Yes there were depending on how you define, in any case you can always interpret any society as having "superstition", we do too.
Technologies or Scientific discoveries that could have been made long before (or after) they actually were.
- Thread starter Samm
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Deleted member 160141
(1): Horrible Histories sucks donkey balls. No two ways about it, they suck asinine scrota and they're proud of it.
(2): Look at half the religious food prohibitions, you'll quickly realize that they actually make a great deal of sense in a pre-modern society, since their effects seem to coincide with scientific observation of local parasites, illnesses, etc, for some reason.
Something causes the effect, the effect is noted by people who haven't the tools to understand the cause, and so they form a superstition based on their observations. It's not as effective as modern understanding of science, but it's as good as can be had without said science.
This isn't just limited to food, btw. It extends to all sorts of things.
ex. "Don't eat pork or shellfish, or you shall surely be visited with deadly illness."Cause: the region has lots of lovely parasites which sit in the ground, and pigs regularly dig through the ground.
Appearance: eating pigs leads to death.
Effect: "Don't eat these animals, somebody obviously doesn't want you to eat them, and he will fuck you up if you try!"
"Don't let a menstruating woman sit in on religious services, or disease shall strike."
Cause: menstrual blood is a host for parasites, and it's easy to contaminate people who sit on the same ground/bench/pews/etc.
Appearance: menstruating woman sits in and half the people there become ill.
Effect: "Don't let her sit in on religious services, something obviously doesn't want her there in that state!"
"Don't drink the produce of the cow lest ye be visited with deadly illness."
Cause: the region has parasites which love sitting in cow's udder and cow's milk.
Appearance: drinking milk leads to death.
Effect: "Don't drink milk, something obviously doesn't want you drinking it, and he will fuck you up if you try! As a matter of fact, don't fuck with cows in general!"
Note: turning the milk into whey, however, makes it perfectly safe.
Cause: the process of turning milk into whey kills off whatever parasites live in it.
Appearance: Drinking milk leads to death, but eating whey doesn't.
Effect: "You can consume dairy... after you make it clean by making it into whey."
"Don't stick your dick in a microwave, it'll fall off!"
Cause: [fill in the blank]
Appearance: [fill in the blank]
Effect: [fill in the blank]
(3): Don't knock the ancients before you try them, kid. No, seriously. They weren't morons, even the ones whose works don't line up with any ideology you're comfortable with. In many ways, their output is actually much preferable to the diarrhea produced by philosophy departments nowadays.
(4): Ancestor worship? Not a bad idea, actually.
(5): "Giving up on superstition" seems to be increasingly conflated with "giving up on religion", which in turn is conflated with the "religion is crazy, any tint of religion makes you a JesusZombie!" type of atheists. Unfortunately, that just ain't how societies work: when they don't have something to fill the hole in their head called "religion", they get really skittish and hard to control.
(6): Yes. For example, we do not know what it feels like to suffer at least one famine every half-decade and at least one plague every decade.
(7): What's a Hobb?
I know snobbing out on people from the past is all the rage right now, but I'll let you in on a little secret:
They weren't dumb, just less advanced.
The two conditions are not synonymous.
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I think a lot of agricultural technology like iron plows, wheelbarrows, and seed drills could've been discovered independently from the Europeans or ported over from China in the case that the Chinese successfully make contact with Daqin / the Roman Empire.
Pasteurization might have been invented earlier if cultures well accustomed to food preservation experimented more with certain products like wine, preserves, broth, etc.
Penicillin might have been discovered during the late 19th century since germ theory was is in its infancy back then and it would've been a great success.
Pasteurization might have been invented earlier if cultures well accustomed to food preservation experimented more with certain products like wine, preserves, broth, etc.
Penicillin might have been discovered during the late 19th century since germ theory was is in its infancy back then and it would've been a great success.
The Aelopile was a nice toy but steam engines still had a long way to go.
Early steam engines in 1700s were prone to explode due to high temperature and pressure and required steel that could handle those, which the romans didn't have.
You are being terribly unfair towards the traditional knowledge of people around the world. I happen to be an ethnobiologist, and my field of study is just that, the relationships between people and nature.
So what do people outside of nature, in those 'superstitious' cultures know about nature? A lot, it turns out. Most of modern pharmaceutical compounds and active ingredients are from plants that have been used from time inmemorial by people all around the world in herbal and traditional medicine -in fact one major point of contention in our field are corporations that use that knowledge without compensating those people. People in rural and 'wilderness' areas have more knowledge about their land that any visiting biologist, from how to grow crops and use the resources in a sustainable way, they know about the state of their enviroment, the natural cycles and of course, the diversity of the life living there, with traditional taxonomy systems that often are equivalent to Linnean ones. Their input is absolutely vital in any kind of conservation effort, and the biological sciences are indebted to countless anonymous informants whose knowledge has been systematized without their proper context in their culture and without the proper recognition they deserve.
I know this might sound like hippie mumbo-jumbo, and I won't pretend that this knowledge isn't based more in tradition and 'superstition' (what a horrible word) than in scientific methods. And of course, traditional knowledge can be harmful in many cases. But you are being terribly unfair and generalizing. I would reccomend for you to look up the sciences of ethnobotany, ethnozoology and ethnoecology, and to see why there is a reason too why the knowledge of ancients and elders -now very endangered unfortunately- is so valuable.
Also, I don't know what you meant by Hobbs.
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This is something that people claim a lot, but it turns out not to be true, at least not in general. In particular, often religions with particular taboos coexist with religions that have completely different taboos without either society being much more or less successful than the other. For example, the Bible itself mentions pig farming as taking place in the Levant by non-Jewish populations, without any particular implication that they were far worse off in health terms. It's probably more accurate to see these things as cultural markers not dissimilar to various similar arbitrary practices in the modern world, with only a tenuous connection to health issues.
Really,
Can you tell me how you will be able to create germ theory in middle ages? I thought that it was kind of impossible without microscopes?
Fair point. Best idea I could think is “Tiny disease insects that no one can see”, but that’s a bit far fetched
I think one might be able to disprove the miasma theory and create something better but not prove the germ theory.
The germ theory per se might be impossible, but there are definitely better ideas that people could have had. For example, the idea that disease is a substance or quality that is generated in a sick person and flows out in the breath, sweat, and other excretions, and then when it enters someone else causes them to fall ill. This is still wrong in important ways, but it's a bit more right than the miasma theory is.
Reminds me a bit of this:
Scott starts with the story of “scientific forestry” in 18th century Prussia. Enlightenment rationalists noticed that peasants were just cutting down whatever trees happened to grow in the forests, like a chump. They came up with a better idea: clear all the forests and replace them by planting identical copies of Norway spruce (the highest-lumber-yield-per-unit-time tree) in an evenly-spaced rectangular grid. Then you could just walk in with an axe one day and chop down like a zillion trees an hour and have more timber than you could possibly ever want.
This went poorly. The impoverished ecosystem couldn’t support the game animals and medicinal herbs that sustained the surrounding peasant villages, and they suffered an economic collapse. The endless rows of identical trees were a perfect breeding ground for plant diseases and forest fires. And the complex ecological processes that sustained the soil stopped working, so after a generation the Norway spruces grew stunted and malnourished. Yet for some reason, everyone involved got promoted, and “scientific forestry” spread across Europe and the world...
Traditional lifestyles of many East African natives were nomadic, involving slash-and-burn agriculture in complicated jungle terrain according to a bewildering variety of ad-hoc rules. Modern scientific rationalists in African governments (both colonial and independent) came up with a better idea – resettlement of the natives into villages, where they could have modern amenities like schools, wells, electricity, and evenly-spaced rectangular grids. Yet for some reason, these villages kept failing: their crops died, their economies collapsed, and their native inhabitants disappeared back into the jungle. And again, for some reason the African governments kept trying to bring the natives back and make them stay, even if they had to blur the lines between villages and concentration camps to make it work.
All of Ctestebius writings from the time of Rome were lost. He was considered the father of pneumatics. He developed an arrow firing pneumatic cannon among other things. He was supposed to have written extensive treatises on compressed air. This is one of the first ways to store energy in the mechanical form. If it was further developed it would have changed history completely. His machines were not demonstration projects, like Heron's Aeolipile.
Apologies, I put two bb’s.
From wiki:
Tolkien used them as part the model that became Hobbits.
pretty much, yeah.
<snip>
or, making space for logic, reason, and such things as the Scientific Method.
Yes, it is.
As the man sung:
The gold old days weren’t always so good, and tomorrow isn’t as bad as it seems.
People look back on the past with nostalgia, rosy colored glasses, not seeing the warts and all.
Respect the information, sure, but don’t give them a pass just because they are in the past.
<snip>
[looks back at posts, at no point do I see myself saying they were morons or dumb]
And look at history, they did a lot of dumb stuff.
Just like we do now, surprise, surprise.
Arsenic in make up and wall paper.
Let’s poop up stream of where we drink.
Etc, etc.
And if you cook those foods, properly, does that not pretty much eliminate the chance of all those parasites, illnesses, etc, while allowing you access to more diverse calories and means to thrive?
Why not: ‘cook these things this way and here’s a nice sauce recipe, too, so you won’t get bored’?
And wouldn’t an ‘unclean’ water be a good idea?
A lot of diseases get spread that way and there is nothing about that.
And where are the prohibitions about eating poisonous plants?
Don’t let menstruating woman worship but no mention of not letting them prepare food during their unclean time? Wouldn’t they make the food unclean?
And menstruating women being unclean is another ‘keep women down’ aspect one finds throughout the Bible, other cultures celebrated menstruation and found them more powerful.
And the fact that the Hebrews had neighbors that did positive things with these animals, were successful, and the Hebrews had to separate themselves, make themselves unique, is another reason why these animals may have been chosen, as well as that the clean animals were stereotyped as virtuous and the unclean as vice ridden (cattle are hard working, pigs are lazy).
And you are skipping things like ‘do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material’.
I know the acting and production values are not great, but, the thing they were saying was not correct?
Honey is not a good antiseptic and was not used to treat wounds?
Myrtle leaves are not high in salicylic acid and were not used to treat pain?
Limestone is not calcium carbonate, which is not used to treat stomach complaints today?
Finally: treating blindness by putting that stuff in the patient’s ear was not done?
Pretty sure all that was done.
And thank you for numbering everything.
And wheels were used by the Incas and the Japanese in toys, but their terrain did not lend itself to widespread use.
And the need for good steel before steam engines spread adds to the Steam Engine Time idea.
Many Muslims believed (and some still believe) in Jinn as invisible beings which can have a real and material effect on the world. The religion of Islam also has a strong tradition of ritual cleanliness with some hadith claiming cleanliness is half of one's faith. If someone disproves the miasma theory I don't think it's impossible for them to advance a "invisible Jinns are punishing you for being unclean/associating with the unclean" theory even without actually being able to see said Jinn.
While I agree with you, I wasn't talking about disproving miasma theory but proving germ theory in middle ages.
I have no problem with the positive aspects of traditional people use of nature.
Just the negative aspects, and ignoring those negative aspects.
Aspects that are still used despite evidence to them not being useful.
For example: having sex with virgins cures aids.
One has to take it all in.
Because that’s all they had, and a lot of error went into their trial and error.
Good, keep the good stuff.
But they also kept bad stuff.
But, not when these people leave their areas, through invasion or migration, and do not adopt, using their old ways because they are the old ways.
Until, again, a lot of trial and error.
Agreed.
Generalizing, yes, this is just a thread on Alt-history, this is not a scholarly thing, no one is citing scientific papers, which is a good thing.
I am a little familiar with these, but I am also familiar with other things, too.
I would recommend you to look up things that are not precisely those things but have some impact on things discussed.
Thank you and cheers.
Because it wasn't exactly all that counterintuitive. From experience people could tell that staying around foul-smelling things was more likely to get sick.
People stay in smelly homes filled with filth —> People get sick = People get sick because they inhale filthy fumes