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 ?

*the not did

I've also always wondered who first thought to milk an animal and then decide it was a good idea for humans to drink it.

Surely that's an obvious source of food.

The problem here is that humans can't digest milk protein. This capacity has required mutations, which have arisen a few times and independently.
We think it's normal in Europe because most of us have such mutation. It gave an evolutionary advantage in times of famine, because it's a constant source of food and we don't have to kill the animal to get it.
Some tribes in Africa drink cow's blood instead.

I wonder why it took so long for someone to invent the bicycle. I mean they figured out the wheel pretty early on and bikes aren't that sophisticated so how come it took until the 19th century to invent one.

Saskia that's really interesting, I agree, it must've been such a dangerous environment for children.

State sponsored pirates were called privateers, and as Lweji said they were hired as needed in times of war. When England was at war with Spain, for example, Queen Elizabeth I gave out Letters of Marque giving permission for the bearer to attack Spanish ships and steal their cargo. The Queen would take a cut of the spoils and the rest would be kept by the privateer. It was a way of undermining the enemy's economy while making a profit and avoiding the cost of maintaining a formal Navy.

The downside was that when the war eventually ended, the privateers weren't keen to give up their lucrative business and many of them carried on plundering ships despite no longer having royal permission to do so, at which point they were defined as pirates.

Sorry, trills. Am in work mode.

jack - I'm only being pedantic because I think it's so interesting. Likewise with the medicine. I saw some stuff about surgery on breast cancer in the past - it sounded agonizing. But people must have felt it was their only chance.

There's an amazing book called 'The body and surgery in the Middle Ages'. But also later stuff - there's a reference in Pepys' diary: www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1665/05/05/

About periods....actually a lot of women now are going back to using older methods of re-usable sanitary towels made of absorbent cloth.

Commercially produced sanitary towels have a lot of chemicals in and people are concerned that they increase the risk of certain types of cancer (I haven't done my research so can't say if this is true or not). Plus think of the environmental issues of all the sanitary towels piling up in landfill.

It's like the trend of going back to terry cloth nappies.

The problem here is that humans can't digest milk protein

Sorry, my error there.

Humans can't digest lactose, which is a sugar, not the protein.
And to be strict, it's as adults. Obviously, babies can.

LRD you can go be in work mode if you want, but I'd prefer you to hang about here telling us clever and interesting things all day. :o

Babies whose mum died in childbirth. How did juddering christ will we feed it. Lets have a go on the cow.

The obvious answer to that is wet nursing.

Mum dead but tiny baby alive? Look, Mrs X, Y and Z over at the next few campfires have babies, maybe they can help out with feeding our motherless baby?

I guess cows milk would be a last resort for if they couldn't find any woman willing or able to wetnurse the motherless baby.

The state-sponsored pirates were know as privateers. They were privately-owned ships that had been granted permission to attack (and loot) the ships of enemy nations.

Sir Walter Raleigh made a lot of his fortune this way.

Most mammals grow out of their ability to digest lactose after they are weaned.

Personally I digest lactose very well, which is great because I love dairy products.

I can see how it would be a MASSIVE advantage to be able to do so in a world with scarce resources.

I meant, I'm in work mode which is why I am being a pedant.

I love these threads. The stuff about digesting lactose is amazing. I never thought about that side of it.

About witches - I think this one is really complicated. The 'witch craze' is early modern, not medieval. Medieval England has issues with witches, but not really big issues, if you see what I mean?

A lot of medicine resembles spells resemble prayers - there's not so much to differentiate them.

My favourite example is birth girdles. These were long strips of parchment or cloth, with prayers written on them. They were lent out to women in labour to hold, or tie around their bellies, to help them deliver safely.

One of them, which is 5'7 long, has an inscription on it explaining that the length of the roll is also the height of the Virgin Mary.

I think people forgot how common hunger and starvation would have been throughout human history. A person hungry to the point of starvation will give anything remotely edible a go.

Oh I love the idea of Birth girdles. It sounds like something made with a lot of love and hope.

LRD we are FB mates (have name changed maaaaaany times) and I adore it when you and your colleagues have these fascinating work chats on there. lots goes over my head

I imagine that most people's lives were hard, brutal and at times painful and scary.

Bill Brison's history of the home is fascinating reading too IMO

One of the things I remember from school was people saying that Hitler's hatred of Jews began when he contracted syphilis from a Jewish prostitute.

I watched a documentary which was about Charlse Dwaine' cousin who did similar study to Dwaine. Hitlerwas a fun. Used the theory it to further his aim.

Mary was pretty tall then, for her race/sex/time?

Sure I read somewhere that women who got their periods often just stayed in bed rather try to cope with the flow. Obviously that would only apply to women who didn't have to work. Not sure how how the lower classes managed, especially as they also would be less likely to afford materials for pads.

I imagine that the issue with inventing bikes, was the ability to manufacture gears and a drive train small enough to fit, precise enough to work and light enough to be practical.

The concept of gears, chaindrive etc must go back to at least medieval times (trebuchet, winches etc), and the "Hobby horse"(like a big balance bike) was invented in the early 1800s and the Penny Farthing was invented in the late 1800s, but was somewhat impractical! I imagine the available manufacturing technology for small scale, precision gearing etc is actually what delayed the invention of bikes as we k ow them.

Here's another

How did they invent the gun/gunpowder?

and

When building the underground, how did bits of London not sink down into it? Who came up with it? I'm just thinking of that house were they tried to put a basement in and the whole fucker collapsed. Same principle I guess

I have such gaps in knowledge. I know next to nothing about the history of STEM.

My school history :

Tudors and Stuarts but not in massive detail
Industrial Rev - can barely remember
20th Cen - knowledge still quite strong
Romans - barely remember
French Rev - basic grasp
Napoleon - can't remember
The Victorians - primary school level

And that's what I remember doing

Remember doing Castles as well, but not who the kings were

Recommend A Room Of Ones Own by Virginia Woolf as a reada lot to say about the historic creative suppression of women. Classist though... she can't imagine what poor women would have to write about

I think quite a lot of the underground runs under roads.

They did demolish a lot of houses for the first underground railway, when they just dug a trench and covered it - this page is interesting on how better techniques were developed.
www.constructionenquirer.com/2013/01/09/see-how-the-tube-was-built-150-years-ago/

You can learn quite a lot from children's books showing the daily lives of ancient people.

I've also learned quite a lot from Christian Jacq's novels set on on Ancient Egypt, for example, as he is a scholar.

Check broadsheets' science/history sections, as well as National Geographic or New Scientist for interesting bits.

The main issue with bikes will have been the roads themselves, plus why people got from one place to the other.

Bikes, particularly the first ones, wouldn't have been practical on uneven roads. Besides, people would either need to travel short distances (fine to walk) or would need to carry luggage/goods. Bikes are not good for transport. Even a single horse or a donkey would be best.

Bikes are really only good on flat surfaces too, not so much for going uphill, so their use for transport is still fairly limited.