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 ?

Where was the wheel invented? I'm assuming it was somewhere dry and flat - I'm thinking of Egyptian chariots which predate European wheeled transport I think? Or do I have that wrong?

Ah - chariots.

There are some interesting questions to be posed about how far war and fighting have driven scientific thought.

interestingly, on a UK building site you might see lots of wheelbarrows. Handcart and barrows were probably a big early use of wheels.

But when I lived in Asia, on building sites you would see 2 men carrying a large sort of deep tray with handles sticking out of each end. They took piles of soil and rubbish out on those, no wheeled carts to be seen.

Pack saddles are still very common in some parts of the world. Pack animals are just more practical than carts.

Think of the state - comparatively - of any highways. Most would have been little more than rutted tracks in the earth, likely impassable in winter, and if they weren't frequently travelled you might have been better served by taking to the moor. Early tales - e.g. of the American settlers - are full of wagons getting stuck in fords, drifts, whatever. It also made you more vulnerable in a time when thieves would predate on travellers. (You were stuck, possibly with valuables, in one place or moving slowly.)

What did the Romans ever do for us? Build decent roads...

The bicycle indirectly led to the invention of the plane, too, as the Wright Brothers ran the family bicycle business and used their technological know-how and access to materials to create prototype planes (and the rest is history)

I suppose that much would have depended on the labour - 'free' or forced - that you had available for construction.

Canals were built because they were the best way to transport breakable goods in bulk, particularly pottery. Roads were too bumpy and pack animals couldn't carry enough.

I've always imagined that wheels were invented by some bright spark observing rocks being moved on log rollers. Stonehenge and the pyramids are thought to have been built using this method. Perhaps someone wondered what if we fixed a wider piece of wood at each end of the log so that the log was raised above the ground - assuming they had the means of fixing a piece of wood to the end of a log. So the next question is who invented nails?

There are some interesting questions to be posed about how far war and fighting have driven scientific thought.

My PhD is in Coastal Engineering. Coastal Engineering as a discipline evolved from studies on the land/sea interface when planning the Dunkirk landings. Even in the 1990s one of my most referenced civil engineering text books was a Royal Engineers publication. In the USA the federal responsibility for flood and coastal defence lies with the US Army Corps of Engineers.

The Dam Busters campaign is another good example. In fact, many instances of war driving science in David Bodanis' book E = mc2; the biography of the most famous equation.

on another tack entirely....

Did anyone see that amzing programme about building the Panama canal a few years ago? The workers kept dying. One clever young man realised that they were dying of the same illness, and that the area they were living in was very swampy. He didn't quite join up all the dots - malaria, mosquitos, breeding in water, but he did get it enough to build shelters and put screens on the windows, and drain the areas around the camp. The number of deaths fell dramatically. Work progressed. Then he fell out with the boss, new man took over, said the cabins were rubbish and a waste of time, and stopped all the anti-malarial methods, and the number of deaths shot up again, and so the build faltered again.

Reminds me of the doctor in Paris about 1750? (OK, no idea of the date)
He noticed that some midwives lost very few women to child bed fever. He noticed that they changed aprons and washed their hands. He decided to see if being clean would stop child bed fever. He ran a hospital of some sort. At his hospital the numbers of women dying of childbed fever, ie, post birth infection dropped by 75% (!!)

He was then accused of withcraft and shut down. It took another couple of hundred years for the link to be understood.

Both of which make me reallise how often in history, logic, evidence and proof were irrelevant. Explanations are no good if the basis of the explanation has no visible proof. I wonder how much has been lost over time due to superstition?

Going back to the foot binding of earlier, I heard that it started because the emperor had a favourite concubine with very tiny feet and the ladies of the court tried to emulate that look, which eventually became the extreme child foot-binding practice.

Fairytales would often have a bit of innuendo and smut in them because the telling of stories was a whole family affair. Bit like the Carry On films really, you have to already know what they are hinting at to get the adult jokes while the little kids are happily oblivious.

Someone upthread mentions Viking settling in Normandy.

French king Charles the Simple gave them part of what was at the time called Neustria, against the promise that they would settle there peacefully and stop pillaging and burning stuff.

This didn't quite work and Normandy was gradually extended through conquests by Rollo and his successors. William the conqueror was Rollo's direct (although illegitimate) descendent

The name Normandy obviously means "the land of the Norse men"

DH refused to let me name our PFB Rollo

Rotter!

As to the fighting, I guess I was thinking of more prosaic things. Such as - you've just smelted a new ore at huge expense. How do you decide what to sell it for and what use you're going to put forward for it?

Sure - it might make a better cooking pot but given that most uses of iron hadn't yet been discovered, your best bet for a sale was to roll in to a High Homestead and say to the chieftain 'I've got this great new sword which will take the best edge you ever saw and will make you invincible in battle against those bronze-sword carrying losers'. Cue lots of excitement.

And a new industry.

Steppemum - you're not thinking of Ignaz Semmelweis are you?

He was based in Vienna & made his discovery in 1847 - he was initially concerned with people washing their hands between conducting autopsies & attending to women in labour, which is just beyond grim - but was hounded out (to extent of having to move to Budapest!) & his following 20-year letter-writing campaign to try to get people to believe him led to him being committed to an asylum. (Admittedly, accusing your colleagues of being murderers doesn't make you sound terribly together...). He died a fortnight after he was admitted - possibly as a result of having 7 bells knocked out of him by the staff.

Question. Where did a male god come from?

Early ideas of god were always female as they were life givers.

Early humans had both if I recall?

Placemarking a good read.

Have read tons about history, I quite like Philippa Gregory (but she does tend to embellish the truth a bit...), don't read Susannah Dunn if you like historical fiction it may be interesting but I wish she'd stick to what she wrote before.

Weir is good.

For many years I've been into researching execution methods yes I'm strange

Another theory which I believe Peter Ackroyd covers is how history seeps into streets buildings areas etc

Cannot wait to have a good read through of this thread.
Does anyone know anything about cadaver synod? It's bloody fascinating stuff and more than a bit grim. I'd love to have more than wiki knowledge on it, so if anyone can reccomend any books etc I'd be pleased.

Fab thread. I've often wondered if red became the colour for danger because of blood? If you bled it was bad so therefore red became a symbol for something you don't do? And green for go/good because it's the colour of regrowth in nature?

I didn't know about it.

They cut off the three right hand fingers of the corpse?

If there are any Latinists on the thread, I'd be interested to have a more precise translation of Synodus Horrenda, though.

I've also made that assumption about red / green, Moomichi, though not sure how that ties up with red having different connotations in different countries (red is lucky in Japan, I think?)

I recall a story I was told once. Rugby match between the Army (red colours) and the Navy (dark blue). The captain of the Army team approached the captain of the Navy team and said 'I hope you're ready for this - we wear red to hide the colour of blood.' At which the Navy captain turned round and said 'Oh Well. We wear blue for the same reason!'.

(Those of you from naval families will appreciate that. )

Interesting that 'blue blood' has been taken as referring to the upper crust, though. I wonder if it was to do with 'pallor' - i.e. not being in the fields all day.

Yy cozie those where the fingers he used to bless things so that was the significance. It's been a while since I last looked at it though.