The Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, while humans have been around for at least 300,000 of those. That's a lot of history.
It's not surprising that we sometimes get confused about what happened when. Sometimes, events that feel recent happened much longer ago than we think, and vice versa.
For example, did you know that the famous American civil rights activist Rosa Parks would have been able to watch the first two Shrek films before she died in 2005? When we learn about one historical event, we don't always consider what was happening everywhere else in the world, so it can come as a bit of a shock to discover that two very different but important events happened simultaneously.
Here, BBC Bitesize has put some weird and wonderful examples of this into our time-twisting quiz - why don't you give it a go? Good luck!
This article was published in May 2021 and updated in August 2026
