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Cyrano4747 posted:Um, disease is a HUGE part of it if you're talking pre-cities. You don't have epidemic diseases wiping out thousands at a go, but any bullshit injury could result in a life threatening infection. This is made worse by the food insecurity that goes with not having stable agriculture. It's not just the threat of starvation either, even very mild malnutrition can really gently caress up your immune system. Don't all of those apply to pre-modern cities as well, though? I.e. cities have infection, malnutrition, and plagues, whereas tribes have infection, malnutrition, and a higher degree of violence. (I could easily still be wrong)
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May 9, 2017 21:45
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I was mostly thinking about how being born in the 1960s would be best because American Baby Boomers got to reap a ton of economic benefits in a way that I'm not sure people born in the 80s did/do, while still getting to enjoy the quality of life today. Also they probably get to die before the world is really really hosed up.
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May 9, 2017 21:47
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Jamwad Hilder posted:I was mostly thinking about how being born in the 1960s would be best because American Baby Boomers got to reap a ton of economic benefits in a way that I'm not sure people born in the 80s did/do, while still getting to enjoy the quality of life today. Also they probably get to die before the world is really really hosed up. I dunno, having to listen to all the whining Millennials pretty much offsets all that.
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May 9, 2017 21:53
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Deteriorata posted:I dunno, having to listen to all the whining Millennials pretty much offsets all that. hmmm, nah
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May 9, 2017 21:55
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Also the constant, heart-pounding fear of impending nuclear annihilation. We're still under the same bomb, mind: we just tend to forget about it. The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask / Tell > Ask us about Roman/Greek/other ancient history: trust us: be glad you're alive today instead of then
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May 9, 2017 21:56
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Jamwad Hilder posted:I was mostly thinking about how being born in the 1960s would be best because American Baby Boomers got to reap a ton of economic benefits in a way that I'm not sure people born in the 80s did/do, while still getting to enjoy the quality of life today. Also they probably get to die before the world is really really hosed up. People born in the 1960s were born before any serious attempts to control pollution in the environment. That's a lot of basically undetected and untreated poisoning going on before any serious prevention was in place.
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May 9, 2017 22:08
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People in the 1960s had to eat American cuisine, whatever that is.
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May 9, 2017 22:31
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Arglebargle III posted:People in the 1960s had to eat American cuisine, whatever that is. Meatloaf, mashed potatoes and corn. Every single night. If they want to get real wild they might have green beans. Probably. Speaking of food, has anybody read the new book by Crystal King called Feast of Sorrows: A Novel of Ancient Rome? quote:Set amongst the scandal, wealth, and upstairs-downstairs politics of a Roman family, Crystal King’s seminal debut features the man who inspired the world’s oldest cookbook and the ambition that led to his destruction. I liked it and the historical plot was something I'm pretty familiar with, as I enjoy studying first century Rome, specifically Augustus through Nero. A lot of it takes place during Tiberius's reign and Sejanus is one of the main villains.
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May 9, 2017 22:42
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Pretty sure ancient Rome and Greece got hit multiple times with pretty bad plagues so Honestly the whole "no plagues before 1500" is really dumb. As for worst place to be in history? East coast of America/Caribbean around the time of contact with Europeans. Your population just got literally decimated by plagues of strange new diseases, strange new people show up and murder and torture the gently caress out of you when the are not forcibly abducting you. If you are in the Caribbean your populations either get completely wiped out or you get worked to death on plantations before they use African slaves because they last longer.
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May 9, 2017 23:08
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Telsa Cola posted:Pretty sure ancient Rome and Greece got hit multiple times with pretty bad plagues so Honestly the whole "no plagues before 1500" is really dumb. I said smallpox, specifically, emerged in 1500 BC. Most diseases are younger than you'd think. e: and obviously there were other diseases before smallpox, but plague-style diseases, specifically, don't emerge in sparse population densities and don't tend to last longer than a generation in them if introduced from outside (without repeated contact to reintroduce it, of course). cheetah7071 fucked around with this message at 23:21 on May 9, 2017 |
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May 9, 2017 23:17
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I would not want to be an average Chinese person at basically any time of their history. I mean their civilization prospered, obviously, but it seems like if there aren't rival kingdoms warring with each other then that just means the Mongols, other steppe jerks, Westerners, or the Japanese probably showed up to kill you. No thanks.
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May 9, 2017 23:20
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cheetah7071 posted:I said smallpox, specifically, emerged in 1500 BC. Most diseases are younger than you'd think. Apologies, my brain is mush from finals week and I did not see the B.C in the original post and assumed AD.
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May 9, 2017 23:26
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cheetah7071 posted:I said smallpox, specifically, emerged in 1500 BC. Most diseases are younger than you'd think. Is that supposed to be impressive? It's very hard to track diseases from before there was a ton of writing around, as they'd often be described in very vague ways that don't let you narrow stuff down. And many diseases, even after that point, look very similar from the outside even though they operate very differently in the body and thus can easily be sorted out by modern diagnostic methods. Really you should be saying most diseases were formally figured out more recently than you think, most are quite old in and of themselves. I'm not sure where you get the idea that smallpox only emerged in 1500 BC though, that's just the oldest bodies we've found where there seems to be enough evidence that you can say it's smallpox as opposed to a similar disease. And those cases are in certain Egyptian mummies who inherently have better preservation than many other people who died from smallpox would have. Last I saw, historical epidemiologists believe smallpox itself could have been around in "modern" form as early as 10,000 BC based on what little we can determine of historical diseases.
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May 9, 2017 23:29
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fishmech posted:Is that supposed to be impressive? It's very hard to track diseases from before there was a ton of writing around, as they'd often be described in very vague ways that don't let you narrow stuff down. And many diseases, even after that point, look very similar from the outside even though they operate very differently in the body and thus can easily be sorted out by modern diagnostic methods. Really you should be saying most diseases were formally figured out more recently than you think, most are quite old in and of themselves. I got it by reading books that were apparently not up to date on modern epidemiology, and a quick scan of the wiki page to confirm I remembered the date right. Thanks for the correction, then.
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May 9, 2017 23:32
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Personally, I would hate to be been a peasant in Southern China around the mid 19th century. Plagues, floods, Europeans and anywhere between 20 million to 100 million people killed directly or indirectly by the Taiping rebellion, let alone the other concurrent rebellions and the other bandits taking advantage of the chaos. Back to Rome, is there a good source on how Roman camps worked back during late antiquity? I know that during the principate their camps were fortresses that they would put up overnight, which that in and of itself blows my mind, but did they keep doing that even as the empire was collapsing?
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May 9, 2017 23:46
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Most of our infectious diseases are just variations on pathogens that have been infecting mammals since mammals first originated. And probably the mammal-like reptiles before them. I would buy that agricultural population concentration and travel between population centers allowed more virulent forms to find success, though. Evolutionarily, there is incentive for diseases to be less severe but have a longer period where transmission is possible in dispersed populations, while higher transmission intensity through increased disease symptoms can be favored in concentrated populations.
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May 9, 2017 23:49
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Safety Biscuits posted:I just read a pop history book and I worked out that for one particular ship, a bit over 90% of slaves were dead within 18 months of leaving Africa. That's probably not including the ones who died before it even left Africa. And that was just one voyage with under 200 slaves. This is off-topic for this thread but I wanted to drop in quick because everybody should know about the Zong Massacre. In 1791 the British (ex-Dutch) slave ship Zong ran short of drinking water in the Caribbean following navigational errors. The captain of the ship knew that their insurance policy would not compensate the owners for slaves who died of natural causes (i.e. thirst) during the voyage. Also, slaves who survived long enough to be landed in Jamaica would probably be so messed up and depleted that they would soon die anyway, before they could be sold, again with no insurance payout. However, there was a legal principle in shipping that insurance companies had to provide compensation for cargo deliberately destroyed to save other cargo--for example, if a ship was sinking and some cargo was thrown overboard to save the rest. Accordingly 133 slaves went into the sea to die of drowning. This total apparently includes 10 slaves who reacted to the massacre by deliberately leaping overboard to commit suicide, possibly because it was all so hosed up that they couldn't face living in this world. About 208 slaves survived to be sold in Jamaica for an average price of £37, and the slavers made an insurance claim for £30 for each of the 133 slaves deliberately drowned. The insurance companies did not want to pay, which led to a lawsuit, and the documentation from that is why we know about this. One interesting detail that emerged was that midway through the drownings the Zong sailed through a heavy rainstorm and collected a large quantity of freshwater sufficient to supply them all the way to Jamaica, after which they threw another 36 overboard for reasons that are unclear. It's possible that the crew assessed their health and determined that on arrival in Jamaica those slaves might sell for less than £30, the insurance payout per slave lost. At any rate, the courts in London determined that the insurance companies had to pay, and nobody was charged with murder, because the slaves were property in the same sense as livestock or any other commodity, and could be disposed of as needed in the same way. The one bright spot is that the insanity of this story galvanized British abolitionist sentiment and definitely hastened the end of the Atlantic slave trade.
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May 9, 2017 23:54
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Don Gato posted:Back to Rome, is there a good source on how Roman camps worked back during late antiquity? I know that during the principate their camps were fortresses that they would put up overnight, which that in and of itself blows my mind, but did they keep doing that even as the empire was collapsing? There's a 1st or 2nd century work called De munitionibus castrorum ('On fortified camps') which seems to be the leading ancient source on the matter. I found a dissertation that contains a translation of it in English as an appendix. It's more in the genre of field manual than anything else -- it doesn't talk about them as a historical/cultural phenomenon, but if you want to recreate/DIY a Roman encampment you could probably do it with that book.
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May 10, 2017 00:18
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Jamwad Hilder posted:I would not want to be an average Chinese person at basically any time of their history. I mean their civilization prospered, obviously, but it seems like if there aren't rival kingdoms warring with each other then that just means the Mongols, other steppe jerks, Westerners, or the Japanese probably showed up to kill you. No thanks. China certainly has its bad points in history just like anywhere else, but comparatively speaking it comes off fairly good. The last two hundred years have been a bit of a clusterfuck though.
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May 10, 2017 00:22
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Ithle01 posted:China certainly has its bad points in history just like anywhere else, but comparatively speaking it comes off fairly good. The last two hundred years have been a bit of a clusterfuck though. Yeah, I'm just not as well versed in Chinese history and most of the stuff I have heard of is warring states, rebellions, dynastic struggles, foreign invaders, etc.
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May 10, 2017 00:27
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Jamwad Hilder posted:Yeah, I'm just not as well versed in Chinese history and most of the stuff I have heard of is warring states, rebellions, dynastic struggles, foreign invaders, etc. There's a huge chunk of basically the 4th through the 14th centuries where if you look at a list of the top 10 most populous cities it's a bunch of China with maybe Baghdad, Cairo, and Constantinople towards the very end.
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May 10, 2017 00:41
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China's population through pretty much all of history has been comparable to the entirety of Europe's; when you're reading about some horrific poo poo going down like the Mongols or Shaanxi Earthquake or whatever, think of it like the 30 Years War raging off in one side of the continent while down in Iberia or whatever things are comparatively more chill*. China is enormous, things can be catastrophically dire somewhere while somewhere else is mostly untouched. * just an example, maybe things weren't chill in Iberia at the time, you get my point
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May 10, 2017 00:50
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Koramei posted:China's population through pretty much all of history has been comparable to the entirety of Europe's; China's population was significantly way more than Europe's for most of its history. At the time of Ghengis plowing through northern china you're looking at a population of around 120-140 million. Europe around that time is only in the 60-70 ballpark from what i recall.
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May 10, 2017 01:02
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Dang, I didn't realize the difference was that much.
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May 10, 2017 01:12
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Jazerus posted:Most of our infectious diseases are just variations on pathogens that have been infecting mammals since mammals first originated. And probably the mammal-like reptiles before them. You mean synapsids, which are not strictly reptiles. 
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May 10, 2017 01:54
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Arglebargle III posted:You mean synapsids, which are not strictly reptiles. reptile is an arbitrary paraphyletic clade that means whatever you want it to mean 
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May 10, 2017 01:57
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I've tried and tried and I still don't understand the concept of clades.
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May 10, 2017 01:59
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euphronius posted:I've tried and tried and I still don't understand the concept of clades. Don't worry, paleontologists aren't exactly straight A students either.
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May 10, 2017 02:02
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euphronius posted:I've tried and tried and I still don't understand the concept of clades. a monophyletic clade is a group that consists of all organisms descending from the same common ancestor a paraphyletic clade is a group that is defined by some other standard and, as a result, either includes species from multiple lineages or arbitrarily excludes some lineages. for example reptile is paraphyletic because it excludes mammals, birds, and dinosaurs even though their origins are within the group that is considered to make up the reptiles. phylogenetics/cladistics makes a lot of sense once you get into it and is really interesting but there's a lot of barriers to understanding it up-front
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May 10, 2017 02:06
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Koramei posted:China's population through pretty much all of history has been comparable to the entirety of Europe's; when you're reading about some horrific poo poo going down like the Mongols or Shaanxi Earthquake or whatever, think of it like the 30 Years War raging off in one side of the continent while down in Iberia or whatever things are comparatively more chill*. China is enormous, things can be catastrophically dire somewhere while somewhere else is mostly untouched. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_revolt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_Restoration_War
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May 10, 2017 02:26
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If you were born at a dynastic highpoint, being Chinese would probably be better than being European on average. Just stay away from the frontier and the coast. Hell, the Song Dynasty in the 900s is probably a nicer place to live than Europe before, like, the 1700s. E: Tangentially related but I just found out that the new Dynasty Warriors is an open world game that sounds like Far Cry in Ancient China. Jesus, I need this. Mantis42 fucked around with this message at 03:00 on May 10, 2017 |
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May 10, 2017 02:54
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Jazerus posted:a monophyletic clade is a group that consists of all organisms descending from the same common ancestor Maybe outside the scope of the Rome thread, but how the hell do species from different lineages end up in the same clade and why is that scientifically useful?
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May 10, 2017 03:01
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Maybe outside the scope of the Rome thread, but how the hell do species from different lineages end up in the same clade and why is that scientifically useful? They don't???? That's the whole point of a clade.
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May 10, 2017 03:12
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Maybe outside the scope of the Rome thread, but how the hell do species from different lineages end up in the same clade and why is that scientifically useful? Would you rather study reptiles as a group, or reptiles, mammals and birds as a group? More to the point, without the benefit of modern scientific discoveries would you even consider that there was any reason to consider reptiles, mammals, and birds to be descended from a common reptilian ancestor? Also technically speaking paraphyletic taxa such as Reptilia are definitionally not clades. A clade must be monophyletic.
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May 10, 2017 03:13
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Maybe outside the scope of the Rome thread, but how the hell do species from different lineages end up in the same clade and why is that scientifically useful? reptiles are one of the few where it's on purpose, due to tradition and because the reptilian descendants are in fact meaningfully different from reptiles so it's descriptive. similarly amphibians don't include reptiles, etc. and dinosaurs don't include birds. usually. usually at the genus/family level it's because the older taxonomists classified things around anatomical similarities, which is often a really good way to establish species relatedness but can also be misleading. so traditional taxa have been reshuffled a lot as they're found to be paraphyletic since genetic comparisons became feasible.
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May 10, 2017 04:05
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OK, so can you tell me whether or not a pterodactyl is a dinosaur or not? What about a dimetrodon? My kid wants to know.
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May 10, 2017 04:29
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Man is the measure of all things.
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May 10, 2017 04:31
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sullat posted:OK, so can you tell me whether or not a pterodactyl is a dinosaur or not? What about a dimetrodon? My kid wants to know. pterodactyls were archosaurs, but were also probably the most closely related non-dinosaur to the dinosaurs. dimetrodon was a synapsid, more closely related to us than to dinosaurs
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May 10, 2017 04:36
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fantastic in plastic posted:Man is the measure of all things. and we are in fact fish
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May 10, 2017 07:25
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Deteriorata posted:I dunno, having to listen to all the Baby Boomers whining about Millennials pretty much offsets all that. Ftfy
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May 10, 2017 14:37
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