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 ?

Gruesome, even so.

What is this about fingers? Can you explain for those of us not in the know.

They cut the fingers off the corpse that they'd just found guilty. Among other things.

Sorry - they tried a corpse.

Yay! I've reached the end of the thread! Well done to all you contributors, thanks for sharing your incredible knowledge and please keep going!
A couple things:

1. there's a box bed in Beamish, a living museum in Durham. Also Beamish is wonderful in general and I highly recommend it.
2. I had a full-on jaw drop moment about Cinderella's squirrel muff fur shoes
3. Capal is Irish for horse (my Mum had a version of 'how many miles to Babylon' that went: Hup, hup a capalin ('een' at the end of a word implies smallness, so small horse' Hup, hup again How many miles to Dublin? Three score and ten. Will we be there by candlelight? Yes and home again'

I find language in general and place names in particular very interesting. Translations by Brian Friel is a play that deals with how Irish place names were recorded.

How was so much development and knowledge lost when the Romans left? I find it really hard to reconcile the idea that the Romans were here before the Vikings. I mean, I can practically look out my front door and see the remains of a great big, fuck-off wall that they built, we still travel roads the built, they had so much figured out and then it's like there was a regression, and then the Vikings came along and decided to sack a few places, then realised it might be worthwhile settling and then just took over half of England. Right?

I have many more questions, mostly along the line of 'how the fuck did they work that out' but I can't remember them right now.
Has anyone heard the theory that we all have a primal house plan in our heads? Like there was an original house that we all have in our subconscious which influences how we plan or something. Now that I've googled it I can't find anything so I'm not sure if I've made it up.

I recently listened to a podcast about patents and how rich men happened to invent lots of things when actually they were just the ones that could afford/were able to patent them. www.stuffmomnevertoldyou.com/podcasts/mothers-of-invention.htm

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

It's not something I know that much about, but as I understand it, we don't really have the information to be sure of that.

People have looked at (for example) the statues of female figures found in prehistoric Europe, but we don't know what these were really for. One idea is they were goddesses, but they could just as easily be porn - or anything else!

I find this topic really tricky. There is a brand of feminism that insists that early societies were matriarchal, venerated femininity and valued 'women's knowledge' which was later stigmatised as witchcraft.

Problem is, there's no uncontroversial evidence for it.

I find the (often weird, squat, malformed) statues-as-porn argument odd. Pictures as porn I can just about get my head around but a lump of clay? Unless people directly interacted with them somehow I can't see how you'd get your rocks off looking at a lump of clay. It's never made sense to me as a theory. Maybe I'm just close minded

We don't know what their purpose was, do we? They were presumably important - simply because they were made - but their significance? Who can tell. The knowledge has been lost.

Oh, sure. I'm not saying that is what I think, just there's no less evidence for it than for them as goddesses.

I will say, though, that I find the idea of women screaming in pain while being multiply penetrated equally odd as something to get one's rocks off.

I wonder how people thought to make bread and pasta. Any sort of processed food.

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

Boringly it just means 'The horrible/dreadful/horrendous Synod' I'm afraid. 'Synodus' is feminine.

That's what my deep brain was telling me. Not boring at all. It rather looks as if some 11th century (or whatever) spin-Meisters were at work to effect the transition to the 'Cadaver Synod'.

Sorry LRD I wasn't meaning to attack you I know it's just a theory - just find it odd. Odd as an idea.

Although thinking about it - we view masturbation as deeply private now, but in the past did they happily masturbate in front of each other or was it more the case that masturbation was rare?

Wasn't there some sort of biblical prohibition against masturbation?

Oh, no, sorry!

I didn't feel at all attacked, and didn't mean to come across as aggressive either. I was just thinking aloud.

I do agree with you - I find it really odd, but the whole thing is so mysterious, isn't it? We don't know what they were thinking.

jo - yep. Leviticus? Deut? One of those, anyway. Sin of Onan - spilling your seed. Though, technically, I think the Bible is fine with female masturbation. I could be wrong.

Who would have had the time? Life was hard as hard, backaways.

To prohibit against it people must have been doing it though I guess...

Ach, there's always time, what about in between the sleeps?

You have a point, there.

But the 'nothing else to do on the long winter evenings' argument that regularly gets applied to sex ought to work for masturbation too.
It's top of my list of things to find out about if I ever get to time travel, though I am not quite sure how I am going to broach the subject....

There's a delightful discussion of someone feeling someone else up, genitally, in Piers Plowman.

And giving a woman a handjob was, apparently, part of any good medieval midwife's repertoire.

Medieval penitentials discuss masturbation - in negative terms - but it's not as bad as sodomy or as fucking your (female) lover with a dildo.

Thanks all, so glad you asked. (Yes, I know you didn't).

Ekirch definitely says people had sex in between the sleeps but I don't remember him mentioning masturbation.

Sin of Onan: he refused to fulfill his duty to impregnate his brother's widow and raise up children in his brother's name, presumably practicing withdrawal. Didn't want to share the inheritance. See Genesis 38 for the whole strange story.

I remember reading something (written from a feminist perspective and countering the idea that most early creative advances were made by men) proposing that the reason those little clay figures are so "busty" and oddly proportioned is because they were carved by women as self-portraits, from a viewpoint of looking down at one's own body. I don't find this massively convincing - surely the sculptor would have seen enough other women to know that they weren't really quite that shape - but it's an interesting idea.

It is interesting - but who can tell why they were carved, what they were meant to represent and who carved them? The knowledge is lost.

Eskimos having 20 words for different types of snow

Doesn't this show language evolves to have detail about your life style/location.

I'm sure I know 20 words for rain, but to me snow is snow.