I wish this silly "gotcha" fact about Oxford being older than the Aztecs would go away.

All it's saying is that most people don't know enough about Mesoamerican civilizations to differentiate clearly between the Aztec and the Maya; the Maya have been around since long before Oxford and that's why people anchor 'the Aztecs' in the distant past. This should be pretty obvious.

It's like saying "Did you know that the Aztec Empire is older than the University of Reading" -- yeah, that's not what most people are thinking of when they think of an old English university.

I don't want to contradict the thesis of the article though, it's true that our perception is skewed. My favorite version of this is that Chinese armies were fighting each other with gunpowder-based weapons in the 1100s.