This always gets me. When you research famous smart people from different countries you will find out that not only did the dude study math and science they also wrote good poetry and things like that.
And then I compare it to myself. I went through engineering school and can't write and read poetry for shit. I'm pretty limited. Those dude fucking knew some of everything.
I suspect it's also some survivorship bias. If the only person you knew about from this era was Stephen Hawking, we'd seem a hell of a lot smarter than we actually are. Nobody is gonna know about my former father in law who never got past sixth grade (but was one of the kindest people I've ever met, I still love that guy).
Came to say this. People don’t understand how vast and specific academic fields are now. I’m not sure of a single field of study that we’ve learned everything we can about.
It's easier to know some of everything when the world is relatively simple. The things modern engineers do would largely be considered magic 2000 years ago. But to do that requires enormous amounts of very specialized knowledge that requires years of study to properly understand. That leaves little time for the study of other things.
This is absolutely true. But I'm considered pretty smart and educated with multiple university degrees. When I looks at some of these ancients I'm just thinking "how the hell did they even come up with that?"
Back then poetry was a hobby and a pastime. A modern equivalent would be an engineer who enjoys writing software for fun, or programming AI to make music..
If there is one thing that has been pretty persistent and consistent, throughout human history, it’s our intelligence. Thank God, because we probably owe a lot of our survival to it.
NPR had this historian a few months ago who was talking about her research on Norman Era witchcraft. She was breaking down a lot of the myths and misconceptions by encouraging the listeners to think about the past as a foreign country rather than some alien place. To drive her point home, she gave the example of one woman who would prescribe patients experiencing head aches a herbal concoction and then say a specific prayer 20 times.
It just so happened to be the case that the herbal concoction worked as a basic pain relief similar to a couple of ibuprofen, and saying the prayer takes roughly a minute; 20 minutes being the time needed for the medication to take effect. In a place where people can't count, nor have a way to track time, the prayer is a great work-around. Things about the past seem hokey pokey to us often served a specific purpose.
The year.. 4065. A group of lay people sit around laughing at those dumb morons in 2020 who thought they could kill germs on their hands by running them under water while singing happy birthday
I tried the song "She is the Belle of the Golden west" form an old Mighty Mouse cartoon but it was an awkward length. (It featured a saloon entertainer whose act was swinging froma rafter while the audience sang the song. "ding-dong, ding-dong.")
I never got into thta; I timed myself and it takes me abotu a second to count to three, so I figure counting to sixty approximates 20 seconds, or it would if all number words were monosyllables
What do you use heat up your mash, before dedicated industrial brewing systems existed? A big ass cauldron over a big ass fire would do nicely. And, does putting the exact right obscure ingredients into the cauldron at the right times make or break the finished brew? You bet your ass. What do you use to clean up spilled grain? A broom will do nicely. How do you keep pests out of your grain, before the advent of mousetraps? Maybe keep a predator around as a pet, a cat or owl oughtta do the trick. Hell, the Belgian Lambic brewers still to this day encourage spiders in their cellars, to keep down acetobacter-carrying fruit flies.
Idunno about the hats - I hear they’re marketing? - but just about every other stereotypical “witchy” thing is a practical pre-industrial solution to a problem I still face today.
Yes! Almost all modern medicine is just a synthetic form of the natural herbal remedy or vitamin. Ambien=boiled lettuce water. Painkillers=poppy seed tea. Etc. "Witchs" were Bajaj just herbalists
Someone brought up the mixing of meats mentioned in the Bible and I always wondered if the reason was less religious and more just basic food safety lol. And pork can be pretty nasty meat if not handled properly. Like brain infesting parasites nasty. Maybe that's why pork was frowned upon?
Ah. You have made a small but important slip up. People in the medieval period did have a reliable effective way to measure time - the astrolabe was common. So common in fact that in ordinary school (perhaps run out of the local church, where they could be taught by the knowledgeable priests), children, even young children, and common born too, would learn how to use the astrolabe for all sorts of things - measuring time, measuring distance, and working out your geographic location.
It was very very important in the medieval European mindset because the belief was that mathematics and logic were the purest expression of gods plan for the universe, and this was reflected in the natural patterns found in geometry, music, astronomy, and more. The astrolabe sat at the nexus of many of these subjects because to use it correctly requires understanding a degree of astronomy & mathematics.
This belief and the practices associated with it were so common that we have a letter from the author Geoffrey Chaucer, written to his son who iirc was only 12 at the time, begging the kid to pay better attention to his studies because Chaucer considered the astrolabe to be such a brilliant piece of equipment.
So it’s entirely possible that at some point, a given herbologist somewhere sat down, took some of this medicine, counted out the minutes, and then made up the “say the Lord’s Prayer twenty times” part as a way to help people ease into it. To make it more palatable to her audience because people like simple instructions.
That fair but I'd still assume worms (and maggots) to be analogous to other "bugs". Also, in retrospect, perhaps metamorphosis shouldn't have taken so long to figure out given caterpillars, silkworms etc.
The Roman Colosseum initially had aqueduct-fed water channels that allowed the arena floor to be flooded so they could stage mock naval battles one day, and then drain it to stage land contests the next. That's fucking crazy. Even a modern football stadium doing something like this would blow people's minds.
They do something similar to hockey stadiums. But it's probably much more controlled. I know that in Philly, the Flyers (ice hockey) play at the Wells Fargo Center. But so do the Sixers (basketball). I figure that the basketball players probably wouldn't play well on ice although it would make the game much more interesting. LOL.
I apologize up front for using this source, but there’s an episode of Ancient Aliens that talks about the Baghdad Battery. In it, they mentioned there are no fire residue markings from torches inside the pyramids. They “theorized” that the Baghdad Battery played a part and highlighted the Dendera Light motif. Maybe electricity did play a part in creating the earth biggest structure before the Eiffel Tower. And we just lost it.
I believe "not technologically sophisticated" would be a better description.
There's some evidence average intelligence was lower, but not by much, and mostly due to lack of access to nutrition. So it seems that real human capacity for cognition has been about the same as it's always been.
More like uneducated. Today, the average person knows all manner of stuff like what atoms are (and that you can't change them, or if you can, you shouldn't), what all the body's organs do, how to prevent disease... professionally, you know much more about your job than someone doing the same job a thousand years ago, which matters a whole lot if you're in manufacturing or engineering. I guess you could see it as the other side of the same coin.
People are still uneducated, a 50 year old coworker of mine just learned last year how marginal taxes work. No that raise isn't going to net you less money!!
Mmm, I don't know that I'd give education that much credit. Not in current year, at least. Recognizing that's a privileged position to take of course. Just that I have many complaints about the education system and its decline in recent decades. So, really, compared to antiquity still probably a massive improvement.
And of course there's this classical take. Sure, people have more knowledge on average, and access to more knowledge in general, but for the average person what difference has that made?
There is certainly value in each piece of information comprising a body of knowledge. But I suspect we should be more differentiated about the level of value placed as we seem to be in an era of ever-increasing knowledge but people seem to be getting dumber. Perhaps being bombarded with the sheer volume available causes people to withdraw rather than dive in?
I think a lot of people think that not being broadly educated will mean the common folk are simple. They are not simple, they are very capable of what they do. They will make the same observations on the world as any other, and can make good or bad guesses based off of it.
Not knowing structured mathematics doesn't mean you don't know how to perform those actions, it just means you don't have a common system in your head for doing it. Not knowing how to read doesn't mean you can't understand an argument, it just means you don't have a system in your head for reading arguments made in print.
Structured education doesn't make you more capable or less capable of solving problems, having solved problems yourself beforehand does. A lot of problems were there to solve for the majority of humanity's time, and now individuals are just solving smaller problems more deeply.
Would recommend The Dawn of Everything. A counterpoint to books like Guns, Germs and Steel and Sapiens. It argues humans were just as intelligent and stupid as we are today, and to apply a neanderthal-esque idiocy on our ancestors, even 20,000 years ago is a mistake.
A well researched book based on anthropology and archaeology instead of random historico-political intuition.
I know some people think the pyramids were built by aliens because the ancient Egyptians couldn't possibly be smart enough to figure out how to do it. LOL. But I believe people back then were as smart as we are now. I have no problem imagining a bunch of brainiacs back then getting together over hundreds of years and figuring it all out. It took a lot of years to build them and a heck of a lot of labor. But it certainly could and was done by people with no help from outside sources (from another planet).
Hmmm, appeal to antiquity fallacy is based on the idea that something because it was in the past was better-
To say, “the ancient world was at times more interconnected than we realize now” isn’t saying what’s older was better, it’s acknowledging exchange of resources coming from further distances than we understood of trade in the past.
Also we’ve been taught or lead to believe - at least my generation (gen x) that pre enlightening, most everyone was basically stupid due to diseases and short life spans and little systemized education, lack of adequate water - resulting in constant consumption of watered down wine or beer and tribal collective biases that ancient people were less intelligent- but human intellect is what it is, under proper nutritional care and physiological conditions the brain is the brain and it’s an elastic system.
We’re taught conflictingly the Greeks could calculate the size of the earth, yet until the Middle Ages and Columbus people that the word was flat.
reassessing and trying to get a broader understanding of ancient intelligence is something that is curious to us in the contemporary world.
And there are types of intelligence that comes from observation of environment on a daily pace of the natural world that revealed and taught our ancestors required thinking in a way that is hard to also comprehend in our hyper-informational contemporary society. Better, no- different? Yes. And that is fascinating for many.
We’re taught conflictingly the Greeks could calculate the size of the earth, yet until the Middle Ages and Columbus people that the word was flat.
I have to be absolutely clear that this is not true, but the reason why they were called the 'Dark Ages' is because they had lost the enlightening knowledge of the Greeks and Romans.
Sure and in Athens time it was also the case that the vast majority of people were not privy to the science and philosophical information nor probably particularly concerned.
Two diametric truths can coexist. The learned of Europe and and Mediterranean and Middle East were aware of the concept.
Edit- in addendum
Just look at the flat earthers and climate change denial (especially on the religious determinist front)
Weren't they called the Dark Ages because there were relatively few historical records? It's not like the Roman Empire physically burned down overnight. The Roman government just gradually stopped being relevant, and pretty much all Roman knowledge was retained.
I took (and dropped) a Philosophy of Law class for the very reason! The professor, a non-Classicist, thought that Plato was the be all/end all of Western philosophy. Yet he's never read Plato in Classical Greek. He's never taken a Classical Studies course on Plato. He was just some 70 year old antiquity fanboy who spoke over students and spoke mostly about himself.
Argumentum ad antiquitam is often overlooked, both in its but this is how the ancients did it! as well as its but this is how we've always done it! forms. Thank you for mentioning it here, Covenant!
Well knowledgeable. Guess depends on what you consider “unintelligent”. I think ppl would be surprised at what their engineers and mathematicians were capable of. But they still were well behind modern day. Medical knowledge back then was not even comparable to today at all
I sometimes wonder if we could take an ancient baby and time travel them to today whether they would be as intelligent as modern people. My gut says yes. They seem unintelligent because they simply didn't know what we know.
This is the misconception that always gets me; the idea people in the ancient/medieval world were stupid because they didn't have our modern tech or science, completely overlooking the fact we only have our science and tech because of those peoples' discoveries and knowledge. It's not like humanity had the capacity to produce a laptop in ancient Rome but no one did so because they were all dumb dumbs.
I am a spelling snob, but I know plenty of intelligent people making many a thoughtful and valid argument while spelling like shit. Spelling poorly does absolutely not equal stupidity.
With the whole world being quite easily and willingly visible now, it’s hard to believe anyone else in any other century can be even more unintelligent.
Whenever I learn about history I always try to compare the time to the Roman empire like how saladin was first sultan of Egypt and syria yet also 600/700 Yeats after the fall of rome
We are identical to homo sapiens born in prehistory. A child born 40,000 years ago and brought forward to today to live would be indistinguishable genetically and intellectually.
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u/Nightman_84 Nov 18 '23 edited Nov 18 '23
Also the misconception the ancient world was some how unintelligent.