Did you know that woolly mammoths were still roaming the earth during the time the pyramids were being built? Or that civil rights activist Rosa Parks might have seen the first two Shrek movies in theaters before her death in 2005? Yes, this is true. It’s crazy to think about, right? Believe it or not, there are a lot more weird timeline overlaps like this that have gone viral on TikTok, and each one is more exciting than the last.
It feels like you're learning something new every day on TikTok, and the latest trend taking over FYP is no exception. Users have been sharing these fun (and low-key, creepy) facts about two seemingly unrelated events that happened at the same time, proving just how messy our understanding of history actually is. Not surprisingly, these videos make people rethink everything they know. For example, when you think of Surrealist artist Salvador Dali, you might imagine him living over a hundred years ago. You'd be right to think so—the Spanish artist was born in 1904, after all—but according to @heartstartspounding's bizarre TikTok timeline, Dalí was actually cast in Harry Potter actor Daniel Read Cliff died the same year he was born. Even Taylor Swift was born in 1989. Wouldn’t this completely change the way you think about time?
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Another weird timeline fact shared by the creator is that Cleopatra — yes, that Cleopatra — was born "closer to the invention of the iPhone than the actual construction of the pyramids." Let it sink in.
The TikToker revealed even more shocking facts in follow-up videos, such as how Oxford University predates the Aztec empire by about 200 years. But perhaps the most shocking fact of all is that a man named Samuel J. Seymour witnessed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and broadcast it on CBS The incident was discussed on a CBS game show called "I've Got a Secret." Lincoln was killed in 1865 and the episode aired in 1956. Seymour was five years old when Lincoln died.
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Do you think you could handle more incredibly weird timeline facts? User @blackcherryheart has many. First of all, did you know that Nintendo was founded in 1889, the same year Vincent Van Gogh created "Starry Night" ? It feels like these are facts we shouldn’t know, but they’re completely true.
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Well, if that doesn’t shock you yet, these facts from @insxne31 will definitely. Not only were Anne Frank and Martin Luther King, Jr. born in 1929, but so were Queen Elizabeth II and Marilyn Monroe Three years ago in 1926. This makes sense.
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Clearly, these timeline inconsistencies are much more common than we thought, but that doesn't make them any less shocking. Someone needs to create a "weird timeline" history class ASAP so we can finally figure out our timelines once and for all.
