Ask Lemmy

Also a horrific amount of mothers dying in childbirth didn't do wonders for the average.

This is just the typical modern misunderstanding of statistics.

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

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.

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.

“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.'

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.

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.

Go even further back, and nobody gave a shit if you were gay. Or were even considered weird for not doing gay stuff.

Also a lot of the people who were openly gay throughout history had their identity hardwaved away. They were roomates!

what about something that's not hunter-gathering, really ancient agricultures? like, y'know, the middle ages?

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

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.

I will concede that it was simpler. But definitely not easier.

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.

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.

Oh, one more addendum to this, another myth related to Corsets:

"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 was essentially slavery without the formal ownership.