The world was an almost unrecognizable place back in 1519. We were in the midst of the age of the explorers: Hernando Cortez led his conquest of Mexico, and we were still a year away from Magellan setting sail with a fleet of ships to circumnavigate the globe and prove that one cannot, in fact, fall off the edge of the Earth (who would have thought he’d still have haters in 2019)? The two halves of our planet were spilling into one another at a rate humanity hadn’t experienced since 12,000 years prior, when the first settlers crossed the Bering Strait and began colonizing North America. The collision of Europe and America also caused religion, weapons, animals, and diseases to spread at unprecedented levels. Without vaccinations, entire American civilizations were in the process of being exterminated by disease (another concept that still has its doubters today — maybe the world isn’t so different in 2019 after all).
Still, if you were somehow spat out of a wormhole into the year 1519, Terminator-style (buck naked, no items of any kind), you would have a Hell of a time trying to explain that you came from the distant future. How could you possibly do it? We asked Chivers on Instagram to weigh in, and their answers did not disappoint. Here are some of our favorites.
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