What questions do you have about stuff from History, or am I the only one?

[EverySongbirdSays]

Hi all, HQ here. We're moving this thread over to History Club now where Songbird will be starting a Part 2 thread for more History quizzical shenanigans

The main history thing I've been pondering for the last couple of days since the weather shifted is the history of clothes.

So... how did Early Man manage in the winter, how did they make clothes out of animal skin?

After that, I understand that clothes production as we know it today began with the industrial revolution.

But how did people manage for clothes you know before we had cotton or machinery

How/when did we realise you could knit wool to make a jumper?

I'm sorry if it's a bit of a stupid question

Has anyone got any stupid questions I might know the answer to ?

I don't think small beer is even as alcoholic as 2% really.

Am I right in thinking people would have 'eaten' more liquid food like gruel, so seperate drinks would have been less of a thing? Now we have a drink with meals usually but then it would be all in one, as it were. So they might not have been drinking as much beer as our modern ways might suggest.

Vestal - that makes sense (re nose cutting). Men get to hide their shame, women have to wear theirs permanently

LRD - I think the practice dates back to antiquity, but it is mentioned in various medieval manuscripts (eg Geoffrey de la Tour, I think). Though there was an incidence widely reported in Afghanistan in 2010 where a man punished his wife by cutting off her nose (not sure if he believed she had committed adultery)

Re grooming, I think almost every society does / has done this to some degree. Being practical, combing hair helps ensure there are no nasty ticks and insects lurking in it. Other stuff (make up ,tattoos, hair styles) connotate social status, and I reckon even the cavemen had a strong hierarchy and various symbols and reminders of who was top of the pile

Batteries - sounds plausible. No perpetual sipping from water bottles in the primary school classroom to maintain hydration for them

I think it's society telling people that they have to x,y,z.

"But there wouldn't be loads of milk, without farming: cows / goats only keep producing milk because we keeping taking it from them regardless of whether they have a baby to feed or not"

Oh I wasn't disputing that cheese would come first, it makes sense...just musing that once you've got animals to milk, storing it isn't really an issue so much as making sure you could use it all.

Re smuggling babies, Royal births were witnessed by like entire courts in certain time periods for that very reason.

Sorry wrong thread

Or was everyone left so paranoid that no one could really be trusted, and people couldn't really make friends? Was life actually relentless misery?Were they so poor that they were actually starving? Or were they just poor in comparison to UK standards? Did people just muddle along much like we all do?

Depends when you're talking. There was enforced famine under Stalin in 1932-33 (Holodomor.) Apparently the incidence of heart attacks went up round 1935 or so, because people were that paranoid, and feared the knock on the door so much - you couldn't trust neighbours, or even your own children. Stalinist Russia in the 1930s wasn't a good place to live.

But I am sure too that people did just muddle along and make friendships, some of which may have been betrayed, but others would have lasted. Humans are very resilient, and have survived almost unimaginable situations, and I'm sure 1930s USSR was no different.

It's also easily storable and portable nourishment, tabulah. Milk is heavy and difficult to carry and store. No vehicles, no refrigeration and people out on the hills working all day? Milk would be difficult to consume properly. Cheese on the other hand.....

bearhug that link is awful

I wonder why Stalin isn't spoken about in the same terms as Hitler. I think he was on a par with Hitler and possibly worse, and yet he doesn't seem to be anywhere near as reviled as Hitler (am I wrong or is that just my perception?).

The image of the ungroomed caveman or woman, covered in dirt and with wild hair is more of a reflection on how Victorian and early 20th artists and illustrators saw people they regarded as primitive. Most recent finds from Neolithic times show that grooming, cosmetics have been around for a very long time. Human intelligence is also meant to have decreased since hunter gather times. With no food surpluses the less able would not have survived to contribute to the gene pool, only those capable of the highly skilled activities of hunting or working out which plants aren't poisonous would survive. Modern medicine ( thank goodness) has sort of stopped evolution of humans. Again how racist,western history books and research presented people from tribal societies says more about western society at the time than it does about aborigines or native Americans.

Also the practicalities of swapping babies is hard. Due dates wouldn't have been hard to figure out but there's still a couple of weeks either side when you might give birth - you need enough pregnant women lined up to provide you with a believable newborn born within a week or so. More babies around then, no one would have been fooled if you were trying to pass off a baby clearly older. Unless you're also bringing everyone who comes into contact with the baby up until around 2/3m into the conspiracy. Also the pregnant women have to be willing/forced to give up their baby, and made not to talk. And you need go betweens to organise, and keep quiet etc. And the swap baby needs to be healthy and have survived birth (obviously).

It's just not likely is it?

mud - one of my favourite, laugh out loud book series is the Darwin Awards, showing how some people are determined to take stupid out of the gene pool

I want to know how women got by without glasses or contact lenses back in the day! I could not survive without either!

I think it depends when you're looking at, when it comes to alcohol. It was obviously some concern in the 18th century, when Hogarth printed Gin Lane. When I was researching my dissertation, I was reading about Welsh miners drinking 8 quarts or more of beer a night (early 19th century), and that lead to a reputation for fighting. I wasn't impressed that they were getting pissed on 2 pints, but then someone pointed out a quart isn't a quarter pint of beer, but a quarter of a gallon, i.e. 2 pints, so 8 quarts was 16 pints. But I think it was less of an issue pre-industrialisation.

Lweji re Portugal being a small player on the world stage, I've read that the 1755 Lisbon earthquake had worldwide repercussions as well as the economic impact, it had a massive impact on the great thinkers of the day (Voltaire, Rousseau) , led to the questioning of God's existence and of the order of things and may have helped spark the French Revolution etc

"Milk is heavy and difficult to carry and store."

Not in a cow it's not...it's portable and fresh, rofl

What I more mean is...you're going to get better use of the milk by making it into cheese because there'll be a surplus.

But I'm wondering if it's more - how do we get to use all this extra milk this cow can make that we can't manage to drink every day? rather than we need to store this...if that makes sense?

I wonder why Stalin isn't spoken about in the same terms as Hitler. I think he was on a par with Hitler and possibly worse, and yet he doesn't seem to be anywhere near as reviled as Hitler

I think you're right, and I think some of it is just that Germany is closer, and more like us, so it's more difficult to distance ourselves from it. Also, Hitler went for very specific groups, and while Russia also went for specific groups, the groups changed over time, so that at some point, everyone would have been at risk. But it is a big gap in our history teaching - I remember talking to a friend about the Holocaust, and pointing out Germany wasn't unique - he'd never heard of the Gulag system or that tens of millions of people died there. It seems to me that humans always seem very keen on genocide, but the 20th century brought us the technology that we could be very efficient about it. And sometimes, the way we're taught history makes it look like only Nazi Germany did anything really bad, whereas it's been done in many, many countries, all over the world and throughout history. It's quite depressing, actually - but people do also survive the terrible, terrible things we subject each other to, and that's something to be hopeful about.

Considering the recent research about how kids spending very little time playing outside leads to short sight, I would conclude that there were fewer people who needed glasses as youngsters in the first place.

It might have been easier to be a woman who was short sighted than a man - you weren't expected to do archery or shooting.
Working class women strained their eyes from lots of sewing in poor light. however.

People with poor eyesight did just often muddle through without glasses. In The Merchant of Venice, there are jokes about different gradations: sand blind, gravel blind, stone blind. It would obviously have been very debilitating not to be able to see - but we think in terms of what we would have difficulty accessing: if you couldn't read, and most people you knew couldn't either, and there was no screen based entertainment, there wouldn't be all that extra stuff to lose out on alongside the practical aspects.

Or people who were short-sighted had accidents and DIED.

" ('I am much distempered at the surfeit of trolls on Mumsnet of late' type thing.)"

Snort.

Just came on to check thread was being moved to history club. As you were.

Meant to say that, as these are presented in the play as low puns and banter, it seems the terms were common knowledge and there were plenty of people around with these different degrees of visual impairment.

I am much distempered at the surfeit of trolls on Mumsnet of late

I missed this.

Oh I'm so sad that I've reached the end of this thread! I've been reading it since yesterday and have been completely riveted. My historical knowledge is very poor, so this whole thread has been a real education.

Or people who were short-sighted had accidents and DIED.

Yup. Would be interesting to know how often it appears in old coroners' records as a cause contributing to accidents.

Higher risk of being killed by predators too.