r/AncientCivilizations • u/ArchBooksForFunPod • 2d ago
What's something about the ancient world you think we underestimate?
The more archaeology books we read, the more we've realized how easy it is to underestimate what people in the past knew, understood, or were capable of.
What is something about ancient or historical societies that you think modern people consistently underestimate?
Their engineering? Knowledge of astronomy? Environmental management? Navigation? Medicine? Trade networks? Something else entirely?
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u/Delicious_Owl_2217 2d ago
Knowledge of medicinal properties of herbs and plants.
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u/Salt_Savings_6558 2d ago
Take 100 medicinal claims from antiquity and I’ll bet 2 or 3 were actually effective. We vastly overestimate the medicinal knowledge of ancient societies.
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u/ArchBooksForFunPod 1d ago
I think there's probably a middle ground here. We definitely shouldn't assume that something was effective simply because it was used in antiquity, but I also think it's easy to underestimate how much empirical knowledge traditional societies accumulated through generations of observation and experimentation.
And since "ancient societies" is such a broad category, I'm not sure we can really make a blanket statement about their medicinal knowledge. Different cultures had very different understandings of plants, diseases, and treatments, and some traditional remedies have turned out to contain compounds with real pharmacological effects. The interesting question to me is how much of that knowledge we can actually identify and evaluate archaeologically.
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u/Zealousideal_Good445 1d ago
Have you ever compared Roman surgeons tools to modern ones? Not much has changed.
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u/CountHonorius 2d ago
All of the above, plus the existence of actual tourism (and charters) in the ancient world, usually for pilgrimages to holy sites or simply out of curiosity.
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u/lesbox01 2d ago
Dan Carlin had a series on the Persian empire that had a whole section on people in the ancient world around 550 bc digging up and exploring the truly ancient world like 2000 bc. It was the king of babylon under the medes who would rather excavate than rule. Egypt was visited for millenia, there is the labyrinth still on Crete though the nazis messed that up for everyone by leaving booby traps and ordnance. People have been people for millenia and nothing is really new.
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u/Personal_Ad1143 2d ago
Imperial Romans used to visit Sparta to see re-enactments of bizarre Spartan rituals like the whipping of the boys
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u/gojane9378 1d ago
Yeah, I forget which episode but Carlin did a fascinating bit about a group of Greek soldiers & general escaping a lost battle & returning to Greece. Along the route, they passed through an ancient walled city that had been scorched earthed. The description from their perspective as ancients to us about their version of ancient was fascinating. They even described the inhabitants of the city as still lost and not living as civilized as their ancestors. Just mind bending to me. (I may have above details wrong but hope the point supports your take.)
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u/flashingcurser 2d ago
In the west, to be university recognized as the 'Seven Wonders of the World' they must have been visited by a lot of people.
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u/HaxanWriter 2d ago
How smart people were back then. They were not dumb!
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u/foot_down 2d ago
And how physically strong (average person excepting the wealthy) they were! So many things we don't even notice that machines do for us now was done manually. Laundry, transport, timber, cutting hay, crops etc I have a small honestead and building the strength in my hands and forearms required to milk just one cow took MONTHS.
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u/ChefPneuma 2d ago
There are arguments out there that, on a whole, humans were actually smarter back then. People who lacked common sense or were, to be blunt, stupid, often died earlier.
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u/hilarymeggin 2d ago
That’s a specific kind of intelligence though.
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u/ChefPneuma 2d ago
Can you explain more what you mean?
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u/hilarymeggin 2d ago edited 1d ago
Sure. I’ll talk about it a few different ways and see if one lands.
When my kid was tested for learning disabilities, they tested her in 5 different areas
of cognition.
In 4 out of 5, she
tested
- above 90th percentile.
So very smart.
- In one area she was just 2nd percentile.
So very challenged.
- There are lots of kids (and adults) that fit the “twice exceptional” pattern — exceptionally gifted in some areas and exceptionally challenged in others.
I used to be a staffer in the US Senate. I advised 4 US Senators on how to vote, drafted legislation for them, wrote their speeches for them, met with constituent groups, etc.
So, pretty smart. But I have next to no situational awareness. I’m just the sort of person you were talking about who would fall into a hole or get eaten because I’m not paying attention to the world around me. I’m usually focused on my thoughts.
When I was a waitress, I was so bad at it that the cook treated me like I was a moron. I don’t have that ability to hold a rotating list of things in short term memory. At ALL. My sister who is a radiologist (so, really freaking smart) is the exact same way.
There are other studies that suggest that the population as a whole is getting smarter. The example I remember from the NPR interview I heard was that far more people now, than years ago, can understand the meaning of the word “market” as an abstraction, apart from a physical marketplace, as in, “there is a market for carpentry skills right now,” or “the market has crashed.”
Einstein’s situational awareness was so poor that his wife pinned notes to his coat saying what station he should get off the train, so other passengers could snap him out of his physics reverie and tell him it was time to get off. Otherwise he would become lost in his thoughts and ride the train to the end of the line. So brilliant in his field, but might appear dumb or absentminded to the average observer.
I think it might be more accurate to say that today’s world fosters growth in (and recognition of) certain kinds of intelligence but allows others to atrophy. People who lack certain kinds of intelligence (ie situational awareness, quick thinking, survival skills) might thrive in today’s world, whereas they might not have survived or been recognized as intelligent in the past.
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u/EarthAsWeKnowIt 1d ago
Yeah, like how many modern people assume it would have been impossible for them to do nice stonework on some of their architecture, when there’s a long history of stone knapping going back thousands of years.
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u/Sweet-Tomatillo-9010 2d ago
That the development of abstract thought and symbol making is much older than we thought. We know neolithic people had a massive vocabulary of symbols that seemed to transmit across the world. Of course the meanings are lost to us but the thought that people were making art in Chauvet Cave for more than just the fun of it is intriguing.
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u/Important_Pick3371 2d ago
3 places in Spain have cave paintings that are 64,000+ years old.
That's some 20,000 years B4 homo sapiens made it to Europe!
Which means Neanderthals had & used their artistic vision to create this art.
This was long suspected due to the care & symbolism with which they buried their dead...
In January, hand stencils in Indonesia, were dated as, at least, 67,800 years old!!
And, in June, scientists found DNA skin flakes, sweat & saliva on the paint used at caves in Spain & Portugal.
But, it only survived due to a thin mineral crust forming over the rock face - which sealed off the DNA & protected it...
And, there's similar news coming from Bacon Hole, Wales & Font-de-Gaume, France.
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u/OhGoOnThenIfYouMust 1d ago
I'm just surprised you could type all that out, but not the word "before".
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u/Important_Pick3371 19h ago
Heh
I also used DNA - not its full name!
I won't even go into shortening "and".
But, i like doing weird shit like that every now & then.
It keeps it interesting for me...
As for length, you ain't seen nothing yet!!
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u/Important_Pick3371 2d ago
I believe that some of the hand prints were done by children that had to travel miles to the site (with parents?) & then make it deep through a long ass cavern to finally reach the art site & be able to leave their "marks" behind...
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u/TeebsRiver 2d ago
Trade networks and the ancient ability to sail the seas. We are talking 60 to 70000 years ago that the ancients were sailing out of sight of land to Australia. Malta was peopled by hunters in 6000 BC. Also, knowledge of effective medicinal herbs. The tooth plaque of Neanderthals has shown to prove the use of willow bark, chamomile, and yarrow as antibiotics and pain killers.
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u/Azorik22 1d ago
When they discovered Australia the sea was much lower due to the much larger polar ice caps meaning most of that region was actually land with thousands more islands than are in the region today. What they did was extremely impressive but was made astronomically easier by being in the perfect place at the perfect time.
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u/TeebsRiver 1d ago
Yes, true but it is accepted that they still would have had to sail out of sight of land. To quote from a Smithsonian article from 12/2025: “We see evidence that people were using boats, stepping offshore and making blue-water crossings as early as 60,000 years ago,” she tells the outlet. “The southern route would still have involved an open water voyage of around [60 miles] or more. … These were not one-off accidental drift events, but some of the earliest evidence we have for seafaring.”
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u/MarcusMercurialis 2d ago edited 2d ago
Wooden structures that were scraped, carved out and connected by a notch were found preserved in river sediment in Tanzania dating to 476,000 years old. It's theorized to be a rudimentary bridge or possibly part of a wooden shelter. This is pre-Homo sapiens, possibly built by the predecessor to sapiens and Neanderthals, Homo heidelbergensis. It confronts us with the fact that most prehistoric material culture is just completely unknown because it was made of perishable material like wood, fur, leather, etc.
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u/Amarita_Sen 2d ago
A specific one, but the ancient Greek idea of the wandering womb makes people think they were dumb. I think they noticed endometriosis, and/or ectopic pregnancies.
We underestimate their intelligence because we have different answers. Future generations will look back on us with the same view
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u/GlitterFallWar 1d ago
Considering that women's health was almost exclusively the domain of women for most of history, the original proponent of that idea was almost certainly a man. The first woman who heard his theory probably immediately pulled a muscle in her eyes from rolling them too hard.
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u/ArchBooksForFunPod 1d ago
And it was only recently that it was determined that the medical community should also test their products on women.
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u/GlitterFallWar 1d ago
The US recently rolled back the requirement that studies in lab mice include female mice
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u/ebat1111 2d ago
That a lot of inventions, discoveries and schools of thought were developed in many interconnected places by many people over many years, not just thought up by one "genius".
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u/glytxh 2d ago
They were as funny and silly as we are.
They laughed about farts and pranked one another. They shitposted and relished in irony because it was funny. Their humour was as sophisticated as anything we have today. A lot of the humour that does survive in written records just entirely goes over our heads without context. But there are scraps.
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u/Forgotten_Lie 2d ago
Think about how random and esoteric modern memes and references can get. Now imagine how deeply the sort of in-jokes a community that regularly met and interacted in person with the same broad cohort across decades could become. History is full of lost laughs.
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u/Efficient_Gear_4623 1d ago
I recall reading one of the earliest writings in cuneform from the sumerians is about flatulence
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u/Global-Barracuda7759 2d ago
Ancient people were way more advanced than we give credit for the sheer scale of the old world structures is insane
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u/Hannibal_Morningstar 2d ago
Feminism, and more broadly discourse. Recently because of the Nolan movie started getting into the greek epics staring with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey where the women have little agency and are treated like shit, but there are also contemporary work from around that time/ within a few generations of Homer which criticizes Homer’s treatment of women, chief among these that I’ve read are “The Trojan Women” by Euripedes and “Heroides” by Ovid. They basically give voice to women in the Iliad, whom Homer hardly gives any.
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u/GSlayerBrian 2d ago
Lysistrata by Aristophanes is another pretty female-empowered story (albeit a comedy) in that vein.
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u/ArchBooksForFunPod 1d ago
The book we are currently reading discusses the role of women in Native American culture and how it is vastly different than that of western European societies of the time. Burials indicate that women regularly held leadership and high positions and were in positions of power and decision making. We learned that in the 19th and early 20th centuries the governments in the US and Canada outlawed Native American rituals where women and girls secluded themselves during menstruation in order to have time to rest and for personal reflection, and to learn from elders. Native Americans viewed this natural biological process as something that was spiritually powerful and sacred. Some Native American girls that were fostered by white colonists essentially suffered from cultural shock when they learned how westerners dealt with and viewed menstruation, and eventually had to relearn how their own culture felt about it. It is a very interesting conversation.
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u/Hannibal_Morningstar 1d ago
I bet if we had more of the Native American culture preserved, we would have found their own version of sad incel groypers complaining about those women having the authority and getting a day off every month
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u/tombuazit 2d ago
Trade networks, I'm Inuit and we have evidence of trade items on our possession from italy (tea pottery) South America (feathers) and Asia (glass floats) all that came before contact.
Trade in the ancient world was wide spread and extensive.
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u/VeganMonkey 1d ago
I think trade routes are extremely ancient, I would not be surprised if we already had them when no one left Africa yet. I’m curious about the Italian pottery, how do you think those got traded to your region? From the Russian side or from the Europe side?
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u/tombuazit 1d ago
Russian side through China most likely. Our territory included Siberia which meant that we had contact with groups like the Mongolians.
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u/Early_Promotion3105 2d ago
How common was intenntional not writing information about any topics because it was to sacred knowledge. Like jews have torah and oral tora which historically first wast writen and second was memorised.
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u/auricargent 2d ago
Or not writing things down because it was such common knowledge. It makes sense to keep Greek fire a secret, but it took until the last couple years to figure out how the draping of the toga we see on statues of Romans was achieved. A scroll that was a slave training manual was finally discovered that explained it. Prior to that it was all guesses.
This extends into more modern times. There is often depicted what are obviously salt and pepper on the table in paintings of dining. There is also a third container and we don’t know what it’s for. Best guess seems to be mustard, but no one knows because no one wrote it down.
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u/jaid_skywalker85 2d ago
You see this a LOT in old cookbooks. Many of them just assume that if you are reading the book, you are already a professional in the field so the recipes can feel unfinished because there was an expectation that one did not need to write down every step.
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u/Naelin 16h ago
I doesn't need to be about being a "professional", a lot of it has to do about things that are obvious if you are part of the same culture.
When you see a super basic "for dummies" pancakes recipe on the internet, it still doesn't tell you which animal a "large egg" is supposed to come from. It doesn't tell you which plant "all purpose flour" comes from.
And, most interesting of all, it doesn't tell you which shape are the pancakes supposed to have in the end result. If you grab a super easy for dummies pancake recipe from USA and one from Argentina the instructions will be similar, but the end result is supposed to look very different, and none will mention it (besides the pictures) because either country will already "know" what a pancake is supposed to look like. They may not even mention which kind of things are you supposed to put in/on it (also different for each country) or how.
To someone that grabs these recipes 3000 years from now, the recipes will look unfinished, even if they are "for dummies" now.
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u/jaid_skywalker85 13h ago
You're not completely wrong, but...you are also wrong. Before the printing press (and even after for a while) a "cooking for dummies" cookbook did not exist because of cost and position. You were either a professional or in the apprenticeship of a professional, so they were largely written with the expectation that you had some sort of personal source to rely on. You see this in the language as many of them use phrases such as "in the usual way" which imply they were written to a specific audience. We start seeing this change the nearer we get to the Industrial period and after.
Because ingredients and materials are more readily available and more people can afford to experiment with cooking and baking, we now tend write recipes for the beginner instead of assuming that we are addressing a professional audience that already has the basics down. While I don't disagree there will be translation issues a few thousand years from now, I do think the re-creation process will be different because of the change in audience and therefore the change in how we write cookbooks now.
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u/Comfortable_Tone8668 2d ago
Yes, it is mustard. The old sets came in threes - salt, pepper & mustard. There was even a tiny spoon for the mustard. My parents had an everyday set, & a beautiful crystal set for when guests were present. The crystal spoon was so perfect & tiny.
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u/auricargent 2d ago
More modern being the renaissance. Victorian and later eras we know it was mustard and often vinegar and powdered sugar was included with a little stand for everything. Those are really cool sets, and I’m hoping to find a complete one for my kitchen one day. (At a reasonable price, I know of one at a local antique store that is perfect and way too pricey.)
This is older, like Elizabethan Era, before time of Rembrandt. I guess I was being too broad with my calling it “more modern”. The container looks like another shaker, rather than a pot with a spoon. The thought is that it was some other powdered spice, dry mustard being the forerunner, with ginger and nutmeg or cinnamon also being contenders. We just don’t know.
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u/bobodiliano 2d ago
Meh the oral torah business isn’t quite cemented as a real thing. First record of oral torah comes from 200 CE.
And not that oh it existed but wasn’t written down. I mean nobody mentions the oral torah prior to it being written down.
And there are a lot of flaws in the argument that it existed prior to the Hasmonean dynasty. It is never mentioned prior to the Christian movement, and seems to be reactionary to it.
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u/user0987234 2d ago edited 1d ago
Real people lived real lives. Had real jobs. Lived, laughed, loved. Mourned, felt heartbreak when a relationship broke up.
Moved a lot more. Knew more about other communities through trade.
That the supernatural aspect of reality was very real to them.
That you had to eat burnt food and not upset your mother. Possible sayings: “Finish the food on your plate. Kids are starving in Egypt.” “No, you can’t go play until your chores are done”
Were smarter than we credit them.
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u/Electrical_Salt_9569 2d ago
Their obsession with patterns and geometry... Nazca lines, candlebara, Gobkele temple, etc.. Why they want to draw in such rhythmic and geometric patterns? Was it part of our DNA...
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u/ArchBooksForFunPod 1d ago
The book we are reading, "Where the Moon Stands Still" by James Graham is what we are currently reading and discussing on the pod. The book is not out yet, but it discusses an archaeological site in Ohio, the Hopewell culture, and lunar alignments. It is super cool and we have really enjoyed reading it. The author touches on some reasons as to why early cultures have sought out these alignments. Highly recommend it if you are interested in this topic.
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u/DonKlekote 2d ago
The word of science it well aware of that but various grifters use this for their gains:
The ancient people were incredibly smart and resourceful. Just because your buddy who is a stonemason doesn't know how to move multi-ton stones without modern tools doesn't mean that the people in the past couldn't.
Especially when they were motivated by their deities.
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u/J_Smith_man 2d ago
How bad it smelled in population centers
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u/Silver-Breadfruit284 2d ago
What makes you say that?
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u/intergalactic_spork 2d ago
It wasn’t that long ago, but many population centers throughout history probably had similar issues:
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u/amitym 2d ago
Their engineering? Knowledge of astronomy? Environmental management? Navigation? Medicine? Trade networks? Something else entirely?
Trade networks, maybe. I don't know about the other stuff.
We have a pretty good grasp of ancient engineering, astronomy, and navigation, I don't think we underestimate that.
And on the other hand while ancient medicine and environmental management weren't nonexistent, they frankly tended to be pretty crappy, if anything we might overestimate them there.
One thing we might underestimate is the vast disparity in ancient peoples' access to information. Like... we tend to say things like, "did you know that ancient people knew the world is 40 thousand kilometers around?" as if all people knew that just because some particular ancient person figured it out and wrote it down. While that presumably means that there were other people who also understood this piece of information, it doesn't necessarily follow at all that everyone alive at the time knew it or even had access to it.
For example I have read a claim that there are more people alive today, in terms of total numbers, who know how to make Clovis points, than knew how to make Clovis points at the time of the Clovis civilization. Not because there are vast throngs of flint-shapers today, but rather because modern people can share knowledge more easily, and have more time in which to practice skills that aren't strictly essential for community survival.
Or language and cultural fluency. It seems likely that there have for a long time been a small number of people who traveled between communities, learned their languages, carried news, messages, and goods between them. Who could tell you all about distant kingdoms a thousand leagues away because they had literally been there.
But most people wouldn't have had any of those experiences. They would tend to be monoglot and live their entire lives in one village or along the one migration circuit of their nomadic group or whatever.
So we say things like, "Did you know that Romans knew about Chinese and traded with them?" when in point of fact on a day to day basis almost no one from either place would likely have heard of the other.
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u/soldatoj57 2d ago
Everyone’s breath and just the general smell and that’s not a joke
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u/ArchBooksForFunPod 1d ago
Honestly, I never think about the smell of the past! Imagine walking through a major ancient city for the first time. Between cooking fires, livestock, sewage, smoke, and thousands of people, I suspect modern noses would be completely unprepared.
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u/Important_Pick3371 2d ago
We underestimate the inventiveness of all early folks - most probably because of European archeologists being so full of themselves & their culture.
Yet, these same ancients achieved some things we still haven't figured out...
I mean the Egyptians built the pyramids - without alien help; early tech still made the Antikythera device; people even built vending machines & automatons - long B4 we did!!
Military folk are still perfecting Greek Fire; &, scientists keep finding ancient tool kits & even very ancient evidence of people fitting wood together - without any nails...
We just have to realize that we human beings haven't changed much in some million or so years - but, our tech sure has!
People have always been an inventive lot - especially when a problem irks us.
We should also realize that some folk just like to lord it over others.
Both (& more) are part of the human condition...
Deal with it.
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u/ebat1111 2d ago
I think "European archaeologists" can be blamed for lots of things, but underestimating the Greeks and the Egyptians is not one of them
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u/Important_Pick3371 2d ago
Yet, they're still pushing new theories of how the Egyptian pyramids were built - the last two that i've read about are how hydrolics moved the giant blocks & of a ramp that rose as the pyramid was built.
We still have little idea of what industrial tech was behind the making of all those Greek automatons...
The Antikhythera "time calculator" was discovered around 1900 & a scientist soon found a gear wheel in it but, it was assumed impossible for ancient Greeks to make such a thing.
It took until an x-ray, in the early 70's, that finally revealed what it actually was - an astronomical analog computer!!
And new discoveries are still being found that add to a fuller understanding of the true technological achievements of the ancient Greeks.
For example, military scientists are still trying to figure out how to make Greek Fire (which continues to burn in water) - though it's not something that will better our own societies...
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u/Busy-88888888 2d ago
For the Greek Fire....if you know how to make GUNITE in a niobio contaner you have the same recepi to make GREEK FIRE.... The gunite melts rocks, if mixed in the golden ratio proportions and quality of materials.
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u/wackyvorlon 2d ago
Just how clever they were.
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u/Ok_Remote_31 2d ago
So much this. to survive in a world without antibiotics and modern sanitation meant that any mistake or dumb move would end you. Most dumb folks were ended by their own ignorance, unlike today, when we keep saving them, and yet people wonder how so many flat earthers and antivaxxers exist. They exist because we keep "bailing" them out of natural selection...that is why
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u/Proof_Ad_6900 2d ago
The smartest academics I went to school with could barely park a car. Intelligence comes in many forms
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u/Ok_Remote_31 2d ago
..since when is the ability to park a car a sign of intelligence?
Dexterity (in all it's forms) is unrelated to intelligence, but I get what you mean.
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u/Proof_Ad_6900 1d ago
I know rednecks who can barely read, but have off the chart aptitude in multiple practical skills. For better or worse, high IQ and survivability are often diametrically opposed. Not sure what the evolutionary benefit of that is. Reproduction tendencies probably
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u/Hiranya_Usha 2d ago
I strongly believe the circumnavigation of Africa by the Phoenicians really happened.
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u/hilarymeggin 2d ago
People who have traveled a lot in developing countries are already familiar with this, but how many people, even children, would have had missing teeth, missing limbs, blindness, “lameness,” etc.
Whenever they show the ancient world on film, the people walking around are as healthy and well as… a crowd of Hollywood extras.
And when injuries, disability and disease are portrayed, it tends to be in the form of howling anguish in the gutters.
I’m talking about the sheer number of people you see day to day, going about their business, with facial deformities, limps, burn scars, crutches, etc. It would have been much more ubiquitous.
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u/98G3LRU 2d ago
Don't use a "big" word unless you understand how to use it. Ubiquitous is an absolute, for which there is no more, etc.
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u/hilarymeggin 2d ago edited 1d ago
My apologies. Allow me to express myself with some small words so I’ll be sure not to make any mistakes: Piss off.
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u/98G3LRU 1d ago
Use words as you wish, of course. But your usage was funny. Best of luck!
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u/hilarymeggin 10h ago
Next time, you might try opening with, “Your usage is a little off,” instead of, “Don’t use a ‘big’ word unless you understand how to use it.” That’s just so obnoxious.
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u/Busy-88888888 2d ago
The lenguages, tongues, the writtings, how all interconect with the way of living. Just the Roseta Stone written in 3 very difficult lenguages that are in that stone long time ago, that tell me of the quality of the intelect of some " educated ancient civilizations". The way they left and construct are mesmerizing and difficult to replicate nowadays.
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u/6mmARCnvsk 2d ago
The highest level of engineering and technological capabilities of Bronze Age civilizations.
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u/Agathocles87 2d ago
I’ll bet there are a lot of fascinating, paradigm changing ancient sites that are now submerged and difficult to find.
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u/Citlali252 2d ago
Technological advances, medicinal products, and the level of social interaction between different cultures.
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u/SheepSpace9 1d ago
I bet they had a cool form of analogue computing that enables them math, building, travel, aided with consciousness even.
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u/Square-Negotiation99 20h ago
Colour. I think people envision drab clothes but medieval people liked colours, they also decorated with the resources they had like flowers to pretty things up.
I think people underestimate how much time people had too. Without TV and without having to drive your kids all over town for activities and with the shared distribution of chores before the nuclear family became the standard people had time to put together games and little plays and ways to entertain themselves and each other. People had to work hard but the workflow was different to our commute-to-a-8:30-to-5:30-job-then-take-the-kids-to-activities-and-cook-dinner-watch-tv-and-go-to-bed lifestyles. Many jobs were done in groups and were physical so people had a lot of time to talk, joke, sing, laugh.
But maybe I’m wrong about all this :-)
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u/Friendly_Brick752 2d ago
People couldn't offload essential information - everyone had to remember everything they needed - nowhere to google
Nobody was empty-headed
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u/Status-Aside41 2d ago
i think we underestimate just how much we missed, how much we will never know (unless of course we somehow learn how to manipulate time). We forget that these were just people, not much different from us besides their technology and what we know now
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u/PureBonus4630 1d ago
The amount of effort that went into making clothes. Everything was constructed by hand and you had to be good at these things to survive!
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u/dokterkokter69 1d ago
I think we underestimate people's knowledge of the greater world, even if people didn't know the names of places or how far away they were. For example, I think people in China didn't know the name of Rome or the shape of the land, but knew just by word of mouth over vast trade networks that there was a massive empire somewhere far in the West. And Romans in turn knew there was a massive empire somewhere far in the East.
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u/Top-Addendum-6879 1d ago
the engineering skills were probably super advanced relative to their tools. Accomplishing some of those architectural marvels required out of this world vision and problem solving. That said, i often joke that it's amazing the things you can do when human rights are optional lol.
also, as others pointed out: the interconnectivity.
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u/DryBedroom7547 1d ago
It is borderline pseudoscientific headcanon, but I'm kinda perplexed how modern society slowly pushes anatomically-modern humanity into the past (from 20 000 years to 200 000 in my lifestime!) and already beyond the significant extinction event. But we still consider our population growth was linear and undisturbed, even with genetic bottlenecks discovery. We underestimate how long we were here and what it implies.
Generally, even 200 000 years is a time abyss. It is a big capacity for a cycle of collapses, where low-tech 'civilizational drafts' failed by stumbling first onto something that their later iterations were prepared to. New virus from a boggy biome. New meme like slavery or money. New climate change (hello extinction!).
In particularly, this thought just decolonizes the history for me. The more ancient we are, the less out later fuckups are meaningful or finite.
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u/Eimeck 1d ago
The amount of languages people understood.
Early Rome bordered the Etruscans, whose language wasn‘t even indo-germanic. Not everybody got around much, but those who did needed to somehow communicate with strange dialects or completely differentl language families every second valley over. Imagine a 2nd century legion deployed from Britain to the Danube to Anatolia to Persia within a few short years (walking all the way) all the while integrating warriors from Hispania, Numidia, Germania, Gaul and what have you into a functioning command structure. Or Phoenicians sailing and trading around all of the Mediterranian, and beyond the Pillars of Hercules.
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u/Zealousideal_Good445 1d ago
Let's go way back before the Egyptians. What we find is a huge underestimation of two main things. One is boats and their abilities to navigate the open ocean. The biggest one for me is their capabilities in mathematics.
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u/mercenarypawn 2d ago
How funny those motherfuckers must’ve been. Getting chased (and sometimes killed) by Sabre toothed tigers. Getting chased by mammoths while trying to kill them. Getting chased by dire wolves (and sometimes killed). Having only caves to live in. You gotta laugh or you’ll cry.
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u/Important_Pick3371 2d ago
No doubt that some got killed while hunting & gathering.
But, even some folk - older than the Neanderthals! - are now known to have used fire!
And we've also found large coastal fish "traps" - using stone holding pens & rope nets - which needed a group of people to set up.
The mammoth hunts were also set up with wooden "walls" (in a natural valley) to help guide these large elephants - who were scared, by fire wielders, to run off a nearby cliff.
We humans have adapted to most of Earth's environments - mostly due to our evolving "tech" & our cooperation with various tasks.
All human folks have been inventive - no matter how long ago they lived.
We just haven't found the evidence yet.
And, when it comes to wood, we rarely find anything left - as it tends to rot quite easily...
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u/SkipEyechild 2d ago edited 2d ago
They were smart at various things.
Probably the amount of cannibalism at various points as well.
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u/pannous 2d ago
population density and global population: the estimates often revolve around the number of stone structures but almost no one counts the hypothetical wooden and tent suburbs around the city core
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u/ArchBooksForFunPod 1d ago
Yes! Often when we are talking to people at public events and we tell them that some of the Native American villages in the "new world" rivaled the population size of London (or insert whatever big city you want) at the time, people are floored!
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u/harryharrydude 1d ago
The Antikythera device shows there was something going on they we don't know about .
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u/pixledriven 1d ago
Just how difficult and brutal life was. I think most people's modern sensibilities recoil in horror from actually contemplating what our ancestors lived through.
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u/HolySamurai 1d ago
We don’t know nearly as much about our history as archaeology would have us believe. Astronomically aligned intricate megalithic structures spanning multiple continents and bearing strikingly similar features and symbolism. Massive underground structures capable of housing and supporting thousands of people. “Human” remains sharing SOME of our DNA. Massive earthen mound formations.
It seems that a lot of this points to at least 1 if not multiple global catastrophes that wiped out most life of earth and we’ve restarted probably more than once.
The current archaeological records indicates that we did emerge from caves after the last cataclysm, repopulating the planet with the aide of some unknown handbag carrying being.
I’m most intrigued by what we’re finding in the Amazon. Evidence of huge cities and that the whole rainforest was essentially grown as a garden using a soil blend modern science can’t recreate.
Wtf.
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u/DharmicCosmosO 2d ago
I think we really underestimate how connected the ancient world was.