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Cronch wrote:
Seeing as those types of burials are very rare and not cultural norm, it seems to be the obvious conclusion. They might've not thought of themselves as "trans", but by gods what makes more sense,

That's kind of the thing though.

Does it? It is easy to say it is, but historians (and in this vein, Archeologists as well), maintain a principle that past persons are still persons and there's a general norm that such persons must be given due respect. Archeologists and anthropologists can be quite reverent when it comes to human remains, even those that are tens of thousands of years old. Those people lived their own lives and while we can comparatively easily uncover material goods, uncovering their opinions is borderline impossible.

There's little reason to assume a person buried with gender atypical goods was gay or trans (or other). That's a huge leap in logic. They might have been, maybe. Hard to say. Celtic and Nordic cultures had traditions of women warriors that carried down to us, so a woman buried with weapons seems more like physical evidence that such figures weren't simply stories but that the stories were derived from a tradition and such goods may in fact not be atypical at all to the culture from which they hail. They only appear atypical to us because our cultural expectations are different and we will only ever uncover a fraction of what graves once existed.

It's also not really that strange to find men with typical female goods. Drag queens actually have an extremely long history in human civilization, and depending on where and when we're talking about they could probably be called trans. They also might not. In ancient Greece, men in drag who had sex with other men was a profession and while men having sex with men was very common in Greek culture the Greeks never embraced a 'gay' identity as we would recognize it. I'd actually consider calling such figures 'gay' or 'cis' to be equally egregious and disrespectful of the persons in question. That's not how they viewed their own lives and we're lucky in having a large body of written works about such things in Greek culture from the men who lived those lives. Nothing in our modern debate over sexual identity is actually very applicable to them, because there wasn't much debate. Past cultures could be pretty blaise about sex (the Sumerians were basically anything goes and no one cared).

For must cultures we aren't so lucky. They didn't write anything or their works have largely been lost to the ages.

Likewise with gay people in history. There is a very strong tendency to go "oh, they're just gals being pals". Or if you have two male "lifelong friends" who left a whole lot of passionate letters, it's just "such good friends".

There is a bit of this, but I think it's still complicated. One example is Anne Frank and another is Debroah Sampson. Both have been pushed as women who were secretly gay or bisexual, completely ignoring the context of the evidence used to support that claim (not entirely unlike how conspiracy theorists selective exaggerate single data points) and contrary evidence that suggests otherwise. On the other hand, we have a pair of men in the 19th century whose names I can't remember but who have been talked about in this controversy, and the LGBTQ community is angry that they're called 'lifelong friends' by all of one historian whose opinion isn't shared by the rest of the field. Most historians are of the opinion 'we don't know' and we don't know because their relationship has unusual points that point a particular way, but isn't so unusual for the time in which they lived. The 19th century isn't the ancient world. We aren't hurting for evidence of opinions or thoughts, but some things are still very hard to track.

LGBTQ+ people get a bit miffed cause this is exactly the same behavior they tend to encounter IRL, so it's really easy to spot.

And I think there's a lot of sympathy for that, but it doesn't change the inherent anachronism in the claims. The past is like a different country. People did things differently there and those people had their own identities and lives. It's not anymore respectful of them to demand they be treated as LGBTQ than it is when people today deny the dignity of LGBTQ persons. It's not that historians deny homosexual people existed before the sixties. I mean, some do. Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben was some kind of badass, and I don't doubt that ignorance of his life today stems somewhat from how he lived it. I'm pretty convinced he was gay. There's too much circumstantial evidence for a 'there's nothing definitive' to really dismiss, but of course there are historians who cling to 'there's nothing definitive' well past the point of stretching credulity. It happens and I'm not gonna say it doesn't.

At the same time though, 'We don't know' is an acceptable answer in academic history (and one the public often doesn't like), especially when it comes to the history of sexuality and identity where we struggle with finding definitive evidence more than you'd think.

There's a heavy trend among modern groups to make claims that reach beyond what the evidence supports. This isn't just true of the LGBTQ community. It's also true of certain pan-ethnic and ultra-national claims, as well as conspiracy theories. Most historians are even too cautious in making those comparisons, because they don't want to make a bad situation worse.

EDIT: This whole controversy gives me flashbacks to the one time I tried to be a Wikipedia editor XD Saladin's article circa 2007 was an insane time. Still is sort of but competing claims of his identity (in this case ethnic) are nowhere near as intense now as they were then. Not on English wikipedia anyway.

Archeologists and anthropologists can be quite reverent when it comes to human remains

I do have a masters' in archaeology, just to be clear. I don't practice it, but there is a definite bias towards sticking to heteronormative answers whenever something unusual crops up.
As for "gay and trans" labels being inapplicable, i'd agree if we also agree that we shouldn't call any figure in history straight. Just because we know someone was in a lifelong cishet relationship doesn't let us say they were straight. Just because a male body was found with male burial goods doesn't let us say that person was a man. Except it's done all the time, or at least was back when I was getting my degree.

By the same token, being attracted to own gender and "transness" are very much part of human species, they didn't suddenly appear in XIXc with "modern" western expression of gender norms, they most likely existed as long as the species have, and having X body with Y artifacts would fit into that pattern of behaviors displayed by trans people worldwide, even if different cultures treat it differently.

My point is, it's always "we don't know" when behavior displayed would fit within LGBT narrative, whereas there's absolutely no such qualms when it comes to "straight" finds in far too many cases.

Though this is kind of completely off-topic, there is no hidden conspiracy here, just biases (and yes, I recognize my own position is also biased by my experience)

Cronch, as someone of actual knowledge (respect to your Masters!), where do you stand on the “if white Europeans couldn’t do it, it must’ve been aliens” trope?

Cronch wrote:

Historians don't deny that people had gay sex in the past, or engaged in transitive behaviors, but to retroactively qualify such people as 'gay' or 'trans' violates numerous precepts of present historical practice

On the other hand, it is *amusing* when you have burials of male skeletons with feminine burial goods, or female skeletons with weapons and male goods, and they can't just say "burial of a trans person". Seeing as those types of burials are very rare and not cultural norm, it seems to be the obvious conclusion. They might've not thought of themselves as "trans", but by gods what makes more sense, that it's a burial of a trangender person or some bizarre, one-off burial of a cis woman that just happened to be buried with male decorations even though no other woman in the same site was?

Likewise with gay people in history. There is a very strong tendency to go "oh, they're just gals being pals". Or if you have two male "lifelong friends" who left a whole lot of passionate letters, it's just "such good friends".
LGBTQ+ people get a bit miffed cause this is exactly the same behavior they tend to encounter IRL, so it's really easy to spot. Some historians will tie themselves into pretzels before admit gay people existed before the '60s...

Historians don't go out and identify historical figures as straight, either. And it is often impossible to tell. Was that woman buried with goods from a traditionally male role trans, or just a woman that happened to take up that trade in defiance of cultural norms? Were those 'lifelong friends' gay, or actually just lifelong friends? And consider that in many societies those were things people would try to keep hidden, which makes building a strong basis of evidence even harder. Sometimes there is enough evidence to reasonably assume, in which case we can see that historians do. But jumping to a conclusion without a solid basis of evidence would just be the same problem from the opposite angle.

Cronch wrote:
Just because we know someone was in a lifelong cishet relationship doesn't let us say they were straight.

To be honest, I've never gotten the impression anyone actually does this (even those who deny what looks like strong evidence on non-cis orientations). The bulk of academic history is generally unconcerned with the topic of sexual orientations and researchers with an interest in studying that tend to come into history from the outside. Saying 'we don't know someone was gay' isn't the same thing as 'he was definitely straight.' At the same time, as unfair as it may be, I think you're asking researchers to work against evidence simply in the name of fairness.

By the same token, being attracted to own gender and "transness" are very much part of human species, they didn't suddenly appear in XIXc with "modern" western expression of gender norms

They don't, but even today you can get a dozen in a room and you'll get a dozen answers on what it means to be gay, trans, bi, pan, etc. People cannot now define clear lines between these behaviors and it's natural that we can't do the same with the past when lots of ideas about gender and identity were different or didn't exist. That's just going back to the original problem; assuming facts not in evidence and fallacious projection of the present onto the past. I've seen no historian who denies that humanity has always engaged in homosexual and non-binary sexual/gender practices, but that reality is very different from claiming X was trans.

And that is a fascinating line of talk fyi. Maybe better served by spinning it into it's own thread? We're more in methods, theory, and philosophy here than conspiracy at this point.

To bring this thread back to conspiracy because I remembered it after my last post; Anne Frank. There's a conspiracy theory that claims her diary is fake because it's written in ballpoint pens and ballpoint pens were invented after WWII. This is wrong because 1) ballpoint pens were invented in the 1880s and commercially available in the 1890s, and 2) Anne Franks 'diary' is not written in ball point. It was predominantly written with a fountain pen. There are ball point markings on some pages. These were put on loose leaf pages by scholars in the 50s and 60s who were trying to order the 'diary' which isn't really a single diary but a collection of notebooks, letters, and loose sheets of paper Anne wrote on.


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 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Cronch, as someone of actual knowledge (respect to your Masters!), where do you stand on the “if white Europeans couldn’t do it, it must’ve been aliens” trope?

Oh, I'll tackle that too.

I think it's definitely a distant thread born of racist cultural trends, but it's also kind of diffused and I think the primary motivator for such beliefs is less racism but more general ignorance. There's really no mystery to how many ancient superstructures were built. We have good ideas/theories for all of them. The biggest mystery is typically how materials were transported but even that isn't a huge mystery so much as something for which many hypothesis exist but no one is really sure of the specifics cause we have no evidence of how it exactly happened.

I think it isn't racism, but rather... technologyism? The sentiment is 'if we can't figure out how they did X with their technology, they could not figure out how to do X with their technology ' which is plainly ridiculous. It is a confusion where the technologically advanced are assumed to be inherently smarter. An evolution of the old white man's burden in a way. That racism almost certainly does play a part, but ancient aliens also goes right into ancient Europeans without pause.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I think it isn't racism, but rather... technologyism? The sentiment is 'if we can't figure out how they did X with their technology, they could not figure out how to do X with their technology ' which is plainly ridiculous. It is a confusion where the technologically advanced are assumed to be inherently smarter. An evolution of the old white man's burden in a way. That racism almost certainly does play a part, but ancient aliens also goes right into ancient Europeans without pause.

I'd also say that its one of those things along with hypnosis, sublimible messaging, bending spoons and a host of other powers/magics that were very popular in TV shows (both drama and documentary) for quite a long span of time on the TV. Even sensible/serious dramas would present some of those elements with a "ring of truth" aspect to them. When you couple that to documentary style programs which present ideas as actual fact in the same style as actual documentaries then people who have limited education or education that only focused on certain areas; then there's a high chance that they simply cannot sift fact from fiction.

So they easily get led down the garden path of lies.

And since things like believing aliens built the pyramids doesn't generally harm anyone, those people are allowed to continue that belief. So you get a culture built up around it.


I'm sure there are many other aspects that attach onto it from other groups as well, so what I've posted there is perhaps but one vector into this conspiracy.


We can also add that history as its presented to the public is often a decade or more behind the actual developments in the field and that many times a TV show might choose to present a story rather than report on the actual current information. So there's not only a time lag but also a general choice factor in what gets shown. So many of these things can be presented as mysteries, when actual researches already know the answer. Or they know three or four or more possible answers, each of which might be possible but isn't proven. Or, for say something like Egypt and Pyramids, the period of time covered is so great that there is no one method and it varies over time depending on which dynasty and which construction team is working on what monument etc...

Weirdly enough, most modern people also have no frame of reference for what a mass of humans can really accomplish. There's a picture circulating of 300 Amish men lifting a barn.


Prior to seeing it, if you had asked me how to move a barn my first instinct would have been a trailer and truck, or one of those enormous helicopters. I can't recall ever seeing several hundred people working at any task together. I'm aware that it happens, like building dams when floods are coming, or digging out disaster sites... but I haven't seen the results. I can't really wrap my head around how much material several hundred people could clear with hand tools in a day, or what they can accomplish. The closest I've seen are strawberry pickers going through the fields, and trucks overflowing with strawberries moving away. Extrapolating from there to a year of sustained effort- I couldn't even begin to guess how much could be accomplished. Speaking for myself, I do not know what manpower really represents at that scale. Because of that it's easier to chock it up to magic than simple patience and perseverance. Aren't humans weird?

It’s also just how well we can organise.

To continue the theme, if you ask 300 people to say, level a field, for whatever reason.

They can do it, because of course they can. But get it organised? Be it shifts, specific roles etc? Efficiency increases.

Even in the U.K., well specifically England? Various and sundry ancient monuments, such as henges and mounds. And come 1066, the Domesday book - which is essentially a mass stock-take of country, village by village, listing the assets.

That’s...that’s a crazy undertaking.

It's no surprise. Modern life for many people just doesn't involve large numbers of people working in coordination like that. Essentially its a "lost skill" set in a sense of what can be achieved and what mechanics you have to introduce to make it functional and safe to work.

Modern life we'd use machines to achieve that because the machine is cheaper to rent than it is to pay 300 people - heck even just finding 300 people to perform a task like that would be a fairly big undertaking for many.



It's not just labour, we see it in many other areas of life too. There's a project (in France I think) to build a castle using archaeological evidence to emulate the old building practice. What it fast shows is that there's a lot of unwritten/recorded methods (even ignoring the patchy details of historical preservation) and processes that are needed in order to achieve things. Some can be quite complicated and technical.
Then again you're talking about method refined over generations by people who often grew up in a trade. They might not have had worldly knowledge, but they'd have known their trade and craft to a high standard.

My father regularly talks about how the British Steel and metalworks industry likely lost a lot of subtle recipes and mixes for different compounds and metals simply through the whole industry collapsing and shifting overseas (and also a big shift in focus from quality to bulk).



Again skill loss is a big issue and even today with all our methods of recording information its not abnormal that highly skilled individuals can take some skills to the grave with them.






That said never ignore the ability of people to hyperbol. Remember when Crop Circles were all the rage and there would be "experts" saying that circles of this nature and precise patterns could not be made by humans on the ground. Yet farmers (or others) with some plant killer or a blade/cutter did create those patterns on the ground quite easily. Selective reporting and reporting with an agenda created the myth that it was impossible in the lay persons mind (and a lay person who doesn't cut long grasses would likely make a total mess if they tried and thus might consider the perfect circle skill impossible.

There is a certain amusement factor in someone saying humans could not create such precise patterns, in the middle of a perfectly geometrical field of long exactly parallel lines.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
There is a certain amusement factor in someone saying humans could not create such precise patterns, in the middle of a perfectly geometrical field of long exactly parallel lines.

My favourite take on that trope was crop circles basically being made with the super tech of sticks and a few lengths of rope

 Gitzbitah wrote:
Weirdly enough, most modern people also have no frame of reference for what a mass of humans can really accomplish. There's a picture circulating of 300 Amish men lifting a barn.

Spoiler:

Prior to seeing it, if you had asked me how to move a barn my first instinct would have been a trailer and truck, or one of those enormous helicopters.

None of the above. When ours (its mid/late 19th century) was moved, the foundation was cut away to insert steel beams, which were then jacked. Then the rest of the foundation was removed and the beams were lowered onto a couple tracked cargo haulers, which crept up the hill in unison, and then lowered onto a new foundation.

Basically we wanted it usable, which meant moving it away from the road.

Neat picture though. I've seen barn raising by hand, but not moving the shell like that.

Awesome! Thanks for adding your experiences Voss! It's always interesting to learn how these unusual procedures are done!

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Cronch, as someone of actual knowledge (respect to your Masters!), where do you stand on the “if white Europeans couldn’t do it, it must’ve been aliens” trope?

Isn't it a standard MO of humanity and what religion has been doing for millenia? If we don't know something, instead of saying "we don't know" we make something up ?

Cyel wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Cronch, as someone of actual knowledge (respect to your Masters!), where do you stand on the “if white Europeans couldn’t do it, it must’ve been aliens” trope?

Isn't it a standard MO of humanity and what religion has been doing for millenia? If we don't know something, instead of saying "we don't know" we make something up ?

That’s my general understanding of it - but that’s not to say my understanding is by any means correct. The dubious joy of a trope.

If we watch say, Ancient Aliens, that trope is all over the shop, every episode. But that show strikes me as a very, very poor touchstone for professional, qualified opinions etc.

My understanding on the “if my ancestors didn’t do it, it can’t be done” is that it mostly stems from the imperialist Europe era. Egypt, South America, Cambodia et al. All seem to be judged through a rather racist lens.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Were those 'lifelong friends' gay, or actually just lifelong friends?

Depends on how many of their letters included lines like "oh my beloved, for whom I yearn like the wheat does the sun" or if they write poems about how they can't do their chores because they were overcome with longing for a girl.

For those whom it might interest in the historical gay people discussion, the oldest known written sentence in (medieval) Dutch is thought to be a gay love poem by some people. Or at least, so my highschool Dutch language teacher claimed. Possibly in jest, possibly not. He was the kind of person where it's hard to tell when he was joking.
It's a scribble in the margins of a prayer book, which roughly translates to "all the birds have already built their nest except us, what are we waiting for?" (Hebban olla vogala nestas hagunnan hinase hic anda thu, wat unbidan we nu?) Since in those days the only people liable to be able to read and write (never mind do those things with prayer books) were monks, and there's not a whole lot of women in a monastery, odds are it was written by one monk for another. At least that's the theory.

Edit: If true, our vaunted tolerance goes back a long way :p.

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Cyel wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Cronch, as someone of actual knowledge (respect to your Masters!), where do you stand on the “if white Europeans couldn’t do it, it must’ve been aliens” trope?

Isn't it a standard MO of humanity and what religion has been doing for millenia? If we don't know something, instead of saying "we don't know" we make something up ?

It's one of the more annoying recurring arguments in my discussions with religious people elsewhere that they a) tend to argue "you don't know so my claim "wins" by default" and b) don't seem to understand that "I don't know" can be a perfectly viable answer in the face of lack of evidence one way or the other.

With regards to historical revisionism of people who don't fit the heteronormative viewpoint upheld through much of history, we must be thankful of those who managed to lead such incredibly outrageously flamboyant lifestyles that they were not able to be erased.

A personal favourite is Julie d'Aubigny, an openly bi woman who dressed as a man, had a long list of relationships with both men and women, was a renowned duellist, opera singer, fistfighter and diss song writer. She basically lived the life of a rock star in Louis XIV France. Possibly the closest a person has come to being a player's D&D Bard in real life.

Bran Dawri wrote:
For those whom it might interest in the historical gay people discussion, the oldest known written sentence in (medieval) Dutch is thought to be a gay love poem by some people. Or at least, so my highschool Dutch language teacher claimed. Possibly in jest, possibly not. He was the kind of person where it's hard to tell when he was joking.
It's a scribble in the margins of a prayer book, which roughly translates to "all the birds have already built their nest except us, what are we waiting for?" (Hebban olla vogala nestas hagunnan hinase hic anda thu, wat unbidan we nu?) Since in those days the only people liable to be able to read and write (never mind do those things with prayer books) were monks, and there's not a whole lot of women in a monastery, odds are it was written by one monk for another. At least that's the theory.

I think it may surprise people to know the Church could be pretty laissez faire about homosexuality at various points in its history

A personal favourite is Julie d'Aubigny, an openly bi woman who dressed as a man, had a long list of relationships with both men and women, was a renowned duellist, opera singer, fistfighter and diss song writer. She basically lived the life of a rock star in Louis XIV France. Possibly the closest a person has come to being a player's D&D Bard in real life.

I'm honestly surprised Chevalier D'Eon isn't a more famous historical figure. They were basically the Mata Hari before the Matahari, and had a far more Hollywood worthy life XD I mean, I only learned about them playing Fate/Grand Order (which this guy/gal might as well have lived to featured in XD)

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

Cyel wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Cronch, as someone of actual knowledge (respect to your Masters!), where do you stand on the “if white Europeans couldn’t do it, it must’ve been aliens” trope?

Isn't it a standard MO of humanity and what religion has been doing for millenia? If we don't know something, instead of saying "we don't know" we make something up ?

That’s my general understanding of it - but that’s not to say my understanding is by any means correct. The dubious joy of a trope.

If we watch say, Ancient Aliens, that trope is all over the shop, every episode. But that show strikes me as a very, very poor touchstone for professional, qualified opinions etc.

My understanding on the “if my ancestors didn’t do it, it can’t be done” is that it mostly stems from the imperialist Europe era. Egypt, South America, Cambodia et al. All seem to be judged through a rather racist lens.

The "lost" city of Angkor Wat is the best example. It sure as heck wasn't lost to the locals who knew exactly where it was, even if they didn't remember who built it. Hence the WILD ideas like "it's been settled by Alexander the Great or one of his generals" because clearly the locals, living in bamboo huts, couldn't do it.
There's always been a healthy mix of unconscious racism whenever it came to non-european civilizations, and while part of it might come from actual racism, a lot of it is from West's love of linear time, and by extension, linear everything. HIstory is a simple line from A to B, from first mud brick cities of Mesopotamia to Rome to London and Berlin. Whereas quite clearly history is a dozen separate timelines converging and splitting that is just as messy as everything today. We love to have clear-cut information like "Edison invented electric light" which is both true and untrue in fact, he invented a type of it. When things require thinking outside of straight lines, some people just go "can't be done, nonsense" and come up with greek generals in south east asia or aliens building pyramids, because that fits the view that things get invented in one place and spread around, not that there would be separate equally valid points of technology.

There's always been a healthy mix of unconscious racism whenever it came to non-european civilizations, and while part of it might come from actual racism, a lot of it is from West's love of linear time, and by extension, linear everything.

It isn't particularly unconscious. There is a central narrative to western historiography that runs from Orosius to Marx and most everyone in between (and beyond, sadly enough, Anthropologist Eric Wolf used it as part of a title in 1982, though he was trying (somewhat) to subvert it).

The 'People Without History' is a long running concept- non-Christians exist to be tools of the divine to punish the faithful, but they have no agency or autonomy. Marx continued this in a different context, but non-westerners were something history happened to, they didn't create it. Hence the USSSR was a perversion that couldn't work to Marxist historians- the revolution should have happened in Germany or Britain, Russia was too backwards.

It's not even confined to humanities, don't forget theories of evolution and such have long been dogged (even today) with the fact that many people refused to admit to humanities "animal" origins due to religious and other influences.

Heck we are only now coming to terms with the idea that humanity isn't the only species with a highly evolved and developed concept of language.

I think what really gets my goat when it comes to “Aliens doned it” is that in many cases, as I think was confirmed earlier, is that we very much do know how it was done.

If memory serves, and I’m again not being taken in by another wild claim, archaeologists have found and recorded hieroglyphics which literally show how the Pyramids etc were built?

There’s also other things to consider. Let’s look at the Agricultural and Industrial revolutions in Europe - certainly in Britain.

The Agricultural Revolution of course came first. This ensured stronger harvests, and involved fewer people. For the land owners, this meant higher profits, to the point previously distinctly Middle class folk became very, very wealthy.

This meant their sons (possibly daughters, but given the time, probably not) went off to University etc, or otherwise gained an education. As that knowledge spread and was improved up, the same thing happened. Greater efficiency. Greater profits.

This ultimately lead to the Industrial Revolution, which eventually became the Digital Revolution, as people obsessed over ever greater efficiency (no I am not touching on the political theories there. Not on Dakka).

In short, a hierarchal society saw wealth and learning spread ever further. Who’s to say that South American civilisations didn’t have something similar? Those stones you can’t get a cigarette paper between? That takes a lot of skill, and learning. But, if successive generations of stone masons only ever had to worry about being stonemasons, and not sowing, growing and harvesting? You would see a significant increase in the skill level.

Example out of my bum for purely explanatory reasons....

Let’s say that to become a master Stone Mason takes something like 2,000 hours of work.

First, you’re limited to daylight hours, as one suspects doing it by candle, rush or whatever light is far from ideal.

Now, if masonry is more a hobby than a specific role? You may end up with just an hour or two a day to dedicate to it, as you have other necessary tasks (hunting, animal husbandry, crop sowing/growing/harvesting, food preparation etc etc).

But...if your immediate society has a certain structure to it, where specific tasks have specialist workers? You’re more likely to be able to dedicate your working day to it entirely.

So where someone in a hodge-podge affair, where they only have an hour two? 1,000 days would be needed to get to master level.

But, if you can dedicate 8 hours a day? 250 days - less than a year. And that’s not taking into account the “rinse and repeat, find a cheat” benefit which may reduce that time, or possibly more likely, increase the time someone only doing it now and again would take to master it.

Sorry. Bit word salad, for which I apologise.

TL/DR? History appears to have a tendency to treat a snapshot of a culture as a universal constant.

Someone smart said it takes 10K hours to learn a skill. I forget who it was, but its a value I've heard repeated around so if not true it might at least give some idea as to timescale.s


Also don't forget today we live in a very diferent time when it comes to trades and skills. In the past you'd likely start your skill and trade learning much earlier in life. If it was a stable time with children inheriting from their parents then chances are you'd be training from a very young age informally; moving into formal quite quickly. So by the time you hit 20 you'd already have years of skill behind you. Whereas today we might start at 18 to muddle around; but might not even settle on a trade till much later in life and that assumes stable work (a lot of people have lost jobs; retrained and wound up in totally different trades several times).

So yep in ancient times there was generally more stability for a lot of work and often a lot more parent to child passing on of skills. Of course there were downsides - lack of internet; easy access to books and easy travel meant that even if you did learn all your parents had to know; you might be a local master; but lack a more worldly view. So you might just not think of some ideas. It would also mean that some local masters might well discover things that get lost once they die because they never passed it on in person, or those they did pass it onto never used that knowledge or passed it on themselves etc... The lack of formal documentation and the easy exchange of it likely meant many discoveries were made and lost over time.


today we can accelerate some of the learning because we can exchange ideas so freely. Heck if we want we can exchange them in near real time over the whole world.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I think what really gets my goat when it comes to “Aliens doned it” is that in many cases, as I think was confirmed earlier, is that we very much do know how it was done.

IKR?

In short, a hierarchal society saw wealth and learning spread ever further. Who’s to say that South American civilisations didn’t have something similar?

They did; several booms (and busts) before European colonization. But then history of civilization in general very much a history of booms and busts.


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 Overread wrote:
Heck we are only now coming to terms with the idea that humanity isn't the only species with a highly evolved and developed concept of language.

I think that is a bit of an unfair criticism given that we are and have been for all of recorded history. The technology and knowledge to even figure something like that out in our context has not even existed until recently.

Slightly related fun fact: Humans (Homo sapiens) did not invent the use of fire, we inherited it.


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 A Town Called Malus wrote:
With regards to historical revisionism of people who don't fit the heteronormative viewpoint upheld through much of history, we must be thankful of those who managed to lead such incredibly outrageously flamboyant lifestyles that they were not able to be erased.

Dam straight!

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I think what really gets my goat when it comes to “Aliens doned it” is that in many cases, as I think was confirmed earlier, is that we very much do know how it was done.

Slightly related fun fact: Humans (Homo sapiens) did not invent the use of fire, we inherited it.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
With regards to historical revisionism of people who don't fit the heteronormative viewpoint upheld through much of history, we must be thankful of those who managed to lead such incredibly outrageously flamboyant lifestyles that they were not able to be erased.

Dam straight!

Very true. In fact modern science believes that homo sapiens would not exist if our ancestor had not discovered the use of fire and began cooking raw meat with it.

Basically, cooking meat breaks down some of the proteins, making it easier for the hominid digestive system to assimilate it. While the hominid omnivorous digestive system is versatile and has some advantages, it is also inefficient. It can handle raw meat but doesn't get as much useful protein out of it.

Cooking meat made it easier for our ancestors digestive systems to get much more protein out of it and this lead to the expansion of the cerebral cortex due to more useful protein being available in the formative years, plus it lead to an increase in height and overall physical health and strength.

Plus cooked meat it far easier to chew and swallow, meaning you didn't send all that time chewing it.

On the ideas that some peat bog bodies were homosexuals executed for their deviance, heinrich himmler believed that and stated it as fact during his time in power. Many refuted this after he was no longer able to retaliate against them.

I find the alarming thing which ties into flat earth and all other similiar nonsense is its a business. A fairly lucrative business and its reeling people in.

For example I came across a channel called "Gaia". Which masquerades garbage nonsense things like "Ancient Aliens did it/ Earth flat/Atlantis is real magic" etc. as well produced fact based documentary because science guy#1 is in a white lab coat...

Unfortunately it seems large segments of the populations are kinda roped in and believe because its said by an important smart looking "science person" on TV.

 Argive wrote:
I find the alarming thing which ties into flat earth and all other similiar nonsense is its a business. A fairly lucrative business and its reeling people in.

For example I came across a channel called "Gaia". Which masquerades garbage nonsense things like "Ancient Aliens did it/ Earth flat/Atlantis is real magic" etc. as well produced fact based documentary because science guy#1 is in a white lab coat...

Unfortunately it seems large segments of the populations are kinda roped in and believe because its said by an important smart looking "science person" on TV.

Indeed it can be very big business indeed if you land the right setup. Often as not when you look into some of these groups you can often find someone behind them who is promoting them and pushing the agenda who is also profiting off them - sometimes making money into the millions. Flat Earth might not be there yet, but each supporter joining a group and such expands the sphere of influence and the earning potential.

Somehow I don't have much sympathy for the 'victims' of such unscrupulous business.