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.
So common as in literally half of kids died.
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
also infections too. only the fat kings lived to things like 50-70s.
That’s not actually true. People died of a variety of infections and disease we treat easily today, many people were malnourished. The 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.
“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 (which was kicking around as a minority theory before the microscope). 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, because a lot of people were just violently ill from a lot of things.
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, and originally had a practical purpose.
People don’t drink holy water.
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.
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.
“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.
[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.
ALSO the gay panic, which was instigated by NANCY and RONALD reagan. which last long into the 90s.
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 (although they made a measurement error with that one).
Before that, the competing theory was that 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, so nobody with a long-distance trade network would thought it was flat.
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.
Ancient Aliens is based on the assumption that ancient humans were too stupid to do anything unassisted
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.
“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
The eighties didn’t look like the eighties for most of us. The eighties looked more like the seventies.
Most people wore sweatshirts and cone shapes jeans. So no, no seventies clothing. I got laughed at for wearing a shirt that was distinctly 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.
That everything is getting better all the time.
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.
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?
