People Explain Which Things Are Far Newer Than People Realize

Glug Glug Glug

The knowledge that it's bad to drink when pregnant. Only became widely known in the 80s.

youcallthataheadshot

This one boggles my mind. Alcohol isn't exactly new -- the ancient greeks had wine and mead. The temperance movement was active for a good hundred years before they got the 18th Amendment.

But nope. While there were certainly some alarms raised throughout history, people were surprised to learn about fetal alcohol syndrome in 1973, and it wasn't confirmed by a second group of researchers until 1979. In the 60's through 80's it was apparently common for doctors to give alcohol intravenously to women to stop premature labor.

Lord_Nivloc

Don't You Love Bread?

Ciabatta bread goes all the way back to the early 1980s.

Hyphum

Haha I heard of that too, awhile back. I went googling it again and apparently baguettes are from early ~1900s. Crazy, I would've thought they'd be historical.

Kep0a

Suck It, Marco Polo

Tomatoes are actually a new world crop. So when you associate Italy with pasta sauce, you're actually thinking of Italy, post Columbian Exchange (mid 1500s).

And actually, tomato sauce wasn't even integrated into Italian cuisine until the late 19th century, so go figure.

lacroixb0i

Earthquake!

The theory of plate tectonics.

It pretty much makes up the entire backbone of modern geology, yet it wasn't actually accepted until the 1960s. Alfred Wegener proposed his theory of continental drift in 1915 but couldn't explain the mechanism behind it so his theory was dismissed. Over the next few decades, the evidence of crustal movement became undeniable and plate tectonics developed as a theory.

It's just crazy to me that geologists were pretty much completely clueless until around 60 years ago.

Gneissisnice

Just A Little Bit Of Time

New Zealand! Its indigenous population only arrived there about 800 years ago, despite Australia just across the Tasman having been inhabited for 75,000 plus years

GrimThursday

History class in New Zealand is really boring. We learn the same history year after year because there isn't a lot of it

Scottishbiscuit

Named For A New Planet

Pluto, the celestial body, wasn't truly discovered until 1930.

Only one year later, Mickey Mouse's dog was renamed from Rover to Pluto — likely to capitalise on the hype around this new planet, but there are no sources to confirm this.

TomAVulpis

Well Now I Can Not Die On My Own

At home blood glucose monitoring has only been possible since around 1980. 1908 thru 1980, you had to make an appointment with your doctor.

dbbljack

I'm a Type 1 diabetic. My brother found an old, late 80s or very early 90s, test kit at a thrift store one time. He thought it would be neat to have, so he bought it for like $3 or something. We got it up and working and wanted to see how accurate it was, since those back then really were just ballpark, and once I put the huge amount of blood it required on the strip, it shut off. So naturally we were disappointed, set it on the counter, and got to doing something else. Several minutes later it started screeching, and so we checked it and it was giving us my fairly accurate glucose reading. It didn't turn off or die, it just had a five minute test time! I often thank God just how far medical technology has come, what with the small drop of blood and 2 second test time I have for my current meter. It's super easy to get frustrated with diabetes, but I always try to remember just how good I do have it now.

Alphapanc02

So Then...What's Kibble?

Late, but commercial dog kibble. There's so many people who think it's what our pets were bred and evolved to eat over the thousands of years they've been alongside humans.. But the first kibble wasn't even made until 1956.

Before that, dogs lived entirely off raw meat and table scraps. That's what your grandparents and great grandparents fed their own food. That's what they've eaten for thousands and thousands of generations before them. That is what they're designed and evolved to eat.

Howlo

En Firenze

Italy wasn't a unified single country until 1871. Before that, it was a patchwork of small kingdoms and city-states with different local dialects and languages. As late as 1861, only 2.5 percent of Italians spoke what is now known as standard Italian, which before then was the Florentine dialect of Tuscan.

zeteo_galeneian

Science In The 80s

The now commonly-accepted theory that a large meteor caused, or was a major cause of, the extinction of the dinosaurs.

When you watch Fantasia (1940) and see the Rite of Spring sequence, where-in you witness the extinction of the dinosaurs, you see that it's portrayed as a great drought which was followed by a series of massive earthquakes. That's because at that time, this was the most accepted idea of what caused the mass extinction.

The theory of the dinosaurs being killed off by a meteor strike (or the effects of said strike on the planet, rather) is called The Alvarez Theory and was first proposed by Luis and Walter Alvarez in the year 1980.

Zingeronix