One of the most common is that people were stupid in the past. Humans have been roughly the same intelligence across history. There was lack of technology and knowledge, but ancient people were far more intelligent than many give them credit for.
I love bringing this up to people who laugh about “how dumb old people were”.
I then remind them that people just five years ago thought that 5g towers were mind control devices that activated the microchips in vaccines. I then proceed to explain to them that it’s possible to level two fenceposts 10 meters apart using nothing but a hose filled with water and Archimedes Principal.
Ancient Aliens is based on the assumption that ancient humans were too stupid to do anything unassisted
That we have gotten dumber.
Or smarter.
Or more moral.
Or less moral.
Anyone who says that is trying to sell you some ideology.
If you know your history, you know humanity has fundamentally always been humanity since we started writing shit down. Possibly earlier, but then we can’t be sure because no-writing-itis.
Some of the oldest texts we have are old men cranking about the kids these days.
There’s stories of people being awful and exploiting each other. There’s stories of people taking care of each other and of their surroundings during dark times. There’s stories of people being weird little guys. We have just sorta always been ourselves.
That everything is coming better all the time.
Average life spans. People in ancient times didn’t drop dead at forty. They regularly lived to be advanced ages we would consider normal. It’s just that infant and young child deaths were so common it really drags down the average.
Also a horrific amount of mothers dying in childbirth didn’t do wonders for the average.
That’s not actually true. People died of a variety of infections and disease we treat easily today, many people were malnourished. The two big historical boosts in lifespan were after antibiotic discovery, insulin, and GPCR cardiac meds.
No, people did not life longer before 1900.
Mid-adult deaths dragged down the average. Child deaths really dragged down the average. The point is that the interpretation of “40 year life expectancy” is caused by misunderstanding averages, not from some massively inferior physiology of prior humans. Yes, more things readily killed you, but it wasn’t a mid-life ticking time bomb. Excluding infant death bumps expectancy up around 10-20 years
A bit of column A, a bit of column B.
Yes, 50% child mortality skews life expectancy statistics heavily, but any 40 year life expectancy estimate is clearly filtering out at least some portion of childhood deaths. By our best estimates: of the 48% of people who survived age 10, slightly less than half were dead by 45. Of those who clear 45, less than half reach 65.
Those early deaths aren’t driven by “inferior physiology”, but disease and malnourishment (as the previous commenter noted). It was possible to live into your 80s, but you had to be very, very lucky to pull it off.
This is just the typical modern misunderstanding of statistics.
To be fair, I doubt people understood statistics much better back in the day, either.
And there were poor or no records of birth, they guessed at people’s age of death.
I was thinking that when I wrote it.
But there is more people now. So more people to misunderstand it :-)
So common as in literally half of kids died.
Which is how evolution worked, those with diseases like diabetes etc (mutations thay arent beneficial) died and didn’t pass that gene on.
I mean, there was a selectivity to it, yes. But also a whole lot of random chance, which is why it kept happening instead of fixing itself in a few generations.
Also wrong. WTAF this thread. Lemmy just loves to make up science.
also infections too. only the fat kings lived to things like 50-70s.
This is the biggest historical misconception. So much dumb stuff like “horribke histories” (children’s history books + tv show in britain) heavily reinforced this misconception
that it was brutal and terrible
But research conducted among the Ju/’hoansi in the 1950s and ’60s when they could still hunt and gather freely turned established views of social evolution on their head. Up until then, it was widely believed that hunter-gatherers endured a near-constant battle against starvation, and that it was only with the advent of agriculture that we began to free ourselves from the capricious tyranny of nature. When in 1964 a young Canadian anthropologist, Richard Borshay Lee, conducted a series of simple economic input/output analyses of the Ju/’hoansi as they went about their daily lives, he revealed that not only did they make a good living from hunting and gathering, but that they were also well-nourished and content. Most remarkably, his research revealed that the Ju/’hoansi managed this on the basis of little more than 15 hours’ work per week. On the strength of this finding, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins in Stone Age Economics (1972) renamed hunter-gatherers ‘the original affluent society
what about something that’s not hunter-gathering, really ancient agricultures? like, y’know, the middle ages?
“Beer and wine were invented because drinking water was unsafe.”
No, people have generally always known how to find clean drinking water and understood its importance. Beer and wine got made because they were delicious, nutritious, and got ya drunk.
“Medieval Europeans needed spices because all of their meat was rotten.”
No, they had the same physiology we do and would have been just as disgusted by rotten meat. They would eat fresh meat when in season, and they knew how to preserve it by smoking, salting, drying, pickling, or fermenting it. Medieval Europeans wanted spices for the same reason we do, because they taste really good.
“Beer and wine were invented because drinking water was unsafe.”
No, people have generally always known how to find clean drinking water and understood its importance. Beer and wine got made because they were delicious, nutritious, and got ya drunk.
Sounds like someone who misheard a different fact. Which is why sailors drink low proof alcohol on long voyages. Because they couldn’t safely store water for such a long time. Water turns green and becomes undrinkable if you store it in a barrel. It’s one of the things that helped unlock ocean travel in the 1400’s.
Alcohol occurs naturally in nature. It did not need ‘inventing.’
Alcohol occurs naturally in nature. It did not need ‘inventing.’
I think they meant “mastering the production process”
Or we could say the same for nuclear fusion reactors
This entire thread is one bullshit fact after another without a single source.
Google “why did sailors drink alcohol” if you want some sources.
Im totally sure these are just myths. Its like the americans traveling abroad asking for coke in the bottle. If your traveling and getting something from an inn you know the alcohol is likely safer than whatever standards they have for water. I mean they did not have germ theory but over time people would realize alcohol is safer. If your poor you will eat some marginal things and hide the flavor although granted spices were expensive till they were not and its pretty well known wealthy people put a bunch on to show off and when it got cheap that is when the fancy cooking with proper pairings became a big thing. poor people getting spices im sure at some point was like. omg! you had to be a lord to have a meal like this when I was a kid.
I mean they did not have germ theory but over time people would realize alcohol is safer.
I mean, that would just lead to germ theory. In reality, people will ascribe their problems to all kinds of crazy things, spirits and demons being the most popular. If something is actually poisonous and kills or maims 100% of the time, they’d catch on, but health correlations that are a crapshoot went unnoticed for centuries.
No, people have generally always known how to find clean drinking water and understood its importance.
Citation very needed. People thought some water to be better than others, and the Romans went as far as building out aqueducts to their favourite springs, but an understanding it can cause water borne disease, and that it can look and smell fine but be bad, is decidedly modern. Health effects weren’t necessarily thought to be confined to drinking either - holy water and baptisms being an example where just contact was thought to confer something.
The spices thing is legit, though. How long would you last eating no spices whatsoever? Trading gold for an equal mass of pepper suddenly doesn’t seem so dumb.
I’ll dig up the sources when I can but you can find writings from Ancient Rome to Medieval Europe describing good water to drink (clear, cold, fast-moving, odorless) versus bad water (stagnant, dirty, smelly). Of course they didn’t know why the good water was better than the bad water and, as you said yourself, it wasn’t a complete picture, but they most definitely knew which water to drink and which to avoid. It’s why you find settlements along fresh water sources and why people have always dug wells.
One thing I don’t see mentioned a lot is that water has always been the most commonly consumed drink simply because making beer is resource-intensive. I don’t doubt that people would have tried to drink only beer if they could get away with it, but it just wouldn’t be practical when the stream is right over there.
Sure, they knew drinking something gross was likely to make you sick. If your nice clear river is downstream from a public lavatory, would they see a problem with that, though? Probably, they’d only worry if it was close. Bad smells and weird sounds (like got Bach in trouble) are similarly mentioned as sources of disease.
As for alcohol, I should point out it has the effect of alcohol, and getting drunk is popular. If it was about safety, making a nice herbal tea (or actual tea if available) is easier and faster and much more effective at killing bugs.
I wonder if holy water ever gets swapped out? How many hands and babies have been dunked before it’s changed?
Things to ask a priest, I guess.
What I’ve seen just in media makes me think modern churches use a fresh batch of normal water with a little holy water added. All kinds of things have changed over the centuries, though. The practice of a priest wedding people is comparatively modern for example.
People don’t drink holy water.
Ok, so cholera epidemics were fake.
JFC
Cholera pandemics are a relatively recent phenomenon, with the first major one starting in India in 1817 and several others occurring over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. They didn’t start happening until people were living in very large, crowded cities.
or they observed animals getting “drunk” from fermented fruits. and decided to do themselves.
More likely that they accidentally started to ferment stored grains that were being soaked in water to soften them.
“There didn’t used to be so many LGBTQ+ people back in the day”
It’s because folks were forced into the closet with threats of institutionalization, prison, physical harm, marginalization, and even death. And then there probably was a time when there were fewer gay people, because HIV ravaged the gay male population in many parts of the world while our leaders turned a blind eye because it was killing “the right” people for a time.
Go even further back, and nobody gave a shit if you were gay. Or were even considered weird for not doing gay stuff.
In fact, it generally wasn’t even a category. It was just a behavior
There’s no way to know this for sure. Though we have examples throughout history of some cultures being accepting of homosexual or transgender identities, it’s entirely possible that most prehistorical cultures were strictly heteronormative just as they were once we started recording history.
Started recording history? Like in ancient Greece, one of the gayest cultures in all of time? Like ancient Egypt with its myths about jizz in lettuce? Ancient china with its noted love of femboys and general belief that being gay was just “a thing young men do, that is fine for them to do so long as they do their social duty of marrying and having babies”?
Maybe prehistoric society was violently heteronormative and it’s true we can’t know… But saying “cultures were strictly heteronormative when we started recording history” is fucking hilarious. Heteronormativity is if anything a modern disease caught from abarhamic religion.
I said most cultures in recorded history have been heteronormative. In Ancient Greece, the most commonly cited example, it was a mixed bag and was more often about pederasty and power dynamics than it was about equal homosexual relationships. It wasn’t a one-to-one equivalence of the way we view sexuality today.
As I said, there were times and places where it happened, but you’ll struggle to find more than a handful of examples of accepted homosexuality throughout recorded history.
Do you disagree that homosexuality has been overwhelmingly a taboo in pre-modern times? Or that it was ever accepted in a way that it is in developed societies today?
Also a lot of the people who were openly gay throughout history had their identity hardwaved away. They were roomates!
and those naked wrestling in ancient times too.
ALSO the gay panic, which was instigated by NANCY and RONALD reagan. which last long into the 90s.
[Laughs in Greco-Roman]
Funny enough, back in the days before the queer rights movements, an education in the classics was important. Lots of people would have known about Sappho, and the one emperor that got made fun of for being straight, even if they didn’t approve. It’s a very recent myth.
Corsets were awful: only when you tight laced, and the majority of women didn’t. Corsets and stays were designed to support the boobs and smooth out clothing. That’s it.
No ankles: yes ankles. Skirts were usually above the ankles for practical reasons.
Feudalism bad: yes and no. It meant everyone had a job and housing. Homelessness didn’t exist until the end of feudalism.
Oh, one more addendum to this:
“The silhouette of the 19th century was achieved by squishing a woman’s organs to the point of death”
This was rare. Ladies were instead padding everything else. You’ll look like you have an impossibly thin waist if you’ve basically strapped a pillow to your arse and another to your tits.
Feudalism bad: yes and no. It meant everyone had a job and housing. Homelessness didn’t exist until the end of feudalism.
There were absolutely homeless and destitute people in feudal societies. Quite a lot of them, really, although the individuals in question likely didn’t live very long. We have many references to beggars from this period, as well as some insight into attempts to curtail them.
Someone who finds themselves displaced from where they used to live can’t just wander onto some lord’s land and start farming. That land is already full of people who are producing just barely enough to feed themselves (after said local lord’s taxes are accounted for). A typical peasant family has more labor available than is required to till their rather small allocation of farmable land, which itself is often insufficient to feed them. Any surplus labor is spent working land of one of the local “big men” to cover the gap. Supporting an additional person off the street, even one capable of putting in a good shift, is no easy task in this period.
It’s easy to romanticize the past from a great distance when looking at the problems of our present, and produce some wildly incorrect conclusions as a result. Feudalism (to the extent that this term refers to any specific system at all, scholars don’t use it very much these days) was a deeply unfair system with a host of structural problems, and had far fewer safety nets for the unlucky members of society than any developed country has today.
Feudalism was essentially slavery without the formal ownership.
Corsets were awful: only when you tight laced, and the majority of women didn’t. Corsets and stays were designed to support the boobs and smooth out clothing. That’s it.
So they are just a semi prototype Spanx?
Protestants spread the myth that people in the middle ages thought the earth was flat to try and discredit Catholicism.
Ancient Greeks proved the earth was a sphere as early as the 4th century BC.
And Eratosthenes calculated its circumference to within a few hundred kilometers because he treated the earth as a perfect sphere instead of the oblate spheroid it is
My favorite is that in the same vein, Aristarchus estimated the size of the sun to be much larger than the earth (although he still severely underestimated it because it’s so hard to measure), and therefore proposed that the earth should orbit around the sun. And the main problem with his theory was not any religious objection, but rather that his model would imply that there should be parallax visible among the stars. Unless they are, you know, ridiculously far away.
And how big it is, and how big and far away the moon is, and wrote a decent guess at the distance and size of the sun (but made a measurement error with that one).
Before that, the controversy was if it’s a cylinder with the ends to the east and west. Anyone with eyes for stargazing can see they’ve obviously rotated when they move a significant distance north-south, and that means anyone with long distance trade.
Life back in the day was so much easier!
Just so dumb on so many counts.
I will concede that it was simpler. But definitely not easier.
Depends what you mean by “easier”.
I think there was more down time in the day. Yes more manual work but not for 8 or 12 hours a day, at least before the industrial revolution.
There were also more hardships without modern medicine.
Medieval peasants worked more and harder hours than modern people.
Amount of work would also very, by season, region and status. There’s bones that get dug up of people who physically fell apart from overwork, basically, if they were slaves or it was just a really rough period.
One thing they didn’t have were schedules. Tardiness to meetings was measured in days, and IIRC a Greek philosopher is on record listing them as a form of aestheticism, like flagellation or starving yourself. Hunter gatherers also benefited from doing work we naturally find appealing, and not necessarily having to deal with coercive authority of any kind.
Sure, but plenty of people are overworked today.
I agree that things will vary a lot by time and place.
I imagine any number of slaves would disagree with you on the downtime.
Is slavery less common today ?
Is that an actual question?
yes. Maybe look into it.
About .6% of the world is considered as living in modern slavery.
In say, the feudal era, that percentage would be some 70 or 80 times higher.
Maybe you should do some reading?
Yes, vastly.
There’s literally no country where it’s de jure legal now, and fairly few where it’s legal in practice.
Modern slavery includes forced labor, bonded labor, trafficked people, and child labor - it’s analogous to chattel style historic slavery in that the conditions are similar.
Current estimates are 50m people living in these conditions today, vastly more than at any time in human history.
Modern slavery includes forced labor, bonded labor, trafficked people, and child labor - it’s analogous to chattel style historic slavery in that the conditions are similar.
No, no it’s not. NGOs conflate the two sometimes to draw attention to an important issue, but a job where you get a bit underpaid and can’t quit early is not the same as what’s in Roots.
Actual chattel slavery still lingers in places, but only pretty marginal and lightly populated ones. Mauritania is an infamous example.
Current estimates are 50m people living in these conditions today, vastly more than at any time in human history.
Global population in 1 AD was around 200 million. 25% slaves isn’t impossible.
And going by absolute number instead of proportion is another lie with statistics you might be repeating. Yes, population has grown. What does that have to do with it?
The eighties didn’t look like the eighties for most of us. The eighties looked more like the seventies.
People don’t realize that it took a little bit of more time for certain decades to truly start before we knew them as they were. They all didn’t go like “it’s 1980, so lets break out the synths right now!”. But actually, the 80s didn’t seem to really start until something like 1982. Same with the 90s and so on. It takes cultural change some time to get moving.
“How did everyone know how to blow on the cartridges without Twitter?”
We went to friends houses and learned.
Not even that. I mean the game didn’t load up correctly, so you replug it. Then ‘clean’ the contacts - and just blow in the cartridge.
My 90s baby is showing
