyler:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Ruffin_Tyler
@paulgp My favourite of these is sadly only a hypothetical (to the best of my knowledge) - that in between the invention of the fax, the assassination of Lincoln, and the abolition of the samurai class, there was a 24 year window in which a samurai could have sent a fax to Abraham Lincoln.
@paulgp On the Aztec (early 13th century) and Oxford thing (late 11th century), central estimates of the first humans arriving in New Zealand are mid/late 13th century.