Average life spans. People in ancient times didn't drop dead at forty. They regularly lived to be advanced ages we would consider normal. It's just that infant and young child deaths were so common it really drags down the average.
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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This is just the typical modern misunderstanding of statistics.
To be fair, I doubt people understood statistics much better back in the day, either.
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Also a horrific amount of mothers dying in childbirth didn't do wonders for the average.
So common as in literally half of kids died.
Which is how evolution worked, those with diseases like diabetes etc (mutations thay arent beneficial) died and didn't pass that gene on.
I mean, there was a selectivity to it, yes. But also a whole lot of random chance, which is why it kept happening instead of fixing itself in a few generations.
It's still how it works. We're either going to artificially fix the problems or go back to that, and do so in an evolutionary eye blink - almost certainly in our lifetimes, by the look of it.
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This is the biggest historical misconception. So much dumb stuff like "horribke histories" (children's history books + tv show in britain) heavily reinforced this misconception
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"Beer and wine were invented because drinking water was unsafe."
No, people have generally always known how to find clean drinking water and understood its importance. Beer and wine got made because they were delicious, nutritious, and got ya drunk.
"Medieval Europeans needed spices because all of their meat was rotten."
No, they had the same physiology we do and would have been just as disgusted by rotten meat. They would eat fresh meat when in season, and they knew how to preserve it by smoking, salting, drying, pickling, or fermenting it. Medieval Europeans wanted spices for the same reason we do, because they taste really good.
“Beer and wine were invented because drinking water was unsafe.”
No, people have generally always known how to find clean drinking water and understood its importance. Beer and wine got made because they were delicious, nutritious, and got ya drunk.
Sounds like someone who misheard a different fact. Which is why sailors drink low proof alcohol on long voyages. Because they couldn't safely store water for such a long time. Water turns green and becomes undrinkable if you store it in a barrel. It's one of the things that helped unlock ocean travel in the 1400's.
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Im totally sure these are just myths. Its like the americans traveling abroad asking for coke in the bottle. If your traveling and getting something from an inn you know the alcohol is likely safer than whatever standards they have for water. I mean they did not have germ theory but over time people would realize alcohol is safer. If your poor you will eat some marginal things and hide the flavor although granted spices were expensive till they were not and its pretty well known wealthy people put a bunch on to show off and when it got cheap that is when the fancy cooking with proper pairings became a big thing. poor people getting spices im sure at some point was like. omg! you had to be a lord to have a meal like this when I was a kid.
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No, people have generally always known how to find clean drinking water and understood its importance.
Citation very needed. People thought some water to be better than others, and the Romans went as far as building out aqueducts to their favourite springs, but an understanding it can cause water borne disease, and that it can look and smell fine but be bad, is decidedly modern. Health effects weren't necessarily thought to be confined to drinking either - holy water and baptisms being an example where just contact was thought to confer something.
The spices thing is legit, though. How long would you last eating no spices whatsoever? Trading gold for an equal mass of pepper suddenly doesn't seem so dumb.
I'll dig up the sources when I can but you can find writings from Ancient Rome to Medieval Europe describing good water to drink (clear, cold, fast-moving, odorless) versus bad water (stagnant, dirty, smelly). Of course they didn't know why the good water was better than the bad water and, as you said yourself, it wasn't a complete picture, but they most definitely knew which water to drink and which to avoid. It's why you find settlements along fresh water sources and why people have always dug wells.
One thing I don't see mentioned a lot is that water has always been the most commonly consumed drink simply because making beer is resource-intensive. I don't doubt that people would have tried to drink only beer if they could get away with it, but it just wouldn't be practical when the stream is right over there.
Sure, they knew drinking something gross was likely to make you sick. If your nice clear river is downstream from a public lavatory, would they see a problem with that, though? Probably they'd only worry if it was close. Bad smells and weird sounds (like got Bach in trouble) are similarly mentioned as sources of disease.
As for alcohol, I should point out it has the effect of alcohol, and getting drunk is popular. If it was about safety, making a nice herbal tea (or actual tea if available) is easier and faster and much more effective at killing bugs.
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"There didn't used to be so many LGBTQ+ people back in the day"
It's because folks were forced into the closet with threats of institutionalization, prison, physical harm, marginalization, and even death. And then there probably was a time when there were fewer gay people, because HIV ravaged the gay male population in many parts of the world while our leaders turned a blind eye because it was killing "the right" people for a time.
Go even further back, and nobody gave a shit if you were gay. Or were even considered weird for not doing gay stuff.
In fact, it generally wasn't even a category. It was just a behavior
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Also a lot of the people who were openly gay throughout history had their identity hardwaved away. They were roomates!
and those naked wrestling in ancient times too.
[Laughs in Greco-Roman]
Funny enough, back in the days before the queer rights movements, an education in the classics was important. Lots of people would have known about Sappho, and the one emperor that got made fun of for being straight, even if they didn't approve. It's a very recent myth.
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that it was brutal and terrible
https://aeon.co/essays/why-inequality-bothers-people-more-than-poverty
But research conducted among the Ju/’hoansi in the 1950s and ’60s when they could still hunt and gather freely turned established views of social evolution on their head. Up until then, it was widely believed that hunter-gatherers endured a near-constant battle against starvation, and that it was only with the advent of agriculture that we began to free ourselves from the capricious tyranny of nature. When in 1964 a young Canadian anthropologist, Richard Borshay Lee, conducted a series of simple economic input/output analyses of the Ju/’hoansi as they went about their daily lives, he revealed that not only did they make a good living from hunting and gathering, but that they were also well-nourished and content. Most remarkably, his research revealed that the Ju/’hoansi managed this on the basis of little more than 15 hours’ work per week. On the strength of this finding, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins in Stone Age Economics (1972) renamed hunter-gatherers ‘the original affluent society
what about something that's not hunter-gathering, really ancient agricultures? like, y'know, the middle ages?
Protestants spread the myth that people in the middle ages thought the earth was flat to try and discredit Catholicism.
Ancient Greeks proved the earth was a sphere as early as the 4th century BC.
And Eratosthenes calculated its circumference to within a few hundred kilometers because he treated the earth as a perfect sphere instead of the oblate spheroid it is
My favorite is that in the same vein, Aristarchus estimated the size of the sun to be much larger than the earth (although he still severely underestimated it because it's so hard to measure), and therefore proposed that the earth should orbit around the sun. And the main problem with his theory was not any religious objection, but rather that his model would imply that there should be parallax visible among the stars. Unless they are, you know, ridiculously far away.
And how big it is, and how big and far away the moon is, and wrote a decent guess at the distance and size of the sun (although they made a measurement error with that one).
Before that, the competing theory was that it's a cylinder with the ends to the east and west. Anyone with eyes for stargazing can see they've obviously rotated when they move a significant distance north-south, so nobody with a long-distance trade network would thought it was flat.
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Life back in the day was so much easier!
Just so dumb on so many counts.
I will concede that it was simpler. But definitely not easier.
Depends what you mean by "easier".
I think there was more down time in the day. Yes more manual work but not for 8 or 12 hours a day, at least before the industrial revolution.
There were also more hardships without modern medicine.
Amount of work would also vary by season, region and status. There's bones that get dug up of people who physically fell apart from overwork, basically, if they were slaves or it was just a really rough period. It is true it could be light some times and places, though.
One thing they didn't have were schedules. Tardiness to meetings was measured in days, and IIRC a Greek philosopher is on record listing them as a form of aestheticism, like flagellation or starving yourself. Hunter gatherers also benefited from doing work we naturally find appealing, and not necessarily having to deal with coercive authority of any kind.
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I imagine any number of slaves would disagree with you on the downtime.
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One of the most common is that people were stupid in the past. Humans have been roughly the same intelligence across history. There was lack of technology and knowledge, but ancient people were far more intelligent than many give them credit for.
Ancient Aliens is based on the assumption that ancient humans were too stupid to do anything unassisted
I love bringing this up to people who laugh about "how dumb old people were".
I then remind them that people just five years ago thought that 5g towers were mind control devices that activated the microchips in vaccines. I then proceed to explain to them that it's possible to level two fenceposts 10 meters apart using nothing but a hose filled with water and Archimedes Principal.
That we have gotten dumber.
Or smarter.
Or more moral.
Or less moral.
Anyone who says that is trying to sell you some ideology.
If you know your history, you know humanity has fundamentally always been humanity since we started writing shit down. Possibly earlier, but then we can't be sure because no-writing-itis.
Some of the oldest texts we have are old men cranking about the kids these days.
There's stories of people being awful and exploiting each other. There's stories of people taking care of each other and of their surroundings during dark times. There's stories of people being weird little guys. We have just sorta always been ourselves.
“How did everyone know how to blow on the cartridges without Twitter?”
We went to friends houses and learned.
Not even that. I mean the game didn't load up correctly, so you replug it. Then 'clean' the contacts - and just blow in the cartridge.
My 90s baby is showing
The eighties didn’t look like the eighties for most of us. The eighties looked more like the seventies.
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That everything is getting better all the time.
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