Reconstructions made from the ancient skeletons found at archeological sites:
The Whitehawk Woman. She lived in England around 5,000 years ago and was buried with great care. She was also buried with a newborn infant, and died aged between 19 and 25 years old. Researchers believe she died during or very soon after childbirth. Her bones indicate she was otherwise in good health.
Adelasius Ebalchus. He lived in Switzerland 1,300 years ago, and was in his late teens/early twenties at the time of his death. His gravesite indicated he came from wealth, and his bones showed he was well-nourished. His bones also showed that Adelasius suffered a lingering infection; archeologists believe he most likely died from lung inflammation.
The Slonk Hill Man was found semi-crouched in a grave near the seaside town of Brighton, England — in the same area as the Whitehawk Woman. Their lives, however, were separated by nearly 3,000 years. The Slonk Hill Man lived during Britain’s Iron Age. The reconstruction artist (an archeologist and sculptor) described him as being “very good looking”, tall, muscular, and in robust health at the time of his death. There were no obvious signs of what caused his death.
The Wari Queen. She was found in 2012 by a Polish-Peruvian archeology team, entombed in an underground mausoleum in El Castillo de Huarmey, Peru. She lived approximately 1200 years ago and died in her sixties. Her bones indicate she led a leisurely life, and her decayed teeth indicate a diet high in sugar (most likely she regularly drank the sugary corn-based beer, chicha). Other artefacts in her chamber suggest she was an expert weaver — a very highly-valued craft.
i know that a lot of what pliny the elder says is kind of bullshit but i’ve never wanted to believe him more in my life than when he says that hedgehogs collect apples for the winter by rolling onto them so the apples stick on their spines and they can carry them off
Occasionally forget people genuinely think capitalism is thousands of years old
One time I was talking about Robin Hood with some coworkers and one guy was like “he was bad because the people he helped learned to expect handouts” and I wanted to be like… okay can you explain how that flawed capitalist propaganda applies to feudalism
reminder that capitalism was literally invented in the 16th century
That’s an exaggeration. What was invented in the 16th century was mercantilism. Capitalism really dates for the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the rise of industry and cash crops over artisans and merchants. Vulture capitalism, with the notion that companies have no duties other than generating profit, is even younger.
Capitalism is only 200 years old and I have to say, they have not been an impressive 200 years
I think a lot of this comes from the fact that most people don’t know the formal definition of capitalism. We all know the word, we’ve all seen the jokes, but very few people bother to actually define it unless they’re talking about political theory and philosophy, so it’s easy to end up with the impression that Capitalism = Money Can Be Exchanged For Goods And Services.
Capitalism is the economic system where most of the means of production (i.e. everything people need to have to make the stuff that everyone wants) are owned by private individuals or corporations, who then hire people to provide the labor necessary to produce things, with the intent of selling the output at a profit. It’s the difference between “you’re a carpenter and you make a chair and you sell it” and “you’re Richard Q. Richington who owns a chair factory, and you pay people to sell the chairs you paid other people to make and then all the excess money goes back to you.” There have been Richard Q. Richingtons on and off throughout history, but that being the norm for every single industry is a pretty recent development.
Some more beautiful snippets of Charlie’s letters to Gertrude, circa 1909
…This interesting snippet…👀
And this -
So further reading of these letters seems to flip my initial thoughts on their head!
It turns out CHARLIE is the one with money. Or rather, Charlie’s grandmother, who it seems owns several houses she visits in the summer etc. It would appear Charlie draws drafts for the family business, which seems to involve building (in one letter he had to actually ‘have a go at whitewashing’ himself, and was horrified by how messy he got!)
He has an older brother named Bernard, who he often goes for walks with and rides in motorcars, which Bernard appears to be passionate about.
He also has a cousin named Arthur, who in one letter is the source of great scandal; he was engaged to a girl, giving her an expensive ring and everything, only for her to break it off with him. Their grandmother says he’s well rid of her, accused her of being a golddigger essentially, and then said there’d 'be more than one in the family, soon!’, referring to Gertie, which upset Charlie enough to leave.
I *think* the reason Charlie struggles for money is because he appears to he working at a *different* company by 1910, on a fairly low wage, and saving all he can for marriage and a home with Gertie. Which might suggest he was either cut off or severed his ties with the family as they disapproved of Gertrude.
Also mentioned in his letters is an Uncle Harry who is against them courting, and an Uncle Joseph/Jo, Arthur’s father, who seems more sympathetic.
Gertie, meanwhile, seems to live in rooms somewhere, with a miserable married landlord who is constantly telling her to leave Charlie (Charlie wrote a drunk, very upset letter to her begging her not to take advice or pay any notice to him) - she doesn’t have much money and her family are apparently always angry with her. She works (not sure where yet) and works a LOT.
Also sad, Gertie seems to be very sickly. She constantly has the flu, headaches, fatigue, etc, to the point where Charlie wonders if 'she will ever be without those accursed headaches!’. Charlie meanwhile CLEARLY suffers chronic depression. He is constantly low, apologising for being so low, always tired, and gets headaches from excessive crying.
I so hope things get better for them by the time I finish these letters.
So a while back I won a cheap eBay auction listing for a collection of love letters from the first world war.
They arrived today, and…the listing was WAY more than I expected for the price I won it for. There’s over 100, and they’re not just from WWI, but from 1906 (earliest I’ve found so far) through to 1915.
Charlie writes to his girlfriend, Gertrude. This is the most beautiful, lovesick stuff I’ve ever read. He sends her so many letters, sometimes twice a day, and lots of poems. He seems to have been an artist, as he talks a lot about small exhibitions of his stuff, and included a flyer for one. He also talks about how her parents don’t approve of them and how he’s desperately awaiting the day they’ll be married.
I haven’t found the latest of the letters, but the fact it’s up until 1915 and then stops…doesn’t give me hope for a happy ending.
This man continuously refers to his precious beloved Gertie as his queen and goddess, and whilst most of it is sickly sweet, there’s some raunchy stuff too, with him talking about how he can’t wait until they have a little house together and can ‘please each other all day’…
There’s. So many.
I’m going to put them in order by date, read them through, and then maybe even transcribe them so we can find out a bit about Charlie and Gertie’s love story.
This man was absolutely lost in the sauce
Y'all he writes about sending her pressed poppies and postcards for her collection 😭😭😭
111 years after Charlie got his dick touched in 1910, I decided to tell you all about it. Sorry Charlie.
Some more finds:
And some CODE!!!
Also all this is poems:
UHHHHH…👀👀👀
This has a lot of notes so I need everyone to know:
They got married 😭😭😭❤ (thank you to @lovesjustachemical for finding this!!!)
when fantasy books describe the cloth of Quant Farmpeople’s clothing as “homespun” or “rough homespun”
“homespun” as opposed to what??? EVERYTHING WAS SPUN AT HOME
they didn’t have fucking spinning factories, your pseudo-medieval farmwife is lucky if she has a fucking spinning wheel, otherwise she’s spinning every single thread her family wears on a drop spindle NO ONE ELSE WAS DOING THE SPINNING unless you go out of your way to establish a certain baseline of industrialization in your fake medieval fantasy land.
and “rough”??? lol just because it’s farm clothes? bitch cloth was valuable as fuck because of the labor involved ain’t no self-respecting woman gonna waste fiber and ALL THAT FUCKING TIME spinning shitty yarn to weave into shitty cloth she’s gonna make GOOD QUALITY SHIT for her family, and considering that women were doing fiber prep/spinning/weaving for like 80% of their waking time up until very recently in world history, literally every woman has the skills necessary to produce some TERRIFYINGLY GOOD QUALITY THREADS
come to think of it i’ve never read a fantasy novel that talks about textile production at all??? like it’s even worse than the “where are all the farms” problem like where are people getting the cloth if no one’s doing the spinning and weaving??? kmart???
THANK U
pro tip: what do you say instead? I gotcha.
In Ye Olde Medieval Fantasy Dayes, everybody’s layer against skin (shirt tunic or shift) is gonna be linen. it’s almost never wool except stockings or hose (like pant legs). Say “undyed cloth” if you wanna make them sound simple and peasanty. Comment on how you can tell it wasn’t made for them (the fit is off) and has had probably eight owners before.
Outer clothing is gonna be either wool, or a blend called Linsey-woolsey, and again you could say Undyed, but dyes are not only common they are CHEAP and relatively easy. (innerwear is often left undyed or bleached to white because it gets washed to heck- like beaten by a wooden stick on a stone by the river- and dye would just fade out a lot so why bother. Ths is also why innerwear has ties, rarely buttons, unless you are so rich you have people doing your washing delicately because they’re hired to do only that. Buttons would get broken in the washing)
A poorer person is often seen in “russet”, a kind of rusty orange-brown color. Purple was famously reserved for royalty in many times and places, but its also just hard to do. We see a lot more magentas and fuschias for nobles or common middle class folks than we ever see of Purple- and not many of those. Deep blue was more likely on very rich people, but a light blue was common for even poorer folks. Yellow was popular with everyone, and so was green, and many shades of reds, including the color we now call orange (they did not- this is why redheads are called redheads and not orangeheads). Your vision of everyone in very drab brown and mud colors is from Hollywood- most medieval-ren folks have clothing with colors. Sometimes garish colors, to the modern eye. Traffic cone Orange and acid green was a popular combo in the 13th century.
Example medieval dye colors. Lots of yellows and orangey-browns. Woad gave a range of blues that are basically what we think of as “denim colors.” There were purples - royal purple was a specific color from a specific source - but if you mix wine-dye and woad-dye, you get purpleish dye. (Getting the color to stay that way may be more difficult. Everything worn by peasants fades; they couldn’t afford the really good fixatives.)
Plum, dusty purple, lavender, burgundy, chestnut, blood red
Walnut, chocolate, tan, linen, pale apricot, spice, dark spice
Peasant clothes were often more colorful than the nobility. Nobles could afford bright, clear colors that peasants couldn’t - but one mark of wealth was being able to buy all 4-8 yards of fabric for an outfit at the same time. So nobles would have a full outfit, including hat, stockings, even shoes, of one type of fabric (with ornamentation of a contrasting type, and as many buttons or bits of silver as they could get away with wearing), while peasants would often have a shirt, bodice or jerkin, skirt or pants, stockings, and hat of all different colors.
Dying or re-dying any one piece of clothing was within most of their cost limits - dye itself is cheap; fixatives cost. But boiling your shirt for an hour with onion skins in a copper pot would re-color the fading fabric.
And yet more medieval dye colour samples:
While centered on medieval Europe for the finer points, this is broadly true for any clothing needs
You also can dye at three different stages: in the wool (fiber stage), in the yarn, in the garment. You will get the most dye saturation in the wool, which means the dye will last longest that way and the color will be uniform across the fabric made from the fiber, but you can get ikat/kasuri by very carefully dyeing yarn and then weaving with it, and dyeing in the garment can give ombre and tie-dye effects.
the cooking show I’m watching is rated PG-13 for language and nudity
no it’s not cutthroat kitchen or gordon ramsey it’s a documentary exploring the anthropological & historical significance of cooking, and the dangers of the mass industrialization of food.
and i misspoke it’s rated TV-14 (for language and nudity)
this guy is so fucking angry about sliced bread (justifiably) that he really came out on camera with this absolute banger of a quote:
“And this is really how capitalism usually works. It creates a problem, and rather than fix the problem, it creates a new business to solve the problem.”
utterly scathing and yes this is from a 60 minute documentary episode dedicated entirely to the subject of Bread
You can’t just not tell us why sliced bread is terrible D8
right ok so technically it’s not sliced bread butindustrial, mass-manufactured bread that is…causing problems. Here’s the theory as the show presents it:
For about ~10,000 years bread was a fucking staple of the human diet. we evolved to eat this food, our bodies, our societies were built on this food, but all of a sudden we’re seeing a rise in gluten sensitivity* (distinct from celiac disease). Aka our bodies are rejecting this food we’ve spent 100 centuries eating. Where is this coming from?
Well, a big part of it is probably that less than 100 years ago corporations changed the definition of bread. (Like, figuratively and literally, they petitioned the FDA to change the legal definition of bread so they could put in additives.) In fact, industrialization has changed the process and the ingredients used to make bread, to the point manufactured bread is a profoundly different product from what our ancestors knew as bread. Let’s start with:
1) The Process: For thousands of years, humans relied on naturally occurring wild yeast and bacteria found in the air to make (leavened) bread and bread starters (fermented dough used to “start” new loaves. hence the term “sourdough”). you can still do this at home–all it involves is leaving a mixture of water and flour lying around for a few days. notice something missing? that’s right, YEAST. this process of making bread involves yeast–yeast from the air around you–but it doesn’t involve concentrated baker’s yeast. Baker’s yeast refers to various strains of yeast that are added directly to flour & water mixtures as a leavening agent. This allows the bread to rise more quickly and cuts down on the overall production time. Convenient, right?
Now, adding yeast is not automatically a bad thing, and bakers have been doing it for a damn long time in interesting ways (such as using yeast from beer brewing). But lately we’ve taken it to extremes–we’ve gotten too good at creating more and more efficient forms of commercial Baker’s yeast, specifically for industrial use on a mass scale. Manufacturers want bread to rise as fast as possible, because that is how you get more product on the shelves. Making bread in factories now takes asmall fractionof the time it used to.
And why is this a problem? Because it turns out a more traditional “long fermentation process allows bacteria to fully break down the carbohydrates and gluten in bread, making it easier to digest and releasing the nutrients within it, allowing our bodies to more easily absorb them.” [1] This (added to the fact that some commercial breads contain extra added gluten) has the unfortunate result that the product you buy from the grocery store is less digestible and nutritious than the bread human societies traditionally relied upon. Hence the rise of gluten intolerance–the gluten we are eating is simply more difficult to toleratethan gluten in properly fermented bread. (This is the reason many people with gluten sensitivity don’t experience symptoms when eating more traditionally made, longer-fermented sourdough.)
That’s not the only issue though. There’s also:
2) The Ingredients. not just the countless additives, but specifically: the flour. See, a grain of wheat is…incredibly nutritious, honestly. It has almost everything we need to sustain life and health. Civilizations did–and do–rely on bread as a fundamental dietary staple, to the point that you can track political instability with rising wheat prices. It’s essential. Look at this:
In a single grain, the essence of life.
So yeah, wheat is nutritional. We can build bodies and civilizations out of wheat. But it’s also, like…super difficult to access that nutrition. Well, more so than with most foods. If you eat a handful of wheat grains, a spoonful of flour–your body can’t digest that, you get basically nothing out of that (also raw flour isn’t safe to consume, don’t do that). Unlike many crops, wheat relies on being carefully and correctly processed in order for the final product to be as nutritional as possible. As stated above, part of that process is about fermentation. Another part isthe quality of the flour, what it contains and how it has been milled and treated.
And that quality has changed a lot in just a century or two. Take white flour, for instance. White flour has been around for a long fucking time actually, but until the late 19th century it was considered a luxury item, a treat for the very wealthy. White flour was never considered a staple food–until industrialists learned how to manufacture it cheaply. [2] And then it was everywhere. And suddenly, surprise surprise, we started to see a rise in nutrition related illnesses. Because the bran and germ have been stripped away, white flour has only a fraction of the nutritional value of whole grain. But because this gives it a higher shelf life, it was more convenient (and profitable) for manufacturers. So when they learned about the health issues, what did they do? Go back to making healthier flour?
Pshaw. Of course not. No, instead they kept removing nutrients, then artificially adding them back in. And that is how we got enriched flour–flour which is still significantly less nutritious than whole wheat flour. [3] And this is what the previous quote about capitalism was referencing. The food industry created a problem, and rather than undoing the problem, they created a whole new business to “fix” it:
And thus came the mass rise of “enriched” foods.
Eat Wonder Bread! It has as much protein as roast beef! As much calcium as cottage cheese! As much iron as lamb chops! No need to eat real foods, when you can eat highly processed foods instead! Don’t cook your own meals, let trustworthy corporations feed you! Mass-produced factory foods are easy, are healthy! There will be literally no downsides or long-term repercussions to public health & wellness!
So yeah. Much of what we think of as “bread” is chemically and molecularly distinct from traditional bread, and is very different (and less nutritional) than what our ancestors were eating even just a century ago. (On an individual level, I’m not sure how to mitigate this, other than by purchasing the healthiest options available (e.g. whole wheat, sourdough), buying from small bakeries/farmer’s markets, or baking bread at home. Lately there has been a rise of small health-concious brands focusing on traditional fermentation and whole ingredients; some may be available in your area. But ultimately, it’s the entire wider system that needs to change.)
And there you have it! I have never been so incandescently furious about wonder bread. This documentary will do that to you–and will change your whole understanding of modern food. It’s a 4-part netflix series called Cooked (2016), based on Michael Pollan’s book of the same name. Most of the info above comes from the third episode, and is accurate to the best of my knowledge (but let me know if I got anything wrong).
*I want to be perfectly clear though, gluten itself is not inherently bad. It’s being demonized in the press on no scientific basis, just to push yet another diet fad. Unless your body has actual issues with gluten (e.g. celiac disease, gluten sensitivity) there are no proven benefits to eating gluten-free. There are, however, benefits to eating less processed, more nutritional (delicious delicious) bread.
Don't give up. Unless you have to for a little while. Then don't panic. CONTAINS: Star Trek, Dungeons and Dragons, Critical Role, History, Current Affairs, Space, Cats, and Etc. Adult.
