You know the name. When it comes the Renaissance, his is probably the first one that comes to mind, conjuring up a sense of ingenuity and enigmatic, creative prowess. For most people, Leo might as well be the only guy who did anything during the Renaissance. But when you examine the evidence, the story of Leonardo da Vinci as an historical icon is bunk in practically every aspect of his legend.

The man had lots of ideas, including some interesting ones. But the truth is a bit of a letdown. Though he was surely more talented than most of us, there were far superior practitioners in every single field Leonardo dabbled in. The era was so crowded with geniuses that if you walked down any street in 16th-century Italy, you would were bound to brush past one or two that accomplished feats of more lasting significance than he did. When you compare his legacy to other enlightened minds of his era, his work does not stack up very well.

10His Painting Skills Were Surprisingly Dodgy

Even if you accept that the Mona Lisa is the greatest painting of all time because that is what we have always been told, it is pretty much like every other run-of-the-mill portrait commissioned back then, except that her eyebrows wore off.

Most of Leonardo’s paintings are standard portraits and religious scenes, not exactly earth-shattering, and they are so boring that you could not pick out any of them out of a line-up. In a few decades, men like Titian and Raphael would produce works easily beyond Leonardo. And nobody who looks at the work of Caravaggio, who painted many of the same biblical themes and subjects and worked within a century of da Vinci, could disagree that he makes Leonardo’s best pieces look hopelessly antiquated and conventional.

Composition-wise, The Last Supper isn’t anything special either, and regardless of style, there is actually a major flaw hidden within the work that most people do not even know about. Any master artist can tell you that The Last Supper is a technical disaster. The fresco began to fall apart within Leonardo’s own lifetime due to his own lack of knowledge of how to correctly apply the special egg-tempera paint he prepared. That leads to our next point . . . 

9In A Head-To-Head Contest With Michelangelo, He Lost—Badly

Lest The Last Supper sound like a one-time mistake, the error was repeated again. In a competition with Michelangelo to decorate opposing walls of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, in what should been the most exciting art spectacle in history, da Vinci failed monumentally. He didn’t know enough about his craft to execute the project.

He mistakenly tried to apply oil paint to an unprepared wall. The colors of his painting, The Battle of Anghiari, ran in the humid air, a blunder he never recovered from. Leonardo walked away in frustration. The painting competition was over before it even got interesting. Michelangelo emerged triumphant with his Battle of Cascina fresco in the battle of geniuses.

As fate would have it, Michelangelo got snatched up by the very impressed Pope, leaving his uncompleted wall to be destroyed by envious locals who despised his talent. Leo’s Battle of Anghiari was painted over by a nobody to fix his amateurish-looking mess years later.

8His Most Famous Inventions Were Not Original

Leonardo da Vinci is known to have been an inventive mastermind of the first order. But there is a slight hitch in this preconceived notion: It is a lie.

The “helicopter” he famously designed was not a helicopter but an inclined screw. He borrowed the design verbatim from a long-known Chinese kid’s toy without grasping (or caring) that this toy did not spin upward by its own force but was intended merely to twirl down. His helicopter, as it appears to anyone who understands the most basic of physics, is not airworthy. It cannot be made to fly and it never will. Da Vinci did not really comprehend aerodynamics or the necessity of an engine for powered human flight or the physics of propulsion.

He gets credit for a lot of machinery and innovative designs, like the hang glider, to name just one. But he was not the first to design a hang glider, nor the second. The other two guys—an English monk and an Muslim polymath named Abbas ibn Firnas—who did design them test flew them with varying success despite the very dangerous realities of flinging oneself off a ledge. Any technology or modification of any existing device that is depicted anywhere in his notebooks is assumed by less stringent historians to be his, but research usually proves this to be verifiably incorrect.

7He Was A Mediocre Sculptor

If you’re looking to Leonardo’s great sculptures to redeem him, you will sadly never find them. None exist anywhere. The only existing physical statue we have to evaluate his ability is a conventional bronze equestrian model statue, complete with an awkward metal strut supporting the massive weight of the horse and rider. A side note to keep in mind: The primary advantage of bronze over marble was that you do not need struts to support bronze if you know how to balance the weight properly, which Leonardo did not, based on what is left of the model. So it is reasonable to conclude his grasp of metalworking was fairly substandard, and the myth of the artist’s genius and mastery of science evaporates in one single prototype.

Compared to someone like Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the gulf between a true artist and a dabbler becomes strikingly clear. Bernini arguably pushed the medium to its ultimate level with his The Rape of Proserpina. The marble detail is so fine that you can see skin realistically rippling under fingers, individual teardrops, and wisps of blowing hair—all beautiful enough to distract us from the unpleasant fact that we are witnessing some seriously messed up Greek mythology. Leonardo’s giant horse statue on the other hand, was commissioned by the Duke of Milan but never was constructed because Leonardo never figured out a way of casting it. The Duke, Ludovico Sforza, openly wondered if he was wasting his time with Leonardo because his approach to the project was so lax.

Leonardo da Vinci never got further than the drawing board phase on Sforza’s horse for the same reason he never completed his celebrated The Battle of Anghiari: He most likely did not understand his own craft despite what we all like to think. After Leonardo’s plodding first few steps, the Duke pulled the plug. If Leonardo had not wasted so much time, Sforza might have found a replacement soon enough, and the fabulous equestrian statue might have been erected.

6 His Real Inventions Were Junk

Da Vinci’s inventions were awesome, right? That’s a fair question to shout angrily at the screen as you read this, but his inventions were more often than not harebrained or dead ends. There is a good reason they were not constructed from his blueprints; they were not practical nor necessary. Most were abandoned in the early stages and were not workable without a lot of added parts or modifications.

Producing sketches is a large part of Leonardo’s legacy. But to call yourself an inventor, you should also produce viable prototypes and then work out the kinks. There doesn’t seem to be much proof he ever did work past the preliminary stages on the vast majority of his drawings. The robotic soldier he made was just a parlor trick that rattled around, by historians’ best estimates. The contraption only functioned when modern engineers added parts and fixed the faulty design.

His tank, when tested in real life, was painfully slow in ideally dry and flat terrain (a far cry from realistic 15th-century battlefield conditions) and would have concussed and permanently deafened the poor serfs inside who fired the canons. Self-propelled armored vehicles were, interestingly, not new. Any claim that he could have changed the face of warfare is wishful thinking.

As for the perpetual motion machine he supposedly built, physicists since at least the 18th century will remind us that 100-percent energy efficient machines cannot exist. Modern science has rejected that idea. Leonardo did not come up with that idea nor perfect it either. We can stop pretending like he was onto something there or ahead of his time. It is instances like this that indicate he was trapped firmly within the medieval mindset.

While Leonardo was inventing a parachute 400 years before anyone accidentally found a logical use for it, he gave up on a conical bullet design (i.e., the bullet used today), despite working for despots who fought wars for a living and who could have used it.

5He Copied His Legendary Notebooks From Others

Da Vinci did keep interesting notebooks, and had he kept on developing upon the ideas and refining them, he might have changed the world. But scholars today openly admit that those notebooks are probably copies . . . of copies.

Mariano Taccola was another eccentric creative type in Italy who kept notebooks, and it was from these that Leonardo got his trademark Vitruvian Man (as well as many of his fantastic blueprints). Some historians further believe that a mathematician named Giacomo Andrea actually deserves the credit.

Neither did Leonardo invent underwater demolition, another innovation posthumously assigned credit for. His optical “death ray” was borrowed from Archimedes. The flywheel was already conceived centuries before by some other guy we do not care to learn about, and though Leonardo never bothered to find anything to do with his version, the flywheel is yet another gadget he is granted the credit for dreaming up.

There has some speculation that many of his inventions might very well have originated with designs of Chinese origins, which makes a lot of sense considering the Chinese invented such staples of modern civilization as the printing press, cannons, rockets, rifles, and paper in pre-Columbian times.

4He Was Not A Respected Civil Engineer In His Time

His civil engineering track record is worse than you think for the simple reason he couldn’t secure contracts nor deliver anything he promised. Other than a proposed bridge that was not built, an insane scheme to reverse the flow of the Arno river—which failed miserably when his contingency plan featuring earthen dams collapsed in a rainstorm—and some other local projects for Venice including a dike (which was rejected as over-priced), da Vinci accomplished nothing despite the massive acclaim he gets as a skilled civil engineer. Designing grandiose projects is not the sign of a good designer, as any engineer can tell you.

Generally, his ideas were too fantastic or complicated to be practically implemented, and they were always too expensive. His plans didn’t solve problems efficiently but instead posed more. When a Norwegian team tried to actually construct one of Leonardo’s designs, more out of curiosity than for any practical use, they ran into the same problem as did the 16th-century Italian dukes. It cost too much.

3His Anatomical Work Was Not Important

Dissections of corpses was all but banned as an immoral practice by the Church authorities, therefore Leonardo’s anatomical drawings were all that much more important, many suggest. However, his contemporaries—Michelangelo, Durer, Amusco, and Vesalius—all made laborious studies of dissections as well, work more impressive not only artistically but scientifically because they actually tried to pass on their observations to others to expand the limits of human knowledge. Leonardo, again, is one in a crowded field.

Leonardo took extreme precautions to prevent anything he learned from being used by outsiders by writing his notes backward. Charles Estienne wrote an entire detailed series on the human body, depicting the internal organs, muscles, arteries, and veins for academic use, while Leo’s notes were kept secret for centuries. His arguably greatest (and sole) contribution to science is completely redundant, paling in comparison to other pioneers.

2He Left No Great Formulas, Discoveries, Theorems, Hypotheses, Philosophical Treatises Or Breakthroughs

Leonardo did not have much to say of new or lasting importance when it came to chemistry, medicine, sociology, astronomy, mathematics, or physics either, as one might think for an individual of his level of superstardom. He left no treatise or thesis and had no astounding concepts, equations, techniques, or groundbreaking theories to call his own like Newton or Francis Bacon.

His lone resonating scientific idea was his hunch that the Great Flood of the Bible probably didn’t happen based on his observations of natural rock formations, which he conveniently kept to himself instead of using to question the status quo. He was skilled in science, maintained a basic understanding of the human body, and possessed a healthy skepticism, but to call him a scientific “genius” seems unwarranted in comparison to the pantheon of ignored luminaries of the age like Gilbert, Fibonacci, Brahe, Mercator (not to mention the ancient Greeks and Medieval Muslims) who all exerted tangible, lasting influence on the sciences during the Renaissance and even today.

1He Was An All-Around Terrible Role Model

Leonardo was not a thwarted genius. A lot of great thinkers were able to realize their ideas under just as much social pressure and limitations.

Nobody was in a better position than Leonardo; he had the best teachers and patrons. Leonardo’s former overseer, Filippo Brunelleschi, was a master goldsmith who also dabbled in architecture and civil engineering like Leonardo. That is where the similarities end. Charged with completing the dome of Florence’s Duomo, arguably the most recognizable building of the period, he completed it after all the other architects had failed for decades. Brunelleschi not only connived to get his archrival off his back in a maneuver straight out of Machiavelli, he then proceeded to custom build the astoundingly modern cranes needed to complete the unprecedented construction project. His brilliant innovations genuinely changed his world and remain cultural and architectural milestones, in his spare time discovering linear perspective.

Roughly the same time da Vinci was studying his dissections, Bartolomeo Eustachi was teaching and writing books on dentistry and the inner ear and doodling his own models, creating far more demanding and anatomically accurate diagrams that still look like they could have come from modern anatomy textbooks. They even named a body part after Eustachi for his effort. Giordano Bruno was a scholar, poet, mathematician, and mystic, best remembered for accurately guessing the that stars are just other suns and that they logically should have their own planets, suggesting alien life exists like many modern astrophysicists do now. Daring to question prevailing religious dogma, he went one step beyond Copernicus and actively dismissed the tenets he thought silly and unscientific. Then he was executed as a reward.

Da Vinci, meanwhile, proposed incredible machines, which he found impossible to complete or sell to clients, and it might be surmised he simply did not care to understand them. While others were dying for their right to question power in the name of science or speak out against religious intolerance, da Vinci kowtowed to despots and power-hungry aristocrats.

Nathan Williams is a freelance writer based in Ohio. You can read some of his work at Cracked.com here.

Let’s be honest: eating meat is an objectively bad idea. It’s expensive, has been linked to cancer and causes devastating crises in the developing world.

SEE ALSO: 10 Surprising Facts About Vegetarians

Yet, for all the rational arguments against it, some of us just can’t give our carnivorous habits up. Show us a cross-section of our disease-ridden gut and we’ll show you a juicy steak just begging to be eaten. Show us a slaughterhouse and we’ll ask for a knife and fork. It may sound callous, but we’ll only give up our bacon when you pry it from our cold, dead hands—and here’s why:

Thanks to the miracles of evolution, we humans can survive just fine on a meat-free diet. But that doesn’t mean we’re natural vegetarians. Far from it: as far back as 2003, scientists had established our ancestors were eating meat up to 2.5 million years ago. In other words, that juicy slab of barbecue isn’t some icon of modern decadence; it’s part of our traditional diet, and there are plenty of other clues too. First, our bodies lack most of the equipment you’d associate with herbivores. For instance, we don’t have four stomachs, any ability to break down cellulose, or the sort of complex intestinal tracts most leaf-eaters possess. Second, our teeth are obviously designed to handle both meat and non-meat diets. And a good job too, because…

From a strictly logical perspective, there are a number of oddities about us humans. For starters, our brains seemingly shouldn’t be this big. If you look across most primate species, brain size increases with body size: humans are noticeable outliers. Then there’s the added complexity of our brains, which are so stuffed full of neurons they’re likely capable of holding more individual thoughts than there are stars in the universe. So what makes us so special? Well, according to one 2011 study, it’s our appetite for meat.

Seriously: researchers from Spain identified signs of malnutrition in a child’s skull dating from 1.5 million years ago, consistent with a meat-deficient diet. What’s interesting about this is it suggests we were so used to eating meat back then our brains couldn’t develop without it—a theory supported by other evidence that links primate brain complexity to the number of calories consumed per day. Since we didn’t begin cooking our food until long after our brains went supernova, the only likely candidate for our calorific diets is meat. Meaning we’re only capable of making logical choices like vegetarianism because we originally ate other animals.

One argument often put forward for going vegetarian is that humans are the only primates to eat meat. Ergo, it must be unnatural: like using the internet to moan about steakhouses. But guess what? It’s not just untrue; it’s about as scientific as punching biology in the face.

Back in 1960, Jane Goodall observed chimps hunting and eating other animals in the wild. In the years since, it’s been shown that certain chimp communities eat as much as one ton of meat annually. In other words, they’re less indulging occasional cravings than they are taking part in the chimpanzee equivalent of Man V. Food. Not only that, but they apparently use the slaughtered meat to gain a reproductive and ‘political’ advantage over one another. So, to recap: our evolutionary cousins love a good steak so much; they’ll literally whore themselves out to get it.

One of the big reasons for giving up meat is the devastating environmental impact of shipping, say, a chunk of dead cow halfway across the world. So if you’re into environmentalism, dropping meat should be a no-brainer, right?

Not quite. While our current model of shipping is about as environmentally-friendly as a forest fire, it doesn’t have to be this way. See, livestock—managed properly—can be used to do a lot of stuff that would otherwise require a heck-load of fossil fuel. For example, grazing animals can help cycle nutrients and aid in land management: while also requiring little in the way of chemicals and pesticides to grow to an edible size. Not only that, but a lone cow slaughtered on a small farm can feed its owners for ages, which is why we got into agriculture in the first place. So it’s not meat itself which is the issue, so much as our current supply chain.

In our modern age, it’s taken as read that eating meat is a bigger planet killer than chowing down on tofu. But that’s not always the case. For example, compare organically reared animals with industrially produced tofu. The quantities of land needed are greater, the treatment and harvesting of the soya involves more fossil fuels, and the end product often has to be shipped great distances if you live somewhere like Britain—where the climate is really, really bad for growing meat substitutes. Simply put: that tasteless tofu burger you’re forcing down to preserve our planet’s future may actually be more atmosphere-frying than the delicious hunk of beef being eaten by that smug bastard across the table from you.

There are certain psychological traits among humans that seem so obvious we shouldn’t need a study to prove them. One is that exposure to weapons triggers violence. Another is that meat-eaters are more aggressive than vegetarians. However, a group of scientists decided to look into the meat/aggression issue anyway—and what they found turns common sense on its head.

By exposing men to pictures of red meat then placing them in a position of power over another subject, researchers discovered that thinking about steak might actually reduce aggression in humans. No-one’s really got any idea why—beyond hazily linking it to ‘evolution’—but the conclusion seems valid. So, while we may imagine a rabid steak-eater to be more violence-prone than a guy who lives off soy beans and lentils; the opposite may well be true.

Of course, one of the ‘big’ arguments against eating meat is that it’s cruel. However you look at it, cramming a bunch of chickens together in a cage and feeding them until they’re too fat to stand isn’t a particularly pleasant thing to do. Even if you give the animal the best life possible, there’s no getting around the fact you’re killing a sentient creature for no better reason than ‘dinner’. So it’s easy to see why some people just flat-out refuse to eat meat.

Only that’s about to change. Thanks to Dutch scientist Willem van Eelen, we’re now at the stage where we can grow burgers in a lab. Slow down and read that again: we’re now so advanced as a species we can grow a hunk of cow in a lab without ever actually involving a living cow. Currently, the technology is too expensive for mass-production—the first lab-grown burger cost $300,000 to make and tasted only ‘reasonably good’. But we’re conceivably only a decade or two away from a world where steak, sausages, bacon and even veal cutlets can be created without harming a single animal.

Go for a walk in the countryside and chances are—unless you live near a National Park—that the ‘natural’ landscape you’re seeing is nothing like how nature intended it. For thousands of years, animals belonging to our ancestors grazed dense natural forests to destruction, resulting in the great big open spaces we now associate with ‘being outdoors’. And while it may seem kinda sad, this slow-motion deforestation is actually just what we need. See, if the country ever gets its act together and decides to ‘go green’, we’re gonna need as much open space for wind farms and solar panels as we can get. Know the most eco-friendly way for maintaining such places? Yep: grazing livestock. This isn’t just me speculating either, British ‘eco warrior’ Simon Fairlie famously argued that rearing livestock is essential for increasing biodiversity and creating a truly-sustainable world. And what do we ultimately do with all this necessary livestock? That’s right: we eat it.

OK—I admit this isn’t much of a point. But let’s be honest: a huge amount of the vegetarian v. carnivore internet war comes down to this simple fact. For all we talk about protein and write long list articles defending our choices, most of us meat-eaters just basically like the taste. Does that make us callous, immoral people? Well, maybe kinda. But we live in a world that’s an ethical minefield—every single day we log onto computers manufactured by tax-dodging multinationals using sweatshop labor; wear clothes made by virtual slaves in third world countries; give a big chunk of our paychecks to a sociopathic government; and generally reap the rewards of living in a nation subsidized by the unethical treatment of most of the rest of the planet. If eating a hunk of bacon each day is what it takes to get me through this headache-inducing liberal guilt-trip, then so be it.

If we were told our names would be immortalized forever, most of us would probably cheer. Which proves most of us don’t know squat. For every figure who lends their name to something cool like a machine gun or ninja bear, there are plenty of others who get stuck as shorthand for terrible things.

10 Henry Shrapnel

The word “shrapnel,” referring to broken bits of shell, bomb, and bullet that maim civilians, is usually heard coming from the lips of shocked newsreaders. Few know that it comes from Henry Shrapnel. An officer in the British Army, Shrapnel was the guy who came up with the idea of using bits of excess metal in bombs to kill as many people as possible.

The year was 1784, and Shrapnel was a plucky 23-year-old soldier. At the time, troops were starting to fire random bits of metal from guns to increase casualties. Shrapnel was the first to realize that you could increase them even more by preloading those fragments into a bomb, lighting the fuse, and hurling it.

Although the specific meaning has drifted since then, the negative connotations haven’t. Not that Shrapnel cared. He received a lifetime stipend from the British Crown for his contributions to bloodshed.

9 Captain Lynch

Captain William Lynch was a man with a horrifying hobby. Nope, not stamp collecting. The captain was a man who believed in rough justice. And that meant one thing for the petty criminals and wrongly accused in his town. He and his “Lynch-men” would, well . . . lynch them.

Although the term today has connotations of racial violence, the original lynchings weren’t specifically targeted at black people. Lynch and his men felt the government was too remote to dispense justice on outlaws, so they launched their vigilante group to target them.

Unfortunately, their methods were less like Batman and more like the Punisher. Captain Lynch and his men tortured, strung up, and murdered so many strangers that his name became synonymous with one of the cruelest forms of mob rule in US history.

8 Thomas Bowdler

If you bowdlerize a book, you cut out all the juicy bits (the sex and death) and replace them with worse bits, ruining the book. This was something at which Thomas Bowdler excelled. In the late 18th century, the doctor, philanthropist, and prison reformer published a “polite” version of Shakespeare’s plays. His edited version was so bad that it made him a literary villain.

Bowdler had a tin ear and no gift for drama or character. In Hamlet, he rewrote Ophelia’s suicide (spoilers) so she accidentally drowned. In Henry IV, Part 2, he deleted the prostitute character of Doll Tearsheet. He turned exclamations of “God!” into “Heavens above!” He also expunged Othello entirely.

Bad as Bowdler was, others were worse. This trend culminated when an editor replaced the celebrated Tempest quote “Full fathom five thy father lies” with “Thy Daddy’s dead.”

7 Christopher Leyland

A former officer in the British Navy, Christopher Leyland retired in 1889 to dedicate himself to gardening. Until his death in 1926, his vast garden was his life. He built an arboretum, imported rare palms, kept a menagerie of deer, ostriches, and bears, and proved himself to be one of the greatest silviculturists in history.

Unfortunately, this talent would be his undoing. After crossing two strains of cypress fir, Leyland created one of the most reviled plants in Britain: the leylandii.

It’s hard to express just how much gardeners today hate the leylandii. The Oxford Biographical Dictionary has called it “an object of fear and loathing” and called Leyland’s name “a curse.” Collins’ Tree Guide has named it “the most hated tree in Britain.” Many now consider it less a plant than a pest and go out of their way to burn them down. For proud gardener Leyland, this would be the worst form of immortality imaginable.

6 Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin

You may have heard that the guillotine was named after its inventor, Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. What you may not know was that Guillotin didn’t invent the guillotine and was an anti–capital punishment humanitarian who spent the rest of his life pleading with the French government to name the guillotine after someone else.

Before the guillotine, beheadings were frequently botched. This upset Dr. Guillotin so much that he petitioned the French government to make a humane alternative. They eventually agreed and got a French doctor and a German harpsichord maker to come up with something to decapitate a criminal with a single blow. To Guillotin’s horror, they named their new device after him.

Within a year of the guillotine’s creation, it was being used in the Reign of Terror. Guillotin was so upset that he tried to get the device’s name changed, but no one would listen. As late as the dawn of the 20th century, his descendants were still petitioning the French government to rename the guillotine.

5 Nicolas Chauvin

Chauvinist is used today as a synonym for “sexist.” It suggests that the target is dim, superior, and, in its modern usage, antifeminist. All of which means that Nicolas Chauvin is likely turning in his grave. If he’d had his way, the word would mean “a loyal soldier.”

Chauvin was a soldier who fought fiercely for his ruler, Napoleon. In return for nothing, Chauvin went into the thick of the fighting, getting seriously wounded on nearly 20 occasions. Even in Napoleon’s darkest days, Chauvin stood by his side, ready to die for the emperor’s vision of what France could be.

After Napoleon got his butt handed to him by the British, such blind devotion fell out of fashion and Chauvin came to be seen as a relic. It was then that his name acquired its negative connotations, eventually metamorphosing into our modern insult.

4 Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

Imagine waking up one morning to find your name has become a byword for hilarious sexual deviance. That’s exactly what happened to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. In 1883, Richard von Krafft-Ebing was looking for two new terms to classify sexual disorders. He named the first, sadism, after the Marquis de Sade. The second, masochism, was named after Sacher-Masoch.

The problem? The Marquis de Sade was long dead and couldn’t object. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, on the other hand, was still very much alive.

In 1870, Sacher-Masoch had published an erotic book called Venus in Furs, in which a man signs his life away to a woman who sexually tortures him. It was only one of about 15 novels that Sacher-Masoch had written. Yet it wound up being the one that defined him for life. Sacher-Masoch had to live with the shame of being the inspiration for masochism for 12 whole years until he finally died.

3 The Marquis de Sade

We mentioned above that the Marquis de Sade gave his name to sadism. The libertine writer was infamous long before then. In his own lifetime, de Sade’s novels—which feature murder, sexual violence, bestiality, pedophilia, incest, and necrophilia—had him jailed for over 30 years.

But de Sade was a publicity hound who would be pleased by his continuing notoriety. His family, on the other hand, was mortified by it. Thanks to this one black sheep, the Marquis’s descendants felt themselves unable to speak their family name or use their title for 200 years.

Unless your surname is “Hitler,” you probably can’t imagine what this felt like. The de Sades kept their name secret and didn’t even speak about the Marquis in their own homes. It wasn’t until 2014 that Elzear de Sade finally reclaimed the title of Marquis for the family, two centuries after his notorious ancestor had died.

2 Barbara And Kenneth Handler

Compared to having a sexual perversion named after you, the story of Barbara and Kenneth Handler doesn’t seem bad. The two were the inspiration for one of the most famous toy couples of all time: Barbie and Ken.

Unfortunately, this opened a Pandora’s box of Freudian nastiness. See, the real-life Barbie and Ken weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend. They were brother and sister.

The dolls were invented by their parents, who named them after their kids as a tribute. Both children grew up to hate the association. Aside from most of the world thinking they were lovers instead of siblings, they claimed to hate what the dolls represented.

Barbara complained that Barbie was a bimbo airhead. Kenneth was annoyed at Ken’s squeaky clean, boring persona. Both children felt that the association with the dolls ruined their lives.

1 The Nazi Doctors

So far, this list has covered ordinary people who didn’t deserve to have their names immortalized as terrible things. But there’s another category: terrible people who didn’t deserve to have their names immortalized as ordinary things.

Such is the case with the Nazi doctors. Thanks to their medical experiments on Jews and others, many Nazi scientists discovered new medical conditions. Seventy years later, those conditions are still named after them.

Reiter’s syndrome, for example, is named after Hans Reiter, whose experiments killed over 250 at Buchenwald. The “Clara cell” comes from Max Clara, who used the bodies of Holocaust victims to get his samples. Wegener’s granulomatosis comes from Friedrich Wegner, who experimented on Jews in the Lodz ghetto. The list goes on and on.

Even when the Nazi connections were discovered, people kept using the names. Since 1977, there has been a campaign to rename Reiter’s syndrome “reactive arthritis.” As of 2012, less than half of all doctors had started using the new name.

Everyone loves a hamburger or pizza every once in a while. However, enjoying fast food often involves shutting out the knowledge that the places we get it from are usually seven kinds of horrible. They can be owned by bigots, staffed by malicious teenagers (or complete maniacs), and cleaned up by almost no one. And sometimes, things get really weird.

10Chick-Fil-A Gets Homophobic

For most fast-food joints, a customer is a customer. As long as they’re not buck naked or drunk out of their minds, they are welcome to stuff their faces with greasy deliciousness. A fast-food restaurant is a neutral zone—political views or sexual orientation rarely play a part.

Unless you go to a Chick-Fil-A. These days, many view the mere act of eating there as a political statement.

In June 2012, it was revealed that the chicken sandwich chain had made significant contributions to organizations that opposed the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender) community. The CEO of Chick-Fil-A then made a number of statements that made it obvious that he (and, by extension, his company) was very much against same-sex marriages. This caused an immediate outrage and boycott from the LGBT folks. This, in turn, caused a backlash from conservatives, who went as far as inventing a Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day to salute the restaurant’s political stance.

The company soon stated that they would leave political conversations to politicians and later ceased all donations to anti-LGBT organizations. Yet the scandal has made its mark. To this day, few pro-LGBT people frequent the restaurant if they have any other options.

9Ajisen Ramen Soup Base Scandal

Most successful fast-food companies have a signature dish (such as McDonald’s Big Mac) or a secret sauce (such as, well, McDonald’s Secret Sauce) that is meant to set them apart from their competition. For Ajisen Ramen, a famous Chinese fast-food chain, that dish was their soup stock. Ajisen Ramen’s menu was based around noodle soup, and their secret was that the stock used for every soup came from “a broth of pork bones simmered to perfection.” That broth was their secret recipe, the entire selling point their empire rested on.

Imagine their embarrassment in 2011, when the media found that their precious soup base was made from concentrates and flavoring powders instead of actual pork bone stock. Their stock (market, not soup) plummeted and customers were revolted.

What’s worse, the company had always claimed that their soups were extremely nutritious, containing “four times the calcium content of milk and 10 times that of meat.” The test sample mentioned in the report was taken from the concentrate instead of actual soup.

Ajisen Ramen is still operational, but their reputation will probably never be the same.

8 Burger King’s Horse Burgers

When we dine in a hamburger joint, our biggest fear is that a disgruntled employee spits in our burger. However, sometimes the foreign and unwanted substances in our meal don’t need help . . . because they’re already there.

When the 2013 horse meat scandal swept through Europe, US-based fast-food companies were left relatively unscathed, save for one or two. Findus (the food company whose beef lasagna served as Patient Zero for the scandal) took the biggest blows. However, Burger King was the company that suffered the biggest embarrassment. Burger King stores in outbreak areas were quickly and aggressively declared 100 percent horse-meat-free by the company. However, despite their claims, testing soon found horse DNA in Burger King hamburger patties that were supposed to be pure beef.

What saved Burger King was their quick reaction: they immediately severed all ties with the meat company that provided the “beef” patties. Then, they gave the public a heartfelt apology and continued business as usual. Although this got them out of trouble, some people feel it was not enough. The company gave very little information to the public, and apparently offered no compensation to the numerous people whose burgers they accidentally horsed up.

7Domino’s YouTube Scandal

Sometimes, all it takes to send a company to crisis is hiring the wrong people. Domino’s Pizza learned this the hard way in 2009, when some of its employees shot a video in which one of them stuck raw ingredients in his nose, and then put them in the food they were preparing for a customer. They put the video on YouTube, where it became an instant Internet hit.

Domino’s quickly located, fired and sued the responsible parties. Other than that, the restaurant chain chose a very poor way to handle a social media crisis: they decided to shut up about the incident completely. The lack of positive media visibility (and the impact of the gross video) soon tore their carefully built brand image to pieces in a matter of days. Although the company took to Twitter and embraced social media soon afterwards, some say the damage still hasn’t quite healed.

6Pizza Hut Delivery

In 2011, a Pizza Hut delivery driver from Iowa briefly became the world’s least favorite person to handle food. When the customer he was delivering to didn’t have enough money for a tip, he decided to leave a little tip of his own and urinated on her front door.

Unfortunately for the driver (and Pizza Hut), the customer was less than pleased with the yellow pool by her front door and decided to go public. Her apartment manager provided a local news channel with surveillance footage of the incident, and it became a popular news story.

Luckily for Pizza Hut, the manager of the restaurant did all the right things. He was very cooperative from the start, actually visiting the customer and viewing the surveillance tapes. He then immediately fired the driver. Later, the driver himself (who was probably feeling very guilty and embarrassed at that point) came to apologize the customer and clean the mess he had made.

5Starbucks Coffee

In Starbucks, everything starts with water. You can’t make coffee (or any other beverage) without it, so it’s extremely important it’s clean.

At least, that’s what you’d think. A Starbucks manager in the business district of Hong Kong had a very different attitude. The water he brewed his coffee with came from a tap in a nearby bathroom.

Although the tap itself had been kept relatively clean, the fact that it had been in a dirty restroom immediately created a scandal. The entire Starbucks franchise in Hong Kong is still in turmoil. Even in many other parts of the world, Starbucks-related Google searches are beginning to turn up unsavory suggestions such as ”Starbucks Toilet Coffee Lawsuit.”

4Subway “Footlongs”

Fast food may be unhealthy. It may sometimes be prepared in unsanitary conditions. But there is one golden rule that must never be broken: there needs to be lots of it. After all, this is the industry that introduced the concept of “super-sizing” meals. At the very least, people expect their food to be as big as the restaurant advertises. A quarter-pounder with a patty that weighs any less would be a tragedy.

Still, some companies see things differently. When an Australian Subway customer decided to measure his “foot-long” sandwich, he found it was quite a lot shorter than the advertised length of one foot (30 cm). Subway Australia tried to explain this as an individual manufacturing error, before finally stating that the “Footlong” is just a name and not a measurement. This was interesting, because the company had always specifically stated the exact opposite.

Meanwhile, an American newspaper found that many stateside Subways were also quietly shrinking their subs. It wasn’t just about the length, either: they were reducing the size of their cold cuts by up to 25 percent, too.

Subway responded to the international criticism by sticking to their guns and claiming that the “Footlong” really is just a descriptive name. Then, they just stopped all communication and started hoping for the crisis to go away. How well this tactic serves them in the long run remains to be seen.

3Arby’s Finger Sandwich

In 2012, an unfortunate Michigan teenager got a taste experience he’s not going to forget in a hurry. He was enjoying a delicious roast beef sandwich at a local Arby’s when he bit into something strange and rubbery. As the boy removed the foreign object from his mouth, he found to his horror it was human flesh. A restaurant worker had accidentally sliced off part of his finger and left his station without telling anyone. The human meat had then somehow ended up in a sandwich that was served to a customer.

Although Arby’s was quick to apologize what it accurately called “an unfortunate incident,” the restaurant’s reputation took a blow.

2McDonald’s And Children

Children are the future, and the future is looking larger than ever. Childhood obesity in first-world countries is higher than it’s ever been. In the United States alone, a third of the children are obese and the situation (along with the health issues that come with it) is not getting any better.

All fast-food companies are happy to serve children, but McDonald’s in particular is a master of targeting children in its advertising. Their Happy Meal (a simple hamburger meal with a toy included) is possibly the best-known kid’s meal there is. McDonald’s is estimated to give away over 15 billion toys per year as part of their cross-promotions with popular toy lines, thus giving the children an early taste of the fast-food nation they will grow up into.

The strange thing is that McDonald’s refuses to admit they’re doing it—seemingly even to their own shareholders. Their shareholders have asked that the company take responsibility of its (presumably not insignificant) part in America’s childhood obesity problem. Yet the McDonald’s board has dismissed the issue, because associating the company with childhood obesity issues would be “unnecessary.”

To be fair, McDonald’s has made some changes to their Happy Meals to make them healthier. They now come with complimentary apple slices and a milk drink instead of a soda.

1Taco Bell

Taco Bell’s history is spotted with embarrassing events that range from slightly awkward to truly terrifying. Their taco shells have been recalled because they were made with genetically modified corn. Their meat has been revealed to be just 36 percent actual beef (the rest is tasteless fiber filler and various seasonings). The company has been linked to multiple food-borne disease outbreaks, including an E. coli outbreak that killed three people and gave 200 more customers the stomach bug of a lifetime.

With the advent of social media, it looks like the company (together with many of its competitors) is heading for even more hot water. In June 2013, a picture of a Taco Bell employee licking a stack of taco shells was posted on the company’s own Facebook page, to the disgust of loyal Taco Bell fans everywhere.

Pauli Poisuo also writes for Cracked.com. Why not follow him on Twitter?

Although we will see specifically the Christian version of these beings, angels are an object of study and admiration in many cultures and religions around the world. In their variant recorded in the Holy Bible, these creatures are described as beings of extreme power and strength, responsible for performing tasks entrusted by God to fulfill His divine will.

It is true that for skeptics, these stories are hard to believe. But remember that the books of the Bible were written in ancient times, when knowledge about universal phenomena was very limited. So if we look for solid, logical explanations of the angelic accounts and compare them with scientific and empirical discoveries, the resulting conclusion might surprise us. In this list, we will see that, in fact, angels could be actual life-forms living out there, right now, beyond our current knowledge.

10 They Are Not The Kind Of Life-Forms Scientists Are Looking For

One of the main questions posed by humankind is whether there is life outside our world, and we now live in a time when this question is being taken very seriously.

To date, the scientific community has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in finding potentially habitable planets in space, which are currently counted in a few tens. However, it happens that despite detecting habitable planets, scientists’ search for alien life-forms is very limited: Their plan is to identify carbon-based life forms.

All life-forms known to humans (including us) are carbon-based, so the reason for using that filter in the search is obvious. The problem is that by doing so, any living being with a different composition will probably go unnoticed, and that includes the plausible angelic creatures.

While angels are not abstract forces but actually have bodies,^[1] studies on the sacred texts show that angels are represented with a nature closer to that of God. We know that God is described in the Bible as a spirit, the “spirit” being a kind of ethereal, presumably energetic force.

In short, angels seem to be life-forms composed of an unknown substance, superior to any known type of matter or energy. With such characteristics, it is evident that scientists would not be able to locate this type of being, even with their best technological achievements.

9 The Angelic World Is Outside The Visible Universe

The Bible states the expansion is composed of three different zones called “heavens.” The first one is our atmosphere, the second heaven is outer space, and the third one is God’s dwelling place. Given the immaterial characteristics attributed to God, it is understood that the last heaven refers to a place separate from the physical universe.

It is also said that angels stand before God, so, logically, these creatures also live in the same divine abode or “Heaven.” If we interpret these stories, the abode of the angels could be an extra-dimensional realm, from which the entire material creation (including Earth) can be seen but not vice versa. How possible can this be?

A few decades ago, science formulated the string theory. One of the results of this theory is the possibility that there are multiple “cosmic bubbles”: parallel universes cohabitating within a larger expansion.^[2] Each of these universes could have different physical laws, challenging our understanding of reality. More recently, a posthumous publication of famous physicist Stephen Hawking stated there could be only a few coexisting universes.

Perhaps, one of these universes is actually the divine abode inhabited by the angels. And the fact of its unknown physical nature is consistent with the description given by the Bible about this place, being unreachable for humans. In turn, the idea of the angels’ world being outside our material universe supports the argument that humans have no means of detecting these creatures, if they exist.

8 Angels Move Faster Than Light

And continuing on the basis that angels are not limited by our physical laws, there is another spectacular ability these creatures have: they can move at superluminal speeds.

Indeed, the fact of being immaterial creatures superior to our physical world frees them from having a speed limit. They are thus differentiated from matter in our universe, which cannot travel faster than light in a vacuum.

For example, there is an occasion contained in the ninth chapter of Daniel’s book. The prophet Daniel was praying to God, when even before he finished doing so, an angel traveled from his dwelling place outside this universe to where the prophet was. In comparison, light takes more than a second to travel from Moon to Earth, but this angel traveled incalculable distances (from one universe to another; you do the math) in a blink.

It has been speculated for decades that perhaps there is a type of matter capable of surpassing the speed of light. Theoretical particles called tachyons could move faster than light in a vacuum, which makes it difficult for scientists to detect them.^[3] If these particles leave the light behind—similar to an airplane breaking the sound barrier—they are impossible to perceive in real time with the currently available means.

The same would apply to angelic creatures; maybe they are moving from one place to another right now, and we cannot even notice it.

7 They Interact With Human Race Only When Necessary

Chapter 19 of Genesis describes the famous story in which two angels destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, with a rain of fire and brimstone. Interestingly, scientists at University of Bristol (England) deciphered an ancient Assyrian star map, which points to the fall of a supposed meteor over the Alps in 3123 BC. Using computer simulations, scientists also noted that the burning debris from the impact could have rained over the Middle East. This is the area where it is believed Sodom and Gomorrah existed.

On the other hand, Isaiah 37: 36, 37 records an occasion when an angel destroyed the Assyrian army of King Sennacherib, after which the latter ceased to besiege the city of Jerusalem.^[4] About this situation, Jewish historian Flavius Josephus mentioned during the first century: “God had sent a pestilential distemper upon his army: and on the very first night of the siege a hundred fourscore and five thousand [ . . . ] were destroyed.” In turn, the famous Sennacherib’s Prism, written in the seventh century BC, records the victories of the king over enemy cities, except against Jerusalem.

These and other archaeological findings show that the biblical accounts of angels on Earth have a very real component in their stories. Such things leave open the possibility that these beings have really interacted with our race. In addition, in both stories, the angels acted as a last resort in situations that required an urgent solution. Clearly, angels manifest only on specific occasions in human history when the situation requires it, after which they disappear again.

6 The Stealth Mode Of The Angels

Numbers Chapter 22 tells the story of a man named Balaam, who, by order of a foreign king, was going to curse the army of Israel. Then, when he went to meet the king, an angel got in his way and did not let him continue traveling. Without seeing the angel, Balaam blamed the animal he was riding on, and hit it. Suddenly, the angel became visible in front of the man, and then Balaam understood the seriousness of the matter.

So it seems that angelic creatures prefer to observe human actions in secret, hidden in plain sight thanks to a superior physical ability that allows them to enter or leave the visible spectrum. This is not so far-fetched, since scientists have discovered that there are several ways to truly achieve invisibility.

An object can be made invisible, for example, by covering it with layers of materials (specifically called “metamaterials”) capable of bending light or by making it resonate at certain frequencies with the use of electromagnetic waves.^[5] So if invisibility is plausible to humans, it is evident that the mentioned angelic race could also develop an ability of that kind.

5 They’ve Existed Since Long Before Us

Both the previous point and the following one are related to a scientific formulation known as the zoo hypothesis. This hypothesis suggests that perhaps an advanced alien race deliberately avoids contact with humans while secretly watching us evolve over time.

In Job 38: 4-7, God explains to His human servant that when the Earth was formed, the angels, described as “morning stars,” celebrated with joy at such an event. This statement shows that angels are creatures different from humans, unique in themselves and in existence long before the emergence of the first human beings on Earth.^[6]

This also seems to be another reason why angels do not manifest themselves before the human race. Everything points to the fact that the angels have seen us during our entire history, and therefore, they know human behavior very well. In a way, we are already predictable to them, so they know well how to remain hidden from our sight.

4 They Comprise A Species Of Their Own

Sacred texts mention at least four different types of angels, each one with particular physical features and a specific purpose.^[7]

First, we have the seraphs, the angels closest to the presence of God. They have six wings, and their name (Hebrew: seraphim, “burning ones”) implies that seraphs may have an incandescent appearance, like fire.

Then there are the cherubs, protective angels of the divine abode. Their wingspan is equivalent to the height of the angel himself, and it is also said that they are beautiful in appearance.

Angelic messengers represent the rest of their population and perform all kinds of tasks across the cosmos—from sending divine messages to protecting or destroying people.

Above all the described types of angels, there is the archangel. This type of creature is explicitly mentioned only twice throughout the Bible, and in the singular. By this and by the etymology of his name (“chief angel”), we understand that there is only one archangel at a time, whose presence gives him the right to rule all other angels.

Based on this classification, we can see that the angels are divided into groups according to their appearance and position. Just as there are humans with variations in their genetics and their sex, it seems that the angels also have remarkable differences among themselves. This is an aspect that describes them more as a real species instead of being an isolated group of creatures.

3 The Angelic Population Could Be Huge

Following the line of the previous point, another piece of evidence for the angels being a true species is their population number. Many species are limited in their growth by things like the environment or genetics. And yet, we have already seen that angels do not seem to have a problem with that. In the Bible, angels are mentioned fewer than 300 times, but how many of them are there, actually? Well, the Bible itself also gives the answer.

In the fifth chapter of Revelation, the last book of the Bible, the apostle John has a vision of the celestial kingdom in which the angelic creatures live. As far as John can see, the number of such creatures amounts to “thousands of thousands.” Certain versions of the Bible that translate the original texts in a literal way use the term “myriads of myriads.” This phrase originates from Greek and is literally translated as “ten thousand times ten thousand.”

This proves that the so-called “invisible region” is inhabited by at least hundreds of millions of individual angelic beings.^[8] So from the biblical material, it can be interpreted that angels do not exist in small quantities, as if their purpose was limited. Rather, they seem to be an individual species or some other type of population, with freedom of development and free will.

2 Is Their Form Of Communication Superior To Ours?

Repeatedly throughout the Bible, it is shown how angels had conversations with humans in earthly languages. But it is to be expected that, as extraterrestrial beings, angels have their own form of communication different from the languages of Earth. Does the Bible offer evidence that this is the case? Yes, and it also points out that their way of communicating is far beyond our reach.

In Isaiah 55:9, God said that His “ways and thoughts” are superior to those of humans, which obviously includes His language. And in his first letter to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul—who claimed to have had direct contact with angels—made a distinction between the “tongues of men” and the “tongues of angels.” This denotes that angels have a language that does not belong to human nature.^[9]

So, having established that angels have their own language, what would it be like? Well, one answer might be the visions recorded in several parts of the New Testament, when fully lucid people contemplated images impossible to recreate in reality. Such events sound similar to the effects of a process known as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which can be utilized to deliberately introduce images into the human mind through the use of electromagnetic radiation.

So angelic creatures not only communicate with each other in a different language, but such language is beyond the learning capacity of humans.

1 Angels Could Protect Our Universe In Secret

In recent years, scientists have discovered that some kind of mysterious force called “dark energy” is accelerating the expansion of the universe. However, even more recent research shows that this dark energy decreases or increases, depending on the moment, defying even well-known physical laws. It seems that this force “plays” with the universal structure in a certain sense, and the scientific community still does not know what exactly this energetic manifestation is.^[10]

In the biblical text of Job 38:31, God asks His servant, “Shall you be able to join together the shining stars of the Pleiades?” By the context, the Creator affirms that He is the one who maintains the order of the universe at will, with the possibility of modifying it as necessary.

The holy scriptures also state that angels are able to control natural elements at their discretion. So, could angels be the so-called dark energy that baffles scientists and controls the cosmic expansion? It is unclear, but if so, that explains why the unknown force that shapes the universe fluctuates almost deliberately. Maybe the angels are out there keeping the order of the material universe, and we do not even realize it.

Economy student, passionate about Graphic Design, an avid enthusiast of the art of writing.

Many researchers, mainstream and otherwise, believe that we are not the first advanced civilization to have existed on Earth. Furthermore, they postulate that in prehistory, unrecorded history, one or more advanced civilizations just might have existed, thrived, declined, and perished before us.

While this is an outlandish notion for most people, when broken down, it isn’t as crazy as it first seems, not least when you consider what might become of ourselves should a sudden end announce itself without warning. Chances are, should life begin again, nobody would remember that we had even existed. If that’s the case, then, who’s to say that advanced civilizations didn’t exist thousands of years before our own recorded history?

10 Power Stations Would Shut Down Fast

Let’s say that something happened to wipe out the vast majority of human life on planet Earth. Be it a sudden super-contagious virus, a meteorite, a solar flare, a nuclear war, or even (you know it’s coming) an alien invasion, if it was to happen, life would disappear with alacrity.

Seriously, though, many of us don’t realize just how precarious our existence is here on Earth. Let’s say the vast majority of human life is wiped out by any of the hypothetical situations mentioned above; surely there’d be survivors, right? The thing is, where would the power come from? With no one to run them, the power stations, and with them, the world’s electricity supply, would shut down relatively quickly. In fact, many of them would switch into safety mode to avoid any disasters.

However, eventually, with nobody to oversee these procedures, nuclear power plants, their cooling waters having boiled off, would go into meltdown. Chernobyl-type scenarios would unfold all around the planet.^[1] In short, you really wouldn’t want to be around, and if you were, you would want to be completely out of the way somewhere. We’ll talk more about the survivors in entry number five.

9 Man-Made Objects

Most man-made objects, whether comprised of wood, plastic, metal, or anything other than stone (which we will look at later also) will simply disappear, even down to the roads and streets, which will be completely overcome with vegetation within only several decades at the very most.^[2] Just to take that a stage further, within “only” a few centuries, the metal frameworks of the buildings and the bridges around the world will simply rust, break down, and collapse. All that will be left will be the crumpled and piled ruins.

Within only 10,000 years, which is but a snapshot in terms of geological time, just about all that remains will be the stone. And even then, only that which was built purely from stone will survive in any recognizable form (and still might be buried). As mentioned, bridges and buildings will have collapsed due to their rusted and decaying metal parts and will lie in ruins. Over the course of time, much like our ancient sites today, these ruins will be lucky to be pieced together in the future, if ever.

8 Only Stone Will Survive

Is it any wonder that the structures we have left of the ancient world are the buildings, monuments, and statues carved from stone? And make no mistake, there was much, much more than just stonework at one time.

As we have mentioned above, only true stone structures will survive any type of annihilation of humanity for any significant amount of time,^[3] and even then, the remains would then be subject to any future civilizations and explorers stripping such monuments of what they see as valuable and leaving the rest, much like was done with the Egyptian pyramids (and, who knows, maybe the Sphinx) over course of history.

With that in mind, then, how many of our modern structures might survive thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of years, into the future? Ironically, it would mostly be the buildings from antiquity that would still survive. And again, with that in mind, how long have such structures really been there, and who did they once belong to?

7 Myths And Legends

Although they are certainly not the same as solid stone monuments by any stretch of the imagination, should we perhaps pay more attention to certain types of myths and legends that persist across many cultures over thousands of years?^[4] For example, was there really a great flood, even if only in the form of several episodes of localized but substantial flooding that just might have wiped out entire communities? Such calamities would have surely seemed like the end of the world to those civilizations that experienced them.

And what about the tales of “the gods”—higher beings with advanced technology that ruled over mankind? Are these really just legends? Or might there be some truth to such stories? Shortly, we will look at the possibility of survivors from such an “end of the world” situation. What if “the gods” of the past were the survivors of an even older advanced civilization? Might that explain the powers (or advanced technology) of the gods? Or the advanced knowledge of the gods? It is certainly an interesting notion.

6 Ancient Egypt

While we have looked in our previous points at what might happen if our civilization was to face a sudden, life-ending disaster in order to prove, at least in theory, that other civilizations very much could have existed before our recorded history, it is also worth looking back at known ancient civilizations. If we look at the ancient Egyptians, for example, it is perfectly obvious, and even accepted by mainstream scholars, that they appear to have begun their civilization already at the height of their power and then went into permanent decline.^[5]

To some researchers, who are very much shunned by most mainstream experts, this suggests that the Egyptians “took over” the remnants of an ancient, “lost” civilization. From these types of theories generally spring the further claims that such ancient structures as the Pyramids of Giza are more likely monuments and buildings of an Atlantean-type society as opposed to the work of the Egyptians themselves.

5 Survivors Would Be Reduced To Cavemen

Now, let’s say that some people have survived our hypothetical modern-world-ending disaster. What would become of them, realistically? For a start, they would very likely not be concerned with searching out technology or things of that nature. Chances are, once the system has gone down, and the power is off, they will be concerned with their survival more than anything else.^[6] They will no longer be on top of the food chain. Without the aid of our modern plethora of technological gadgets and advanced buildings, many remaining humans will be easy picking for hungry wild animals.

Any survivors would be preoccupied with hunting and gathering whatever food they could and finding some kind of shelter. As the generations go on, humanity’s connection to the “old” world would return. By the third and forth generation, chances are all that would be remembered of pre-disaster Earth would be no different than what myths and legends are to us now. In short, life would be starting again, from scratch.

4 Discoveries Of Mysterious Ancient Objects

As a further point of interest, and perhaps evidence, there have been numerous discoveries of ancient objects, apparently the result of intelligent design, dating to far before such objects should have existed. And what’s more, they’ve been found all over the planet. For example, in 1912, in the small town of Wilburton, Oklahoma, two employees at the Municipal Electrical Plant reportedly discovered a particularly oversized piece of coal that they couldn’t fit into the furnace, which they were stocking to keep the plant ticking over.

They would proceed to smash the coal to smaller pieces so that they could toss the remains into the flames. When they did, though, a perfectly formed and recognizable iron pot fell to the floor. It was allegedly examined and found to be authentic. Why was it there, in a piece of coal that was millions of years of old?

Even more bizarre are the strange spheres, made of some very hard substance, purportedly brought up from the mines of South Africa on multiple occasions by miners.^[7] These spheres have bizarre grooves in them and are of obvious purposeful design. What they might be and, more importantly, why they are there is open to debate.

3 Discoveries Of Tools

As well as mysterious objects that may or may not have a use, many very purposeful and obvious tools have been discovered in pieces of rock that, if we accept what science tells us, are millions of years old.

One particularly intriguing case occurred in London, Texas, in 1936, when the head of a hammer was discovered in a piece of rock believed by some to be as old as 400 million years. (Others say only 700 years.) In 1944, a ten-year-old boy, Newton Anderson, would find a handmade bell in a piece of coal. The lump of coal was reportedly 300 million years old.^[8]

Numerous other purported discoveries of strange, seemingly ancient, objects are on record, many of them from the 1800s and before. The book Forbidden Archaeology lists example after example.

2 Advanced Ancient Technology

Many mainstream historians simply do not accept the notion that many of the ancient civilizations, including the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians, had, at one point in the distant past, advanced technology.^[9] However, many reasons are put forward for this notion, not least the obviously advanced knowledge of the cosmos and the workings of the universe that so many ancient civilizations possessed. Even the placement of many of their famous structures mirrors the arrangement of the stars and the planets to such an accuracy that such knowledge cannot be denied.

We could also look to such devices as the “Baghdad Battery” or the traces of acids in the passageways of the Giza Pyramid that suggest some kind of generation of electricity. And what of the many sites around the world that reportedly show signs of nuclear explosions in the distant past? A prominent example is Mohenjo-Daro, which some researchers, most notably David Davenport in his book Atomic Destruction 2000 BC, have postulated was the site of intentionally made nuclear weapons being purposefully deployed long ago. This, of course, would suggest, as Davenport agreed, that a highly advanced civilization existed.

1 Historians Have A ‘Myopic’ View

At the end of the day, no matter the interesting, valid, and, to varying degrees, legitimate views and claims on either side of the argument, the sad fact is that for many mainstream historians, much like mainstream scientists, archaeologists, and most other specialties ending in “ist,” the view is generally, in the words of Graham Hancock, “very myopic.”^[10]

The reasons for this are numerous. Firstly, amid the constant jockeying for limited funding, nobody wishes to put their head above the parapets. So, as a result, the “status quo” opinion is maintained. Those who do discover things of interest that go against the established paradigm and then, more to the point, attempt to tell the world about them, face a sudden cutting of their funding and, even worse, the wrath of their contemporaries. Perhaps a good example would be the case of Dr. Virginia Steen-McIntyre, who, after discovering ruins in Mexico that suggested civilization in the Americas going back 250,000 years—using accepted, tested methods no less—was suddenly and universally shut out by the “accepted” scientific and archaeological communities.

Right now, the phrase “Middle East” is pretty much synonymous with “gigantic clusterf—k.” But how did things get to be so monumentally bad? How did a region once famed for its tolerance, wisdom, and learning turn into one famed for bloodshed, mayhem, and chaos? To figure that out, we need to delve into the region’s history.

10 The Sunni/Shia Split

In AD 632, things must have been looking pretty rosy for Islam. The outcast sect had swept through Mecca, uniting the entire Arabian peninsula. Muhammad’s clan was strong, they had God on their side, and there were fresh lands for conquering.

Then Muhammad died without naming an heir, and everything went to hell.

Between all his conquering and religion-founding, Muhammad hadn’t found time to father a son. This meant that no one knew who took over when he died. Many of his followers thought his father-in-law, Abu Bakr, should be the first caliph. A smaller, separate bunch thought his cousin Ali ibn Abi Talib should be the first Imam. From that minor disagreement arose the sectarian split that’s been haunting the region ever since—the divide between Sunnis (team Abu) and Shia (team Ali).

9 Centuries Of Disagreement

Despite their differences, the two teams rubbed along fine at first. After three Sunni-chosen caliphs, Team Abu even agreed to make Shia Ali their fourth caliph. Everyone was happy.

Then Ali died, and his son took over. Deciding that one Shia caliph was enough, the Sunnis deposed him. That event set the course for the next 1,400 years of history.

The Shia created their own hierarchy, recognizing imams descended from Ali instead of caliphs. Sometimes, these two systems got along, but when they didn’t, the Shia suffered. During the 16th century, the Ottomans mass executed 40,000 Shia. Later, the Indian Mughal emperors would burn Shia scholars alive. Later still, British colonialists would hire Sunni militias to hunt Shia rebels in Iraq.

Naturally, this led to simmering resentments. As history shows, such resentments have a tendency to eventually boil over.

8 Saudi Arabia’s Deal With The Devil

While these problems were ticking over, an 18th-century Islamic reformist named Ibn Abd al-Wahhab was getting mad.

At the time, Sunni Islam had a big list of stuff you couldn’t do (like worshiping images) that the Shia nonetheless did. Wahhab thought the restrictions should be even stricter and that those who broke them were apostates. That meant the Quran sanctioned their killing.

Wahhabism caught on big time in the Sunni world, so much so that the House of Saud decided to make an alliance with its preachers. In return for their endorsement of the fledgling Saud state, the House of Saud would promote the Wahhabists and shower them with funds.

The pact worked; the House of Saud became rulers of the powerful Saudi Arabia. But it also left them in hock to a dangerous, ultraconservative ideology. It wouldn’t be long before their alliance came back to haunt them.

7 Lines On Maps

For centuries, the Sunni Ottoman Empire was the beast of the Middle East. A superpower that styled itself as a continuation of the Caliphate, it was the glue holding the Middle East together.

Then World War I hit.

If the Great War was bad for Europe, it was a calamity for the Ottomans. Their empire disappeared overnight. The Allied powers divided it up into new nations by drawing a series of lines on a map. From the dust of Turkish rule, Syria, Iraq, and other modern nations arose.

The trouble was that these nations were made up of peoples with not much in common. Shias and Sunnis were thrown together and told to play nice. Kurds, Christians, Yazidis, and others were spread thinly between states. Essentially, a whole bunch of mini-Yugoslavias had just been created. And like Yugoslavia, it only worked so long as there was prosperity and no stoking of ethnic tensions.

6 Iran Gets The CIA Treatment

As all this was going on, there still remained one final player waiting in the wings. In 1941, Iran’s pro-Hitler shah was deposed by Allied forces. This led to a brief flirtation with democracy that would have ramifications for those ethnic tensions we just mentioned.

Although the Allies were happy to see the Iranians trying out democracy, they didn’t like who they democratically elected. Mohammad Mosaddegh was a secular, pro-democracy anti-Islamist who just happened to be a Marxist. As such, he nationalized the British-connected Anglo-Persian Oil Company. The Brits went running to the Americans, who orchestrated a coup to remove Mosaddegh and replace him with the shah’s son.

The new shah was just as corrupt and dictatorial as his daddy. Realizing that democracy had just gotten them more oppression, Iran’s masses began to look for alternative methods of revolution. They found them in the county’s marginalized hard-line Shia preachers.

5 Saudi Arabia’s Internal Problems

Back in Saudi Arabia, the House of Saud was in a worrying bind.

By the 1970s, Wahhabism had gotten very extreme. Its anti-Shia, pro-jihad ideology was attracting hate preachers who poured bile across the Middle East, stoking up Sunni-Shia tensions. It was from these teachings that Al-Qaeda would eventually emerge.

Unfortunately, the internal politics of Saudi Arabia had become so tense that pulling the plug on Wahhabism was impossible. The clerics would’ve whipped up a revolution. So the royal family kept quietly funding this poison, exporting Wahhabism to an ever bigger audience.

Like Chinese water torture, this constant drip-drip of hate was slowly taking effect. The Saudis were spending literally billions of dollars pushing an ultra-extreme version of Islam on Sunnis in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Bahrain—and people were listening. Suddenly, Sunnis and Shia were beginning to look at one another with a whole lot of distrust.

4 Iran Gets Its Revolution

January 7, 1978, marked the moment that all these little streams began to converge into one big, roaring river. It was the start of the Iranian Revolution, a revolution which would see the shah flee, the Ayatollah Khomeini take his place, and the establishment of a hard-line Shia theocracy. It was also the moment that Sunni Saudi Arabia went into panic mode.

The revolution challenged the Saud state’s very being. The Ayatollah explicitly argued that hereditary kingship was against Islam. He also declared postrevolutionary Iran to represent all Muslims, something Saudi Arabia already claimed about itself. Those old seventh-century problems about Sunni/Shia legitimacy were resurfacing again.

Over the following decades, both countries began to deliberately play on those issues to legitimize their own rule. Saudi Arabia fed the Wahhabists even more money to preach the evils of Shia Islam. Iran tried to foment a Shia uprising against Saudi Arabia’s ruling Sunni clique. Each interference brought the temperature ever closer to boiling point.

3 The Iraq Disaster

Throughout the Iranian-Saudi rivalry, there was one wild card keeping everyone in check: Both sides regarded Saddam Hussein as an existential threat. The Iraqi dictator’s wild temper and obvious insanity scared everyone and counterintuitively helped to stabilize the region. Like two fighters caged up with a rabid dog, neither side wanted to make the first move and risk being bitten.

Then 2003 rolled round, and the US shot the dog.

Saddam’s death removed the last check on Iran and Saudi Arabia’s power games. Worse, it encouraged the two regional superpowers to try to fill the power vacuum in Iraq. Saudi Arabia sided with Saddam’s deposed Sunni allies, arming them against the new Shia government. Iran, meanwhile, backed Iraq’s new Shia rulers as they went on a bloody rampage against the Sunnis who had ruled them for so long.

One group to benefit from this chaos were Sunni jihadists Al-Qaeda in Iraq. They would eventually become famous under another name—ISIS.

2 Power Games

With no Saddam and Iraq in flames, Iran and Saudi Arabia began to extend their power games across the region. In Lebanon, Bahrain, and Yemen, both backed their Shia or Sunni allies against the other. Propaganda was pumped into conflict-free countries through mosques and outlets like PressTV. Suddenly, the old divide between Sunni and Shia was at the forefront of Middle Eastern life once again.

As new sectarian conflicts erupted across the region, it became harder and harder for Sunnis and Shia elsewhere not to take sides. In the same way that the Irish Troubles stirred Protestant and Catholic rivalries in the UK, these conflicts magnified the ancient schism and made it seem a matter of life and death.

Then, the Arab Spring exploded. As dictators toppled, wars erupted, and old certainties fell, Iran and Saudi Arabia began to fight for control of the emerging new order. Their struggle would eventually come to a head in Syria.

1 Syria Goes To Hell

By 2011, the old sectarian rivalries had been brought to boiling point. Battle-hardened jihadists were preparing for an apocalyptic war. Two regional superpowers were willing to destroy everything in a deadly game of chicken.

Then Syria imploded.

It was like everything had been leading up to this. Saudi Arabia saw a chance to remove Assad, the Iran-friendly Shia dictator. Iran felt it couldn’t let Saudi Arabia establish a Sunni client state on its doorstep. When Assad gassed his own people and the West did nothing, many Sunnis saw it as confirmation that the US and Europe were siding with Shia Iran. Primed by decades of apocalyptic Wahhabist preaching, they went to fight, joining and empowering groups like ISIS.

The result is a region that is now more divided than it has been for centuries—a mess of factional alliances, dangerous power games, and two big beasts carelessly using an ancient schism to boost their agendas. Until the dust clears and a winner is eventually declared, it’s likely that the Middle East will remain completely screwed up.

Many Star Wars fans are not particularly happy about the new movies, and some feel that Disney threw out the baby with the bathwater when it came to the expanded universe. See, before Disney took over, Star Wars had a huge amount of extra material (novels, comics, etc.), referred to as the expanded universe, or EU.

It used to be that all of the EU was considered canon unless directly contradicted by a movie. However, when Disney came along, they declared that the EU was all just “legends” told within the Star Wars universe. While they can still use elements of it of they so desire, they have chopped the whole thing to pieces, and there were a lot of good reasons why.

10 The ‘Big Three’ Were Far Beyond The Age Of Most EU Stories

One of the biggest reasons that Disney had to go ahead and just throw out the baby with the bathwater is that a huge wealth of the EU stories involved the “big three” (Han, Luke, and Leia), and the actors were advancing in years. Most of these books were written back when the three were still in their prime and were quite popular as depictions of the characters go, but it’s hard to imagine how you could change a lot of the stories enough to make up for such an age gap.

The truth is that what the fans wanted was something fairly shortly after Return of the Jedi—as close as could be plausibly done—and a story that had a young Han, Luke, and Leia simply could not work. For this reason, an incredible amount of EU story lines already had to be scrapped. People simply wouldn’t have been able to suspend their disbelief. Unfortunately, no one would have believed that Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, or Carrie Fisher were in their thirties.^[1]

9 Anakin Solo’s Entire Existence Was A Sore Point For George Lucas

In the Star Wars expanded universe, Han and Leia get married and have three kids.^[2] Two of them are twins named Jacen and Jaina, which some fans wished had been replicated at least in some form in the new movies. In fact, it is for this reason that many fans really like the idea of Rey and Ben secretly being brother and sister—it would fulfill the fan wish for Han and Leia to have had twins. However, the Solos also had another child, and George Lucas kind of wished they hadn’t.

In one of the crazier comics, Leia has her womb touched by the cloned Emperor Palpatine while she’s pregnant—another reason to ax the EU—and is worried about how it may affect her son and make him dark in the future. In order to honor her father, and somehow try to show that the name can be overcome, she names her third child Anakin, after her murderous cyborg father. George Lucas was never happy about this character, if nothing else, because he felt fans would confuse him with Anakin Skywalker. Lucas was reportedly pleased when the kid was finally killed off later on in the New Jedi Order series.

8 Many Of The Most Popular Characters Had Already Been Ruined Or Killed

As we mentioned above, in the EU, Anakin Solo was killed off in The New Jedi Order, but they killed a wealth of other characters in that series and since as well.^[3]The New Jedi Order killed off mostly side characters apart from Chewbacca and Anakin Solo, but after that, the purge really got going. Jacen Solo went to the dark side and was eventually killed by his twin sister. Meanwhile, Mara Jade, Luke Skywalker’s expanded universe wife, gets killed by Jacen Solo, her own nephew, when she tries to confront him and bring him back to the light. Han becomes a washed-up wreck, and Luke goes into exile; Luke’s son Ben gets killed as well.

In the end, nearly every main character that was remotely interesting either dies, loses all the people close to them and becomes a sad sack, or first experiences the second one and then the other—kind of like most Game of Thrones characters. By the time Disney got its hands on the franchise, you could practically count on one hand the amount of interesting characters left whose stories hadn’t already been driven into the ground with incredible force. In the end, Disney felt they needed to be able to go their own route with old characters and be able to feel more free to introduce new ones as well.

7 The Ssi-Ruuk Would Have Given Awkward Questions For Kids To Ask Their Parents

In Star Wars‘s early days, there were a few novels that just kind of left everyone wondering what kind of drugs the author was using. This was mainly because back then, the people in charge, Bantam Books, were basically just letting a lot of sci-fi authors try their hand at the universe and see what they came up with. Still, it is kind of hard to figure out how this one not only made it past the editors but even got a reprisal years later in the form of multiple appearances in The New Jedi Order—a 19-book series.

The Sii-Ruuk are a species that shows up in The Truce at Bakura, and they use a process called entechment to suck out your soul, slave it to a piece of machinery, and use your life energy to power it.^[4] You are stuck in a nightmarish state, powering their desk lamp or whatever until your energy finally fades, your soul passes on, and you die. This is a terrible, horrific thing that really belongs in the most disturbing sci-fi horror novel, but instead, it makes multiple appearances in the Star Wars EU. This is an example of killing it with fire not even being nearly enough.

6 The Yuuzhan Vong Made Such A Mess That A Hard Reset Was Almost Necessary

The Yuuzhan Vong were introduced largely in The New Jedi Order.^[5] This series focused on the invasion of the Star Wars galaxy by a group of extragalactic invaders called the Yuuzhan Vong. This species was largely humanoid but was a black hole in the Force. You could not feel them in the Force or use Force powers on them, but they could not use the Force at all themselves. They came in great numbers and swarmed through the galaxy, almost taking over and destroying everything. Using great organic machines, they reshaped entire worlds to their will.

What made the entire thing so bizarre, and almost ruined the universe from that point forth, is what they left behind. These invaders eschewed all conventional technology and pleasure and thought it evil. They worshiped pain and were extremely sadistic and masochistic. All of their weapons and technology were actually living, which was extremely bizarre and otherworldly. Their shapers, a group of their species responsible for massive genetic engineering, changed entire worlds and left their ridiculous organic matter and other invasive organisms littered all over the universe. The entire thing was simply too crazy for the Star Wars universe and ruined it forever—a hard reset was almost necessary after the horrible disaster of the New Jedi Order series, which never should have been and whose creators should still be ashamed by the existence of.

5 The EU Is So Complicated That One Man’s Entire Job Is Keeping It All Together

One thing many people who are only casual fans (not that there’s anything wrong with that) are unaware of is just how mind-bogglingly huge the entirety of the Star Wars continuity is. There are so many stories throughout so many comics, role-playing game write-ups, novels, short stories, video games, movies, cartoons, and so much media that some may consider it impossible to keep track of. However, there is actually one man whose job it is to do just that.

His name is Leland Chee, and his official title is “Keeper of the Holocron.”^[6] He has been at it for decades now, and even with the EU no longer official canon, they still want someone to keep track of the old continuity as well as the new timeline, so he still has a job. It is an incredibly staggering task, but he has managed to keep a comprehensive timeline updated over the years, with levels of “canon” for every single story for decades. However, this was all just one more reason that Disney felt they needed to tell people to just enjoy the old stories and stop worrying so much about actual continuity in a fictional universe. While Disney still has its own new continuity now, it is a much less crowded galaxy to work in with the old EU now being legends.

4 The Next 30-Odd Years After Return Of The Jedi Have Basically No Breathing Room

Another big problem facing Disney wasn’t just the big three but that even if they did want to cast them in a story, they had already been written into a corner. The period in the 30 years or so after Return of the Jedi has been by far the most popular era to write stories for in Star Wars, so that period is incredibly congested.^[7] Nearly every single moment is filled thick with story, and there really isn’t much of anything you can do to fit anything significantly new in anymore.

The fans wanted new movies in the period after Return of the Jedi, but that period is glutted with stories, and many of them are, quite frankly, terrible. A clean slate allows the writers a chance to simply write a good story and allows for new, young fans to get into Star Wars without needing to go read several dozen to a couple hundred books to get up to speed with everything that is going on in the universe.

3 Changing Anything From One Medium To Another Often Just Disappoints Fans

When Harry Potter was transferred to the big screen, some fans really liked it, and some were incredibly disappointed. Some of the later movies, especially, have been criticized as feeling rushed, and many feel in hindsight that it wasn’t just movie seven that should have had two parts to properly tell the story. However, while it is understandable that Harry Potter and its prodigious length made it especially difficult, it is always hard to translate a book into film. Books are told in an entirely different way, where everything is told to people. On the other hand, movies are a medium where everything is shown to people.

This is why the powers that be are likely reluctant to use book stories from the Star Wars expanded universe for new Star Wars movies. One medium often doesn’t translate well to the other, so it really makes more sense, if you can, to just write an original story rather than trying to translate a preexisting one from a book to a movie. It also creates an air of expectation that can be hard to live up to. If you say you are taking heavy inspiration from a particular book, certain fans will get upset the more you deviate from the source material,^[8] and that disappointment can lead to long-term lost revenue streams.

2 It’s Hard To Have Suspense When People Know The Story Already

Probably the biggest reason of all, though, one which many fans do not tend to think as much about, that Disney decided to go ahead and throw out the EU is because they want to be able to surprise people. The truth is that if you go with story lines that most people already know and don’t deviate from them much, there really isn’t going to be that much surprise, just you bringing a previously told story to the big screen.^[9] While there are plenty of people who will enjoy it, it just won’t spread through word of mouth as much or fuel as much excitement for the next movie.

If you already pretty much know what is going to happen, there really isn’t anything at all to speculate about or talk about, so there is little discussion surrounding the film. This means little to no hype and hardly anyone but the really big fans going to see the movie. The writers know that if you really want a large, general audience, you need a new story that will give people something to talk about for sometimes years to come while they wait for the next installment. For this reason, using preexisting EU stories simply weren’t practical, so Disney decided to go in a different direction.

1 They Can Still Use Characters Or Elements From The EU As They See Fit

The final reason Disney got rid of the EU is because while they did need it gone, it is never really gone if they do need any of it. The EU still has a wealth of existing planets, characters, aliens, organizations, technologies, and all sorts of other things to draw on. While all previous story lines may be axed, they can borrow if they want and bring out fan favorites all the same. For example, due to the way they were written, without even knowing how the prequel trilogy would go down, the first Star Wars expanded universe trilogy by Timothy Zahn will never be adapted into film.

However, the character Grand Admiral Thrawn, a blue alien who uses his knowledge of art to analyze his opponents, is a fan favorite, and Disney has already brought him into the official canon in all new stories.^[10] The truth is that the EU wasn’t truly destroyed; it was just marginalized so that Disney could make sense of the entire mess. All of the old content is still there and can and will be drawn on as needed, but there is simply no benefit to continuing the old continuity system—sometimes you need to start fresh.

Why do modern-day humans appear so drastically different from apes when ape species don’t look all that different from one another?

Fifty years ago, the mainstream scientific consensus said that our ancestors went from living in trees to hunting on the savanna. Then fossil evidence challenged what we thought we knew. In the Great Rift Valley where early hominids thrived, paleontologists discovered that the accompanying microfauna, pollen, and vegetation from that period weren’t savanna species at all.

The image of early hunters chasing red meat through a golden savanna sure painted beautiful illustrations for biology textbooks. But the truth is, we became bipedal before the savanna existed. The former depiction also didn’t account for other puzzle pieces, like the development of our big, complex brains.

Although it began as a lunatic fringe theory, the idea that humans evolved alongside the water and generally had a more aquatic existence has gained considerable steam in the scientific community. Even esteemed natural historian Sir David Attenborough has said, “It isn’t yet the hypothesis that most students are taught, but perhaps its time has come.”

Originally known as the “aquatic ape theory,” it has since been dubbed the “waterside model,” presumably because it sounds a little less silly. Nobody is saying that our ancestors were mermaids swimming in the deep blue alongside whales and talking crabs. Rather, as Elaine Morgan, a proponent of the theory, suggests, “The difference between man and apes has something to do with water.”

Here are just a few reasons to think that the aquatic ape theory might not be so crazy after all.

10 Bigger Brain

Human brain anatomy is markedly different than that of an ape, especially where the cerebral cortex is concerned. Ours is much larger (even though it doesn’t always seem that way). The qualities that define us—like our abilities to use language, make tools, and have fine motor skills—are the result of this key advantage. The question is: How did our brains evolve for these unique purposes?

The enlargement of the human brain can be compared to those found in seals and dolphins. Marine diets seem to be the only foods capable of fueling brain development as they contain “brain-specific” polyunsaturated fats such as docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), which is an omega-3 fatty acid.

The land-based food of savanna hunters simply doesn’t provide the nutrients needed for this change to occur. No primate can develop a large brain with only a land-based diet. As animals evolve bigger bodies on land, their brains actually shrink. Think of the horse with a walnut-sized brain.

In the sea, however, the opposite is true. For example, dolphins have a brain that weighs 1.8 kilograms (4 lb) because seafood provides the nutrients that stimulate a boost in brain growth. This is why a dolphin has a bigger brain than a zebra despite their similar body sizes. Interestingly, the sperm whale has the largest brain in the world, weighing in at 7–8 kilograms (15–18 lb).^[1]

9 Large Sinuses

Our noses are among the most bizarre in the animal kingdom. These oddly shaped snouts are not shared with any other member of the ape family or, for that matter, any other land mammal. We have strikingly large sinuses, which are those empty spaces in the skull between the cheek, nose, and forehead. They seem to serve no significant purpose until one considers the possibility of aquatic adaptation.^[2]

If one imagines an aquatic lineage, it seems that our design has a very useful function indeed. These vacant air cavities may be understood as buoyancy aids that could keep our heads above water. They also protect the upper airway tract in a watery world.

Have you ever wondered why our nostrils peculiarly tilt at a downward angle? It does seem to keep water out of the nose when swimming, does it not?

Our sense of smell, however, is notoriously poor. Keep in mind that one doesn’t need a sharp sniffer underwater. For example, diving mammals typically have a reduced sense of smell. It’s only a breadcrumb on the trail, but you may be getting a whiff.

8 Bipedal Shift

Humankind has been walking on two legs for about two million years. (Some sources say four million years, while others say six million. Suffice it to say, it’s been a while.)

Once upon a time, it was believed that the transition from life in the trees to surviving in open grassland was the reason for this change. However, when baboons ventured from the jungle onto the savanna, they stayed resolutely on four legs.

Why? If walking upright for long periods of time is advantageous, why didn’t more species adapt this trait?

Walking on four legs is clearly a superior means of travel when it comes to balance and speed. Of course, now we know that the savanna wasn’t even in existence at that time anyway. Baboons, it turns out, do stand upright from time to time but only for a very specific purpose—to wade through water for food!

David Attenborough explained that during his lengthy career, he saw many species of primate wading bipedally in the water, crossing shallow rivers and pools. But as soon as they hit land, they always dropped onto four legs again. Wading through water is the only circumstance when these primates will walk on two legs.

Humans only walk somewhat efficiently because of our extended legs and vertical hips. But even so, it’s a little awkward. It’s like we are falling forward with style. So how did we learn to do this?

Studies have observed humans walking in water versus on land, and they suggest that it may be how our early ancestors learned to walk. Water has a natural buoyancy that makes walking upright easier. The evolution of our gangly legs and our silly walk was facilitated by a strong need to develop these traits.^[3]

7 A Subcutaneous Fat Layer

When human babies are born, they look like little cherubs with chubby cheeks and adorable little rolls of fat. This is because their bodies are naturally wrapped in a comparatively thick layer of fat. Other primates are not born so plump. They usually appear to be wrinkly, malnourished balls of skin. So, what gives?

Underneath our skin is a layer of fat that covers almost our entire body. It’s one of the main reasons that humans can become morbidly obese in a way that’s impossible for other primates.^[4] No other primates have these subcutaneous fat layers. Lucky us.

However, this fat layer is seen in sea mammals, including whales, seals, walruses, and manatees. This blubber provides buoyancy and insulates the body, maintaining body heat in cold water. Also, the fat streamlines the body and allows for more effective swimming. It creates a serious advantage in aquatic environments because heat loss happens more quickly in water than air. It’s not just cozy, it’s necessary.

6 Curiosities From Birth

When human babies are submerged in water, they instinctively know to hold their breath and open their eyes. This reflex is called the bradycardic response. Don’t try this at home, but if they are dipped in cold water, their little hearts will instinctively slow as the flow of blood shifts from the peripheral muscles to conserve oxygen.^[5]

This reflex safeguards the oxygen for the brain and heart. It’s not rocket science that a freakishly fat baby who instinctively holds his breath underwater didn’t evolve on an African savanna.

When infants first pop out, they are covered in a mucous layer that looks like cheese. This slick coating that keeps out the cold is called vernix caseosa. It used to be believed that it was unique to humans until a research team from Cornell discovered that newborn seals, or pups rather, are also born in this disgusting greasy ball of vernix caseosa.

Now it’s hypothesized that this physiological phenomenon may extend to all marine mammals.

5 Sweat And Tears

Living near salt water requires the occasional release of salt from the body. While sweating is an effective cooldown ability on its own, it’s not really needed when you’re right next to a body of water and can just take a dunk. That’s where tears come in handy.^[6]

Crying is useful for shedding excess salt. Humans not only sweat more than any other mammal, but they are also the only mammal that sheds tears. Other mammals cry, but no tears fall. As it turns out, humans exude greater quantities of salt water than any other mammal.

4 Breath Control

The reason gorillas can’t speak has nothing to do with their teeth, tongues, lungs, or vocal cords. We only speak because we have mastered conscious control of the breath, and that’s the key.

All diving mammals hold their breath to shield water from the lungs and regulate the pressures in the respiratory tract as they submerge, feed underwater, and surface. This refined mastery of the airway entrances was preadaptive for the evolution of speech. Living in a seascape could explain why we urgently evolved to be able to control our breath.

In our respiratory valves, we have a unique design from other primates in that a soft palate can lift to close off the nasopharynx. This is a critical feature for aquatic mammals to keep water clear of the respiratory passage.^[7]

Humans also have a uniquely descended larynx, which just means that it’s closer to the lungs. As the human baby grows up, the larynx sinks down lower. Again, animals with this design are seals, sea lions, walruses, and dugongs. The one and only primate that has it is us. It allows for gulping large amounts of air easily.

Some researchers argue that our upright posture naturally slid the larynx down, but others suggest that it may have actually been a selected pressure. Next time you hold your breath for a swim, imagine how this seemingly inconsequential feature may have been the biggest game changer in our evolution.

3 Fossils And Observation Of Behavior

The fossil of Lucy, an early upright-walking hominin, and other well-known ancestors were discovered near shorelines of massive lakes, of which the surrounding area was subject to periodic flooding. In an analysis of 20 hominid fossil sites in East and South Africa, there is fossil evidence that suggests our early ancestors were either living lakeside or in flooded grasslands.

How did they handle this deluge?

Researchers have a clue based on observing baboons at Botswana’s Okavango Delta during the summer months when it is flooded. When fruit becomes rare, the baboons eat water lily roots instead.^[8]

Fossil evidence demonstrates that early hominids also resorted to aquatic plants like water lily nuts. The nuts from this thorny plant are a pain in the butt to collect as they require diving 5–7 meters (16–23 ft) deep. Then they can be roasted over a fire where they pop open like popcorn. Even today, people still collect water lily nuts and eat them in the same way.

We also know that our ancestors were chowing down on seafood, in general, about two million years ago. For example, we’ve discovered fossilized bones of a catfish 2 meters (7 ft) long that had been cut with stone tools. It may be no small coincidence that early humans followed the coastlines around the world before heading inland. The water is what they knew best.

2 Pruney Fingers

Have you ever wondered why our fingers get all wrinkly when we’re in the water for a while? This active process is controlled by our autonomic nervous system. Evolutionary neurobiologist Mark Changizi believes it served a valuable function in our distant past.

He thinks that the pruney pattern may improve our underwater grip on objects. An independent team from Newcastle University found some support for this hypothesis in a study that demonstrated how people can pick up wet marbles more quickly with pruney fingers than dry ones.

This advantage only applied to the wet marbles. When the marbles were dry, both wet and dry fingers had the same ability. Evolutionary biologist Tom Smulders said, “We have shown that wrinkled fingers give a better grip in wet conditions—it could be working like treads on your car tires, which allow more of the tire to be in contact with the road and [give] you a better grip.”^[9]

He explains how this advantage could have helped our ancestors gather food from bodies of water.

1 Nakedness

We are the only smooth-skinned primates. Nakedness is an advantage underwater because it allows the body to glide gracefully through the water with ease. Why, then, do we still have hair on our heads?

It is hypothesized that cranial hair remained to protect us from sun radiation. Hair shields the head, but the shoulders and upper arms also tend to have more hair. The hair that did stick around is arranged diagonally, pointing inward toward the midline of the body. This pattern provides the least resistance while swimming.

There’s a close connection between nakedness and water. Mammals that have lost their body hair are the aquatic ones like the hippo, dolphin, manatee. and more. The elephant may be pointed to as an example of a nonaquatic animal that lost its hair, but hold on. Turns out, they have an aquatic ancestor as well. In fact, all naked pachyderms do, even the rhino.

It seems that every naked mammal was conditioned by water at some point.^[10] Why not us?

Celebrities are loved by millions of people all over the world. We all have a favorite celebrity, someone we’ve never met but love. We watch their movies, or listen to their songs, and could spend hours talking about them. People set up blogs dedicated to them, write books about them, and they’re constantly in the news. But what happens when it feels like your favorite celebrity let you down? Or worse, actually hurt you?

Most of us would just be quietly disappointed, or complain on Twitter. “That sucks,” we’d say, and then move on with our day. Some people, however, feel that celebrities need to pay for disappointments and mistakes, and they resolve to use the court system to make it happen, whether the celebrity was actually in the wrong or not.

Without further ado, here are 10 celebrities who were sued, rightfully or wrongfully, by their own fans.

10 Skrillex

Concerts are a dangerous place to be sometimes. Between the packed, jostling crowds, the limited visibility, the strobing lights, and disorienting loud sounds, there’s numerous ways to find yourself injured. That’s exactly what happened to one fan in 2014, at a concert performed by famed DJ and dubstep artist, Skrillex.

Jennifer Fraissl was in the concert audience when Skrillex leapt off a DJ table up on the stage, allegedly landing directly on her and causing her to have a stroke! Though his attorney claims that the video of the incident clearly shows no contact between Skrillex and Fraissl, the jury tasked with the final decision in this lawsuit disagreed.

Fraissl was awarded a cool 4.5 Million in damages, divided up between Skrillex, his tour company, and the venue for payment.

Skrillex, to his credit, took it well, saying that his number one priority was making sure his fans were safe and having a good time.^[1]

9 Creed

Creed is a well known and well loved “dad rock” band, with tracks that have been featured in movies, played incessantly over the radio, and featured in at least one playlist we all had in our 20s. It’s reasonable to expect such an accomplished band to put on a fantastic show, right? The fans seemed to think so, which is why one 2003 concert was such a shock that it apparently required the response of a class action lawsuit!

In 2003, fans of Creed were shocked and a little horrified when frontman Scott Stapp stumbled out onstage, allegedly drunk and unsteady. He reportedly had severe trouble singing, and at one point actually passed out on stage, halting the concert. Needless to say, the 15,000 who showed up to watch creed play were incensed, some so much that they filed a lawsuit on behalf of everyone else at the venue!

They demanded a refund on the ticket costs (and hopefully an apology) for everyone who came to the show, as well as a refund on their parking, a total cost to the band of 2 Million dollars!

The judge, however, dismissed the case, saying that he was not “a rock critic” and that it would be a very bad idea for the arts to set a legal precedent for judging good art (or shows) from bad ones for the sake of lawsuits.^[2]

8 Lil’ Wayne

Even if you’re not into Rap, you probably know about Lil’ Wayne. From 2009-2014, he was a massive success in the rap world. Kids loved him, parents tolerated him, and fans were crazy about him. His explicit songs, whimsical lyrical twists and often hilarious rhymes shot him to the top of the charts.

In May of 2012, however, one fan wasn’t very happy with Wayne. Alfred Marino claims that, after getting into an argument with the famous rapper, one of Wayne’s ‘crew’ smashed him over the head with a skateboard! Marino had pulled out his phone with the intent of taking a picture of Lil’ Wayne after seeing him outside a shop in Los Angeles. After being told repeatedly to put his phone away (and being called a few nasty names) Marino alleges that Wayne’s bodyguard broke a skateboard over the back of his his head, knocking him out and leaving him with vertigo so severe he had to take medical leave from his job.

Marino was reportedly “disgusted” by Lil’ Wayne after the incident, and as a former fan, sued the rapper for the distressing and painful incident.^[3]

7 Justin Bieber

For a while, just about the most harmless celebrity you could imagine would have been Justin Bieber. The Canadian dreamboat was known for his sugar-pop love songs, big eyes, and irresistible charm. Girls of most any age swooned over him, spending tons of money on his merchandise, his albums, and most of all to see him live and in person at sold out concert venues.

At one such show in Oregon in 2010, Bieber set up an act for the concert that played off that very thing, climbing into a giant, heart-shaped metal gondola and being pulled over the crowd, leaning out to wave to the sea of fans below. In the crowd was Stacey Betts, a stay at home mother of five who had come to see the show with her daughter.

According to Betts, Bieber whipped the crowd of girls into such a frenzy with his waving that their screams reached “unsafe levels”, echoing off the metal heart and causing a “sound blast” that permanently damaged her hearing. She claims to have contracted tinnitus, a condition which causes constant, debilitating ringing in the ears. Betts also claims hearing loss and an overall lowered quality of life.

For her pain and suffering, Betts demanded a whopping 9 Million in damages.^[4] The case was ultimately dismissed.

6 Miley Cyrus

Many of us have fond memories of Miley Cyrus as her lovable, blonde alter ego Hannah Montana, the spunky country pop-star plastered across the Disney Channel schedule (and our hearts). The daughter of famous country singer Billy Ray Cyrus, Miley was introduced to the entertainment business young and has stayed there pretty solidly ever since then. Those perfect wholesome beginnings have not, however, kept her out of trouble with the media, and with her fans.

In 2009, a photo surfaced on the web of Miley making a “Chinese eyes” face. Sitting with a group of her friends, Miley was seen in the photo pulling her eyes out to the sides along with others in the group. In fact, the only person in the photo NOT doing this was a young asian man who, it is alleged, was being mocked by the eye pulling.

The photo was deemed so offensive that it triggered a lawsuit. Los Angeles area woman Lucie J. Kim, alleging to have been personally damaged by the “discriminatory” photo, reportedly sued the Disney teen for $4 BILLION dollars! Not just on her own of course, but on behalf of the over 1 million Asian Pacific Islander’s living in the Los Angeles area.

For frame of reference on how out of this world a sum of 4 billion is, Miley’s entire net worth currently stands at only 160 million: roughly 4% of the requested pay.^[5]

5 Usher

Whether you’re a fan of Usher’s music or not, you’ve probably heard his name. From his involvement with Justin Bieber to being parodied on Family Guy, Usher has been around for a while, and in that time has made a name for himself as a talented musician and agent for up-and-comers.

It’s my unfortunate duty to tell you that Usher is also known for a less pleasant bit of publicity: a lawsuit filed against him in 2017 by three people who say that he gave them all herpes! Way to really screw it all up, Usher!

Quantasia Sharpton, an anonymous man, and another anonymous woman have banded together to sue the R&B star for allegedly giving them herpes (and they’re not talking about cold sores, either). Although he refused to make a public statement, Usher is known to have settled a similar lawsuit about the same allegations out of court for 1.2 million dollars in 2012. The unnamed plaintiff in the 2012 case is supposedly a former lover and celebrity stylist.

Sharpton and the anonymous duo sought unspecified damages and to have Usher cover their court fees.^[6]

4 Jessica Simpson

Serious question: can a paparazzo be considered a fan? They’re obsessive like fans, and they love to take pictures like fans, so for the purpose of this list, they probably count. With that in mind, let us look at the lawsuit against Jessica Simpson in 2018.

Outside a hotel in New York, Jessica Simpson was, as is often the case, ambushed by a paparazzo. A few photos were snapped, the paparazzo ran off, such is life for a famous person. However, a few hours later when the photo was posted to a rag site, Simpson copied it and pasted it onto her instagram. You’d think, being that it was a picture of her, she’d have the right. I mean, it’s literally her face!

According to the paparazzo and the media company that employed him, however, since the photo was taken by their employee, they own it, and Simpson actually stole it when she pasted it on her instagram.^[7]

The company alleges damages upwards of 20 thousand dollars. They may not legally own her face, but they sure are determined to make her pay for taking it back!

3 Snoop Dogg

Imagine for a minute you’re at a concert for your favorite artist. Elated at being near them, you rush the stage and go in for a hug. From the wings, as if waiting for you, several security guards swoop in and tackle you, causing major injuries.

That was the situation for Richard Monroe Jr, a Snoop Dogg fan violently tackled by security when he rushed the stage and attempted to hug Snoop in the middle of a concert. Monroe was knocked out and dragged offstage. He later woke on the ground backstage, his face swollen, lying in a pool of blood.

Monroe originally sued for 22 Million in damages, but was awarded just under 500 thousand after the jury determined that Snoop was not entirely to blame for the incident. Monroe also says that, after spending several days hanging out with Snoop during negotiations for a settlement, he feels very close with Snoop. He even went so far as to say that he felt happy when he saw Snoop in the courtroom, despite the circumstances.^[8]

2 Bon Jovi

As we all know, Bon Jovi is a very successful man. An ’80s star that still enjoys relevance and success today, Bon Jovi is clearly a man who needs no helping hands, ethical or otherwise. In fact, he’s still performing and touring to this day, and still putting out new music! So why would he need to steal a song?

According to one Samuel Bartley Steele, Bon Jovi did just that. In 2007, after releasing his song “I Love This Town”, Bon Jovi was hit with a stunning 4 Billion dollar lawsuit by Steele, who claims that Bon Jovi had somehow gotten his hands on Steele’s “country rock tribute” song to the Boston Red Sox (“Man I Really Love This Team”) and had passed it off to his record label as his own. At the trial, Steele even brought a musicologist to testify that they were the same song, only to be surprised when the musicologist testified that the songs were, in fact, nothing alike save for the words “love” and “this” in their respective titles.

His lawsuit was of course dismissed, but that didn’t stop him. Steele appealed the decision, hoping to take another run at the famous singer.^[9]

1 Taylor Swift

When you’re a pretty girl and your face is plastered across magazines, billboards, and social media almost constantly, you tend to attract a lot of strange people. Most are harmless, simply adoring fans who vie for your attention with gifts, stunts, and social media campaigns. What do you do, however, when you manage to attract a stalker?

In 2015, Taylor Swift had to answer this exact question as a fan went rogue and attempted to drag her into court to get her attention. Russell Greer, a long time Swift fan, wrote a song over the course of two years titled “I Get You, Taylor Swift” and send it to her agents, attempting to have it passed on to Swift herself. The agents were not allowed to pass the song on because of copyright concerns, and sent back polite but firm rejection letters.

Instead of taking it on the chin, Greer began sending mail and gifts directly to Swift’s family, begging them to give her the song. When that failed, he tried a new tactic: suing her to the tune of 7 thousand dollars for both neglect of duty and emotional distress. At first, it was couched simply as an attempt to get her attention, but when the lawsuit was dismissed and Greer, through statements made in the motion, found that Swift’s family considered his efforts “troubling” and “invasive”, Greer became openly hostile, and sued her a second time, this time for 50 Million, in another attempt to force her to acknowledge him.^[10]

Yikes! Let’s hope no other girls ever catch his eye quite like poor Taylor!