While books are a fixture of today’s libraries, humans long constructed great centers of learning without them. That includes one of the oldest known significant libraries in history: the Library of Ashurbanipal. This library, established in modern-day Mosul, Iraq, by the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal in the seventh century BCE, contained nothing we would recognize today as a book. Instead, it was a repository of 30,000 clay tablets and writing boards covered in cuneiform — the oldest writing system in the world. Much like your local public library, this royal collection covered a variety of subjects, including legislation, financial statements, divination, hymns, medicine, literature, and astronomy. 

Ancient Greeks invented paper.

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The ancient Greeks can be thanked for a great many things, but paper isn’t one of them. On March 11, 105 CE, court official Cai Lun presented his papermaking process to Emperor He of the Han dynasty in China. It’d take many centuries, but the idea transformed the world.

While we know when this library flourished, defining the appearance of the earliest book is slightly murkier. The Egyptians, for example, are known to have written on papyrus scrolls; when the Library of Alexandria in Egypt burned in the first century BCE, 40,000 priceless scrolls were lost. By about the second century CE, Romans began using bound codexes, a kind of proto-book that consisted of papyrus or parchment sheets between wooden covers. The arrival of Christianity made the codex immensely popular, and it basically replaced the scroll by the sixth century CE. Block-printed books showed up in China around 700 CE, although Europe didn’t see anything similar until Johannes Gutenberg invented mechanical movable type around 1448. So while libraries haven’t always housed books, they have been repositories of human knowledge — in whatever form it might take.

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More than 200 years after the 10th President of the United States was born, one of his grandsons is still alive. As impossible as that may seem, the math — and biology — checks out. John Tyler, who was born in 1790 and became President in 1841 after William Henry Harrison died in office (possibly of pneumonia), had a son named Lyon Gardiner Tyler in 1853. This son was born to the then-60-something Tyler and his second, much younger, wife, Julia Gardiner. Lyon then had two sons of his own in his 70s (also with a much younger second wife), one of whom — Harrison Ruffin Tyler, born in 1928 — is still gracing the Earth in his 90s.

George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush were the only father and son to both become President.

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The Bushes were preceded in this exceedingly rare feat by John Adams (1797–1801) and John Quincy Adams (1825–1829), the second and sixth Presidents, respectively.

It may make this feat slightly less surprising to know that Tyler had 15 children, more than any other POTUS in U.S. history. Tyler’s actual presidency is less remarkable than this biographical oddity, alas — he was referred to as “His Accidency” upon assuming office and wasn’t renominated in the following election. (He was also an enslaver whose profitable plantation ran on the labor of 40 to 50 enslaved people.) Though his grandsons haven’t had major political aspirations, you might say it was in Tyler’s blood to seek office: His father, John Tyler Sr., was roommates with Thomas Jefferson at the College of William and Mary and later served as the 15th governor of Virginia.

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The Earth has been around for a while — about one-third as long as the universe itself. By comparison, Homo sapiens are the new kids on the block. Earth’s story began at the outset of the Hadean eon, about 4.6 billion years ago. It took 600 million years just for the Earth’s crust to take shape, another 300 million years for the first signs of microbial life to pop up, and about 3.2 billion years after that for life to really get going thanks to the evolutionary burst known as the Cambrian explosion. Several mass extinction events and some 465 million years later, mammals finally took center stage, but modern humans didn’t enter the biological limelight for another 65 million years. With the first Homo sapiens appearing around 300,000 years ago, humans have only been on planet Earth for 0.0067% of its existence. 

Pangea is the only supercontinent in Earth’s history.

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Before Pangea, there was Rodinia (which formed about 1 billion years ago), and geologic evidence suggests that another supercontinent called Nuna formed around 1.6 billion years ago. Scientists believe supercontinents occur in cycles stretched across hundreds of millions of years.

In those 300,000 years, humans have been pretty busy. For a couple thousand years, we harnessed fire and lived a nomadic existence, until around the fourth millennium BCE, when the very first civilizations began to take shape. Since then, humans have been on a meteoric trajectory, going from hunter-gatherer to spacefarer in less than 6,000 years. Carl Sagan famously displayed the universe’s history on a 365-day calendar, with the Big Bang on January 1 and our current moment starting at 12:01 a.m. the next year. On that timeline, it’s only at 10:30 p.m. on December 31 that humans first appear, and all of recorded history is squeezed into just a few seconds — but what a few seconds it’s been.

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