Game Changers of History Trivia Quiz

Answer: Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa

For a long time, Israel's Qesem Cave was considered to be the site of the earliest continual use of fire. It contains a 300,000 to 400,000-year-old hearth with evidence of roasting meat. Evidence in Wonderwerk Cave, however, suggested that controlled fires were used over one million years ago. Ashed plant remains and charred animal bones were found at the site in South Africa. Because of its location inside a cave, it is unlikely that the fire began naturally.

Fire revolutionised life for early humans. It could be used for light and warmth in the evenings, as well as for cooking, and it brought people together for social interaction.

Answer: Stone

The Stone Age gradually came to a close as the Bronze Age spread across the world. The ability to make bronze depended largely on local resources. Tin and copper were mixed together to make bronze, so if they weren't available locally, they needed to be traded. One of the first Bronze Age civilisations began in Mesopotamia with the Sumerians.

They, along with civilisations in Greece, began to use bronze before 3000 BCE. The Bronze Age then spread out across Europe, Asia, and parts of Africa.

Answer: Strasbourg

Johannes Gutenberg was born in Mainz, Germany in around 1398. In 1440 he introduced the world to his invention of a printing press that used moveable metal type. Previously, books had been produced laboriously by hand and it could take years to produce a single volume. Gutenberg's invention enabled copies of books to be produced in a fraction of the time. Suddenly the written word was available to a much wider audience and this allowed knowledge and education to spread quickly through Europe and beyond.

Question by clevercatz.

Answer: Martin Luther

Martin Luther was an Augustinian friar in the early 16th century. He became a doctor of Theology at the University of Wittenberg in 1512. Luther was appalled at the corruption he saw within the Catholic Church in Rome. He believed that Christians would be saved by faith alone, but Catholic clergy were selling 'indulgences' (promises of absolution for sin) to believers. Luther also questioned the personal wealth of the Pope while 'indulgences' were being sold to believers to pay for the renovation of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.

Martin Luther was a game changer for many Christians in Europe. He wrote pamphlets questioning and criticising the Catholic Church, which were distributed far and wide thanks to the invention of the printing press. His ideas about absolution and the availability of Bible sparked the Protestant Reformation.

Answer: Jenny

Invented in 1764 by James Hargreaves, a weaver, carpenter and inventor from the northwestern English county of Lancashire, the spinning jenny relied on a number of spindles placed upright and side by side for spinning several threads simultaneously. This invention reduced the amount of work required to weave cloth, as one person was able to work multiple spools at the same time. Hargreaves produced and sold a number of machines, but was met by violent resistance when the price of yarn fell, and a group of spinners broke into his house and destroyed his machines. The spinning jenny, however, was ultimately a success, though other, more advanced machines (such as the spinning mule) replaced it in the following years. The most likely origin of the machine's name is an abbreviation of "engine", rather than a reference to any particular woman called Jenny.

Question by LadyNym

Answer: The first automobile

Sometimes it can be difficult to pinpoint one inventor when a design develops over hundred of years. Leonardo da Vinci sketched out some ideas for transport vehicles, and steam and electric-powered vehicles had been created by the early 19th century. Karl Benz, however, was the first to design and build a petrol-powered automobile using a combustion engine. Benz's invention paved the way for the millions of motor vehicles in the world today.

Answer: New Zealand

Many local areas around the world have accepted women's votes for centuries, but the national right to vote (but not to be elected) was granted to all women in New Zealand in 1893. In 1902 Australia extended the franchise to women, and also permitted them to stand for federal Parliament. Despite many decades of fierce campaigning by the Suffragists and Emmeline Pankhurst's Suffragettes, Canada (1917), the United States (1920) and Britain and Ireland (1928) lagged behind a number of Scandinavian countries. Attitudes towards women's role in society started changing after the First World War, partly because women had taken on traditional "male" work in wartime, and were less inclined to remain at home without a political voice.

The story of Universal franchise is a complicated one, as many countries refused to allow its indigenous people to vote; for example, Australian aboriginal men and women were not granted the vote until 1962.

Question by windrush.

Answer: The sinking of the RMS Titanic

The Titanic disaster was a game changer for safety at sea. Even though the ship was only travelling between two countries, there were victims from across the world onboard. The Titanic crashed into an iceberg while crossing the Atlantic in April 1912.

A number of factors contributed to the crash and the resulting death-toll. Reports that the ship was going too fast and that there were not enough lifeboats for all of the people onboard are just two of them. Icebergs were - and still are - common in the North Atlantic, so the International Ice Patrol was set up to monitor ice formations in the ocean and to inform ships that might be at risk.

Answer: August 6

At 8:15 a.m. (local time) of August 6, 1945, the B-29 Superfortress bomber Enola Gay, piloted by Colonel Paul Tibbets, dropped an atom bomb nicknamed Little Boy on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, located in the western part of the island of Honshu. Three days later, on August 9, another nuclear weapon (Fat Man) was dropped the city of Nagasaki, on the island of Kyushu, Over 200,000 people - mostly civilians - were killed in the bombings, which in 2018, remained the only instances of the use of nuclear weapons in the history of warfare. Japan surrendered to the Allies less than a week after the Nagasaki bombing, on August 15, putting an end to WWII. Though it is often maintained that those bombings prevented the much higher number of casualties that would have occurred if Japan had been invaded, the ethical and legal justifications for these acts are still debated. In the years following the end of the war, the world's two major superpowers - the USA and the USSR - began stockpiling nuclear weapons, creating and sustaining the threat of worldwide destruction for over four decades - the years known as the Cold War.

All the other dates refer to important historical events: the American Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776), the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (June 28, 1914), and the worst terror attacks on US territory (September 11, 2001).

Question by LadyNym.

Answer: Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee originally developed the web so that scientists could easily share their research over the internet. From its small beginnings of just ten known web servers in 1992, it soon grew to fifty in 1993 as the web became free for anyone to use. By 1994, people could use the internet at home and the number of servers grew to 623. Tim Berners-Lee is the reason you can play games on FunTrivia, research the answers using a search engine, and keep in touch with friends over social media.