› added 6 years ago

154

TIL that the first human name in recorded history is: Kushim. He signed his (or her) name at the bottom of a tablet that's over 5,000 years old, which was excavated in Sumer. Kushim signed at the bottom of the tablet to note how much barley they had on-hand.

Read more nationalgeographic.com

via reddit.com

K5lB TIL of the Laha Massacre where Japanese forces picked 300 Australian and Dutch POWs at random in February 1942 and executed them in revenge for the sinking of a Japanese ship. Surviving crew members of the sunken ship took part in the killings.
x67p5 TIL Retro Studio‘s idea for an open world Metroid game where Samus receives rewards for captured criminals was shot down because nobody at Nintendo knew or understood what a bounty hunter was, despite labelling her as such since 1986
6EGP7 TIL that Steve Jobs in 2000 offered Linus Torvalds to come work for Mac OS to make “Unix for the biggest user base”. Not only this, Jobs even tried to persuade Linus to drop working on Linux.
l7jBA TIL that despite being ubiquitous throughout the Roman world for centuries and appearing in sculptures and friezes across the empire, we don't know what the Romans called the armor they wore in battle. 16th century scholars gave it the name lorica segmentata.
gMgv8 TIL that researchers at Draper Laboratory have genetically engineered a dragonfly to become a cyborg. It is equipped with a “backpack” of sensors, electronics and a solar panel and can be controlled remotely through its light sensitive “steering neurons”