BRIEFLY seduced into a guilty quickie of websurfing, I chanced upon this nugget on Joshua Trevino's interesting but highly intermittent blog. Various presidential candidates have dropped wheezing bloopers of historical ignorance in recent speeches, generally in the course of boneheaded rhapsodies to America's superiority over other countries, but I'm not sure any of them has topped this one:

It is an adventure in which young though we are, we have done this: our people have had more happiness and prosperity over a wider area and a longer time than men have ever had since they began to live in ordered societies four thousand years ago.

Politifact's Truth-o-meter probably would have given this claim a passing score, had it been part of a speech by the Pharaoh Djoser of the Third Dynasty of Egypt in 2650BC or so. Catal Huyuk was settled around 7500BC, so if a Djoser speechwriter (Imhotep, say) wrote that people "began to live in ordered societies four thousand years ago," you could see spotting him the extra millennium. But it's really ridiculous for a serious candidate for national office in our day and age to think that organised human civilisation began at a date when in fact the Pyramid of Cheops was already 500 years old. Now, admittedly, Catal Huyuk wasn't excavated until the early 1960s. But the major dating work on Egyptian dynasties was pretty solid by the 1930s, and even in 1952 Adlai Stevenson should have known better than this. Egghead indeed.