"What Devilry is This?!" - 5 Surprising Things Past People Didn't Know

People in the past - they were silly, weren't they? With their tights and their pitchforks. "Burn the witch!" Ha ha! Even Isaac Newton, a man so smart he had to invent a whole branch of mathematics to explore his ideas, would routinely poke himself in the eyes with knitting needles and write down which colours he saw. No wonder they couldn't figure out TV.

I think we've all fantasised about going back in time and blowing some stupid medieval minds with an iPhone or whatever. (And some kind of gun, lest we be clapped in irons and executed in some bloody, convoluted way.) But actually, it wouldn't take that much at all. Circa 1600, some of the things people had no concept of at all were pretty surprising.

Look at him, the dunce...

1) DINOSAURS

I mean, come on. Dinosaurs! They've been right there in the ground since forever. It's not like we were waiting for industrial digging equipment to be invented. Children find them all the time.

But actually, this one does make sense when you think about it. Firstly, what's in the ground isn't bones - it's fossils. Minerals in the ground seep into bones over time and eventually render them stone casts of the original. Secondly, it's not like we ever find complete skeletons. The first recorded finding of a mostly-complete dinosaur wouldn't be until 1858. So in the age of hat buckles, fossils would have been assumed to be just weird-shaped rocks - because that's actually what they are.

Anything sufficiently animal-looking was usually put down to biblical giants. A famous femur fossil found in 1676 was theorised to be the scrotum of a 17-foot man. Fair enough.

Yep. There it is.

It makes even more sense when you add, thirdly, that people in the past also had no idea of the concept of extinction. Nature (God) was thought to be infallible. So the idea that an entire species could just disappear by random chance (or human shenanigans) would have been unthinkable heresy. And of course, the world was thought to be 4,000 years old. Given all this, there was really nothing in the Seventeenth-Century worldview that could accommodate a dinosaur.

2) THE FUNCTION OF THE BRAIN

Yes, big surprise, the thickos of yore not even understanding neurology. But I'm talking the basic notion of where thoughts are formed. Which you would think is intuitive. Of course they're in your head. Have you ever thought so hard your head hurt? So stressed out that you cradle your head in your hands? It seems like the most basic instinctual response. I'm sure I've seen zoo monkeys doing it.

The notion that this may in fact be learned behaviour actually blows MY mind. But in the age of frilly pimp collars, they thought consciousness was located in the heart. Yes, the phrase "to love with all your heart" wasn't romantic metaphor - it was their literal assessment of the situation. Ditto "heavy heart" - they thought a guilty conscience was a physical burden which would weigh it down. (This one actually dates back to at least the ancient Egyptians, who believed the Gods would weigh your heart after death as part of your judgement. Which seems lazy. And unfair. A clear conscience is just as likely to indicate psychopathy as a blameless life.)

As for the brain, their best guess seems to have been that it regulated blood temperature A biological counter to the fiery passions of the heart. Which again just sounds bizarre. We know they weren't shy about beheading people - what did they think was going on there then? That's one vital piece of cooling equipment if its removal causes the whole body to immediately and completely shut down.

3) THAT TOMATOES ARE EDIBLE

A bit more specific, this one. And I'm not talking about how people used to think tomatoes were vegetables. It turns out that was a tax thing. And besides, they were right.

A tomato is a vegetable the same way Pluto is a planet: It isn't, but shut up.

If Shakespeare saw you bite into a tomato, he would have thought you quite bewitched. Or suicidal. See, in the age of lusty musketeers, tomatoes were believed to be poisonous. They were classified as part of the fearsome nightshade family (which is actually correct: their leaves and stems are mildly toxic and can be harmful if for some reason you ate a lot of them) - but it actually goes further. People at the time were eating from pewter plates of tin and lead. The acidity of tomatoes would react with this alloy and absorb it, giving people lead poisoning.

So until well into the 18th Century, tomatoes in Europe were only there for decoration. I wonder if the people growing them in their homes were trying to impress girls with their reckless, gothic side.

4) BASIC BIOLOGY

Shortly before the Great Plague of London, respected physician Jean Baptiste van Helmont apparently decided there weren't enough mice in the world and proposed a recipe for their manufacture. Just stuff an old shirt and some wheat into a jar. "The reaction of the leaven in the shirt with fumes from the wheat will, after approximately 21 days, transform the wheat into mice."

"For rabbits, stuff your hat with goose vomit and wait for a full moon."

This is what I love about history. In the age of gratuitous Latin, you could say any old shit like this and be taken seriously. No need to bother yourself with actually watching it happen - a mouse's fondness for wheat and its ability to climb into a jar are irrelevant to this experiment.

The thing is, this wasn't a revolutionary idea at all - the concept of spontaneous generation (creatures just spawning magically) had been mainstream science for millennia. People already thought flies came from dead bodies, frogs from mud, eels from dew. Helmont was just pulling yet more things out of his ass for the list (he also said you can make scorpions from basil) and nobody thought this was mental.

5) THE DANGERS OF SMOKING

Have you noticed how rarely you see people smoke these days? I think if you went back in time just twenty years, this difference would be the first thing you noticed. People knew it was bad for you, but few gave a shit. Rewind a further forty and you would see cartoon characters advertising cigarettes, and people smoking in hospitals. It's only logical to follow that train to a time when people thought tobacco was actually good for you.

But lordy lordy, did they love tobacco back then. In the age of doughy corset bosoms, it wasn't just smoked - it was chewed, huffed, snuffed, brewed into tea, rubbed into gums, blown up the ass... Like the morphine yet to come, it was seen as a magic cure-all and it seems they couldn't get enough.

And yes, the bit about blowing it up the ass was absolutely a thing. Tobacco smoke enemas were seen as a way of warming the body and promoting respiration. It was the go-to treatment for victims of drowning, and by the 18th Century, "resuscitation kits" - literally a bellows, pipe, and a pouch of tobacco - were placed at regular intervals along the Thames, and anyone unlucky enough to be fished from the river would wake up to quite the surprise.

For more Seventeenth-Century silliness, check out my commentary on the Gunpowder Plot.