ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Meta-historical fall

Well buddy, Meta-historical fall is a really big and fancy way of describing when people make mistakes or have misunderstandings about things that happened a long time ago.

You know when you play the telephone game with your friends and you whisper something in one person's ear and they whisper it to the next person, and by the time it gets to the last person it's completely different? That's kind of like what happens with history too.

People write down what they think happened, but sometimes they get it wrong or they forget important details. Later on, other people read what was written and they might change it a little or add in their own ideas. This can happen over and over again until the story is very different from what actually happened.

It's important to remember that history isn't always 100% accurate, and that's why we have to be careful when we learn about things that happened a long time ago.