Ah, April Fools' Day — the famous day during which we all have to make sure our toilet paper is accounted for, refuse to answer calls from numbers we don't recognize, and generally question anything our loved ones tell us. So how did this stupid holiday even come about? The truth is that it developed over the course of centuries, and people around the world got in on the fun. A precursor to April Fools' Day could be the celebration of the vernal equinox by the Greeks and Romans, during which the sun appears to leave the Southern Hemisphere and cross the celestial equinox.

Then there's the Dutch, who celebrate April 1 as the day when they retook Brielle from the Spanish during the Eighty Years' War, making the Spanish Duke Álvarez de Toledo the fool who left the port undefended to focus his military efforts elsewhere.

So that's how humans slowly transformed a holiday about the seasonal positioning of the sun into a day when you put your coworker's stapler in a JELLO mold. Weird, isn't it?