12 Historical Discoveries That Rewrote History

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Today, we all know that an asteroid killed/started the extinction of the dinosaurs. The theory was first proposed in 1980 by Nobel prize laureate physicist Luis Alvarez and his geologist son Walter. They suggested that a massive asteroid impact about 66 million years ago caused sudden climate changes that wiped out most dinosaur species. Evidence for this came from a worldwide layer of iridium, a rare metal often found in asteroids. This theory was not widely embraced by the scientific community. However, in the early 1990s, scientists confirmed the theory when they discovered the Chicxulub crater in Mexico, which matched the timing of the extinction.
Above is a photo of Luis and Walter Alvarez with a sample of the iridium layer deposit in 1985.
The Terracotta Army were only discovered a little over 50 years ago! In 1974, farmers were digging a well near Xi'an, China, when they dug up fragments of human-sized clay figures. The life-sized statues had been buried for over 2,000 years, guarding the tomb of China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huang. Historical records mentioned the emperor's tomb, but there was no known record of the vast army itself. The discovery revealed thousands of soldiers, horses, and chariots, each with unique details. The Terracotta Warriors are just part of a much larger tomb complex that spans across a 22-square-mile area.
For centuries, many scientists dismissed the idea that rocks could just fall from the sky, despite the fact that documentation of the phenomenon went back further than the Romans. That changed in 1803, when thousands of meteorite fragments fell near the town of L'Aigle in Normandy, France. The event was carefully studied by French scientist Jean-Baptiste Biot, who confirmed they were from space. His report convinced the scientific community that meteorites were real. From then on, meteorites were accepted as a natural phenomenon.
For a long time, explorers and Western scientists believed gorillas were just a myth or a legend (like Bigfoot). Stories from local African tribes mentioned large, ape-like creatures with super strength, but there was no evidence. In 1847, American missionary Thomas Savage and anatomist Jeffries Wyman traveled to Africa, where they discovered a large skull that fit no other known primate. They named the discovery "gorilla." This discovery confirmed that gorillas were real animals. But it wasn't until 1902 that Captain Robert von Beringe hunted down two gorillas and brought them back as proof.
Pompeii was rediscovered in the 1700s, but the discovery was linked to the nearby city of Herculaneum, which was also buried by the same eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. It started in 1709, when a worker digging a well in Herculaneum discovered the first pieces of artifacts. But it wasn't until 1738, when the Neapolitan King Charles VII sent a team to Herculaneum to unearth more artifacts for him to decorate his palace with, that a discovery of the buried city was made. This find sparked interest in the other ancient cities that might be buried under volcanic ash. A few years later, in 1748, Roque Joaquín de Alcubierre, who led the excavation of Herculaneum, began the excavation of Pompeii.
Alfred Wegener first proposed the idea of a supercontinent called Pangea in 1912. He suggested that all the continents were once joined together and later drifted apart. However, many scientists didn't accept this idea at the time because Wegener couldn't explain how the continents moved. It wasn't until the 1950s and 1960s that new evidence from ocean floor studies and plate tectonics came to light. This confirmed that Pangea and continental drift were real parts of Earth's history, and the theory gained wide acceptance.
In 1908, the Tunguska event happened. Which, in case you don't know, was a huge explosion that flattened about 800 square miles of forest in Siberia near the Tunguska River. It was so large that shock waves were recorded in Western Europe. At first, people only knew something had happened, but they had no idea what because it happened in such a remote area with few witnesses. Investigations finally began in the 1920s, when scientists visited the site to study the damage. They confirmed the explosion was real and likely caused by a meteor or comet exploding in the atmosphere.
If you watched any movie made about the Titanic before 1985, they would get one important detail wrong! When the Titanic sank in 1912, several survivors reported seeing that the ship had broken in two before sinking, but many experts at the time and after dismissed this claim. So movies about it never portrayed that. For decades, the exact details of the disaster remained uncertain because the wreck had never been located. In 1985, a joint American-French expedition led by Robert Ballard finally discovered the Titanic's remains on the ocean floor. The wreck was found in two large sections, confirming what eyewitnesses had said more than 70 years earlier.
As Ranker noted, one of the first times the ship was seen splitting in half in media was in the 1996 CBS mini-series, Titanic, starring a then-unknown Catherine Zeta-Jones.
Starting in the late 18th century and throughout the 19th century, there were stories and small artifacts discovered that suggested Vikings reached North America long before Columbus. Some historians believed them (based on things like how well the Vikings could navigate the seas), while others thought they were just legends or misidentified artifacts. The debate continued until the 1960s, when archaeologists discovered a Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada. The site contained Norse-style buildings, tools, and artifacts dating to around the year 1000. This confirmed that Vikings had explored and settled parts of North America centuries before Columbus's voyages.
Prior to its eruption in 1980, Mount St. Helens was, as the New York Times put it, "a relatively little known volcano 50 miles north of Portland, Ore." While that was likely true of the greater US, it was, of course, known to locals who lived there, Indigenous peoples who had lived in the area for centuries, and to volcanologists. It was the latter, who in a Feb. 1975 scientific report in the Journal Science (covered by the Times), warned that Mount St. Helens would have a violent eruption, "perhaps before the end of this century." In 1978, the USGS published a hazard assessment which put a violent eruption as "likely within the next 100 years" and, again, "perhaps even before the end of the century."
Before the 1980 eruption, Mount St. Helens had not erupted violently since 1857.
Slightly similar to gorillas, for a long time, people in the West thought giant pandas were mythical animals described in vague reports from China. Travelers and missionaries occasionally mentioned them, but without clear proof, many dismissed the stories. Even Chinese art rarely featured them. That all changed in 1869, when French missionary Armand David obtained a panda skin in Sichuan, China. This was the first physical evidence shown to Western science, confirming that giant pandas were real. The US would get its first panda in 1936, when a cub named Su Lin became the first panda to survive a trip outside of East Asia. He became an instant sensation and drew more than 300,000 visitors to see him at Chicago's Brookfield Zoo within his first six months.
And lastly, at some point in the future, we might discover a ninth planet in our solar system. For decades, scientists have suspected there might be a ninth planet far beyond Neptune, often called "Planet X" or "Planet Nine." This theory comes from observing unusual orbits of some distant objects in the Kuiper Belt, which seem to be pulled by the gravity of something large and unseen. In 2016, astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown published evidence suggesting a planet about 5 to 10 times the mass of Earth could be causing these patterns. No one has directly seen Planet Nine yet, so its existence is still unconfirmed. However, the orbital data have convinced many astronomers that something big with a highly elongated path around the sun may be out there.
The hypothesis that there might be a giant planet in our solar system dates back to 1915, when astronomer Percival Lowell considered it a logical reason to explain the orbit of Uranus. The search for Planet Nine is what led to the accidental discovery of Pluto in 1930.