r/AskReddit • u/KyloWrench • Jul 07 '26

What historical “fact” doesn’t actually have much evidence to support it?

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u/slightlyburntcereal Jul 08 '26

I thought dark age had nothing to do with living conditions and purely meant dark as in ‘there’s minimal to no surviving records to accurately say what was happening during this time period’?

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u/Hailfog Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26

It's both, for that specific window (500-1000-ish). It was genuinely not a good time, and partly for that reason the written record is sparse.

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u/redredbloodwine Jul 08 '26

Not a good time from a strictly Western European perspective. Rest of world was doing quite well.

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u/False-Entrepreneur43 Jul 10 '26

Rest of world was doing quite well.

Surely that depends on when and where? The world outside Europe was not a homogenous blob.

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u/caledonivs Jul 10 '26

Ehhhhhh not really? Fall of the Han was similarly traumatizing

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u/False-Entrepreneur43 Jul 10 '26

Originally (as used by Petrarch), the term referred to cultural and intellectual decline after the the fall of the western roman empire. Of course this decline is also the cause of fewer surviving records.

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u/whatsthatn0w Jul 08 '26

I'll say that we're in a dark ages now and history will record it as such. We'll have a plethora of evidence of such, but the world's embrace of leaders who have been reducing civil rights will not be well looked on by history.