Let's have a thread about the history of science and experiment

It must have been like New Delhi is today

They were isolated. Cultures in the Old World didn't invent the wheel, one person did and it spread.

Depending on the era, city, and part of the city, it'd probably be. I wonder if there were slums in Roman cities.

Roman doctors used to take blood out of their patients when they were sick. The patients always felt worse with each visit and everytime the doctor took their blood out. They eventually died of course. Correct me if I'm wrong though

What do you mean by shitty?

We still struggle with cancer and haven't got anything against the common cold which kills millions each year.

>I wonder if there were slums in Roman cities.

I think the largest part of Rome itself was a slum.

That is Galens theory of humors, they continued doing this across Europe and the Middle East into the 19th century.

They wouldn't take out a lot though and they knew to much bloodloss could kill someone.

Yes, that's totally how it worked. People flocked to have their illnesses treated by doctors with 100% mortality rates.

A traumatic head injury would still lead to massive loss of blood. They had the sense to know that blood sustained life, like most cultures.

It's amazing how something like the scientific method wasn't common sense when you think of it this way.
>I'm going to mess with your body and do a whole bunch of shit to it
>I have no evidence that this will work other than the fact that some guy hundreds of years ago philosophized it would work

>not wanting to become one with Jupiter

Away with you, filthy barbarian

That doesn't excuse them from realizing round things roll better than square things

Is premodern detective work included?

One of my favorites is Song Ci. He was a Song Dynasty legal official who was called on to investigate a murder in this particular village. The weapon was identified to be a blade, and of the scythe kind and so Song Ci, after much thinking, was reminded of how flies seem to gather on butcher's blades even when they are cleaned.

So one day, Song Ci ordered the villages with scythes to place them upon inspection. He left them on a table on open air and (caught? or gathered) flies to it. The flies kept on landing in this one guy's scythe even when Song Ci shooed them again.

They investigated that guy and found out he committed the murder.

Talk about forensic entomology.

>A traumatic head injury would still lead to massive loss of blood
Not necessarily. You could easily receive a serious head injury without bleeding too much.
A more minor injury (like a concussion) wouldn't bleed at all, and it should still be enough to tip someone off that getting bashed in the skull is bad.

I always like this guy called Towton 16

That sounds really interesting. Like The Name of the Rose in Ancient China.

Cant be bothered to double check but if i remember right the vagina was first accuratly drawn around 1960s by a doctor doing it on his wife. Where as the penis was accuratly drawn somewhere in the 1700s i think. Always found it funny how doctors couldnt be bothered to check females anotomy properly because youd be marked as a pervert for studying it.

Sounds like bullshit to me. People have been drawing dicks literally since we have them

The penis date could be compleatly wrong, I remember the article i read saying penis has been drawn since the dawn of man as you said. Though i mean anotomically correct drawing, as in the insides of a penis. The ammount of study done on the penis vs the vagina is very much in favor of the penis.

LEL

I think he means internal structure

How is this a historical statement?

Cool shit.

It was all of antiquity and the medieval times, actually all the way up to the 1800s where they believes in humors. If you were feeling a certain way, it was a result of too much/too little of a bodily fluid.
>pic related

Really, nobody did. Wheel was only invented once, and spread from there

>ywn get that outskilled

Yes they fucking did. People have been using logs to roll stones since the fucking neolithic.

They didn't need to, people who post these memes keep forgetting that most inventions and discoveries come from necessity

Nah, it depends on the place.

Roman cities had public latrines. No toilet paper, but you could make it with a sponge.

In the Islamic world, the cities had water supply and sewage systems. Instead of a sponge, you would wash.

And finally, in China, from the sixth century, started to use the paper for this purpose - to the point of becoming predominant.

Natives in South America (forget who) used log rollers to carry heavy items long distances.

Really though, without beasts of burden or engines, wheels are only a little useful, with variation depending on the land.

I remember hearing my history teacher telling us that people honestly thought maggots and rats spontaneously appeared on old food. Was it really that hard to put a piece of food in a sealed jar and find out it maggots don't appear on it.

Shhh. They need a reason to feel superior to dark people while their legs atrophy in their computer chairs the asians built them.

Most people didn't have access to glassware for most of history, and the ones who did were putting it to good use instead of letting meat rot inside to prove points about maggots.

Most people didn't think maggots came from meat because most people didn't think. Only people who bothered to think about it came to the faulty conclusion.

When you say "People thought X for thousands of years" you really mean "People who bothered to ask thought X for thousands of years."

kind of makes you wonder

just what are we currently doing completely and utterly wrong?

Good ol' "muh white peeple did this so dat validates my value rite?"

...

I think people in the future might think our treatment of animals is wrong. I don't know in what form but I reckon it will be something like that.

You honestly can not tell the difference between rolling a log, and set up a cohesive wooden disc able to support a lot of weight?

Hey look, someone who actually analyzes history intelligently on Veeky Forums
Good job user.

> You could easily receive a serious head injury without bleeding too much.

Not externally. Blunt trauma means massive internal bleeding and people knew what bruises were.

thing is, that's to obvious
there's bound to be something we're completely and utterly missing
that's one of the most infuriating things, so many secrets I'll never know, would be god damn interesting if you could freeze yourself and wake up 1000 years later just to see how humanity evolved

Our use of antibiotics maybe?

Or some abstract mathematical/physics shit

>lol 21st century people believed in gravity and never thought it might have been the void power of cthulhu

>Roman cities had public latrines. No toilet paper, but you could make it with a sponge.
They shared the sponge.

Anyone who got the hunch that the brain was important to cognitive function would have been hesitant to say so because they were part of the priesthood, who had staunch rituals regarding autopsies (only royalty got them) and were very careful about the treatment of the corpse's "soul."

To suggest to the Egyptian priesthood that they had been "doing it wrong" and ripping their kings' souls (brain) out by their nose for thousands of years, would be blasphemous.

Egyptian priests would stone (not to death) whatever priest made the first cut in the autopsy, because cutting a God-king was a sin.

They were very spooked about that shit and if there was a skeptic among them he would've kept his mouth shut.

>He doesn't know how the use the three sponges

medicine seems like an obvious field where its a guarantee we're missing something

maybe to future humans the very concept of things like donor organs or heck even surgery will be completely baffling

Nano injectors might be a thing yeah or injecting medicine at such a high velocity you don't need syringes

I'm pretty sure they had a good feeling flies were a sign of rot and most likely associated both with rotten food. Considering the fact that they learned salting and smoking were efficient methods of preservation, I'm willing to contend that they at least recognized maggots didn't just magically appear.

Logs aren't wheels, mate.

>maybe to future humans the very concept of things like donor organs or heck even surgery will be completely baffling

We're already able to 3D print a dead cellular framework for an organ.

ted.com/talks/anthony_atala_printing_a_human_kidney?language=en

Logs are cylinders.

Cylinders are wheels

There is no agreed-upon threshold for how short a cylinder has to be before it qualifies as a "wheel."

If you are using cylinders to transport objects, then you understand the principle behind a wheel. If you fail to hook them up to an axle, it might just be because you have no fucks to give.

You don't really need glass. Any sealed thingy will do

pretty interesting that in the future, there'll likely be a time where organ failure is relatively easy to solve by just inserting some cells into a machine and having it print a brand new one

And to think my great grandfather died aged 30 something to tuberculosis the year Alexander Flemming discovered penicillin.

Quite some advancement.

talking about advancement in medicine I do wonder, once scientists manage safe telomere-restoration in a human, just how society will react

I mean, the very idea of age being curable would be unbelievably huge in every single level of society and culture anywhere in the world

penicillin isn't effective against TB; the first antibiotic effective against TB was streptomycin which wasn't discovered until the 1940s. your great grandpappy was donezo either way, kid

>>the ancient egyptians thought the brain was an accessory organ like the spleen or gall-bladder that kept the shape of the head and produced mucus
This confuses me. I feel like the vast majority of humans can tell that their thoughts originate in their head.

treatment of animals

religious beliefs

urbanization

capitalism

Here's a fun one: it's been proposed (mainly by doom and gloom types, mind you) that there is a link between frequencies used by wifi and damage to the ovaries of prepubescent girls, which could lower their fertility drastically by the time they come of age. If that was true, we wouldn't start seeing the noticeable demographic effects for 20-30 years after an area had widespread wifi.

I don't really think this is true, but I think the "what are we missing now" question will end up being something like this. We'll create some kind of technology that seems beneficial and becomes widely adopted, but creates long-term detriment to human populations in a way that will take decades at least to detect.

so essentially its trying to figure out what our time's asbestos is?
not a comfortable thought but a likely one

that said the wifi one seems fairly unlikely given just how little energy goes into those type of signals

Or something like the romans and lead.

What if it's something already obvious like obesity.

I know this isn't any real source, but I read a novel by György Spiro, called "Slavery", where he spent a lot of time describing Jewish slums in Rome (Transtibrum). Does anyone know how accurate is that book in its portrayal of Roman society?

You mean to tell me that if government workers thought you werent raising your own child properly, the state could steal it away from you?!

>the wifi one seems fairly unlikely
Oh, I agree. It's more of a fringe thing than anything, like people who talk about cell phones/bluetooth headsets causing brain cancer or whatever. I just think it'll be along those lines. "Our modern asbestos" seems a pretty apt description, or
>like the romans and lead.
though we used lead to seal canned foods until pretty recently. At least we haven't used it for water pipes in a long time, though.

America has that with high-fructose corn syrup, I think. Shown again and again to be terrible for you, and more expensive than plain sugar anyway, but used commonly because of corn subsidies. I wouldn't be surprised if this was considered a huge mistake on the "sealing cans of food with lead" level.

Or, if you wanted to get fringe again, we could talk about those "muh fluoride in the water" people.

Antibiotics for sure. We are bound to fuck ourselves in the asses with drug-resistant bacteria since we use antibiotics so recklessly. Even now, we sometimes have to use penicillin to treat dieseases, that had become resistant to modern antibiotics. I am pretty sure that the next big breaktrough will be treating bacterial dieseases with handcrafted virus, that will infect the pathogen cells and kill them.

That is, until it evolves and infects a patient.

I would hope we'd use nanites or something before something as reckless as a custom virus that could possibly mutate in to something harmful. At least one assumes that nanites could be deactivated.

No one "needed" the wheel
We could've kept it up as hunter/gatherer societies, but we evolved past it. No one needed to invent anything besides a spear.

The original post was about people not knowing that circles roll better than squares.

It operates on the same principle, which was my point.

Ah I thought it worked against it.

>carrying teepes everywhere to keep up with their goddamn buffalo
>implying wheels wouldnt make it easier

I dunno. Wi-Fi is really good at penetrating things and many parts of the human body are extremely sensitive to radiation.

STOP POSTING THIS GIF

Don't forget industrial agriculture, especially GMOs.
>We need to get rid of pests on our plants
>Let's make them toxin-resistant so we can spray more pesticide to kill more pests
>But what about the pests that adapt?
>Next year we'll make the plants even more resistant and increase the potency of our pesticides
>That sounds like a perfectly reasonable and indefinitely sustainable system of agriculture; good job fellas

Madness. Permaculture 4 lyfe.

No way some dutch perv didn't draw a vagina

Teflon

this practice carried on to the 19th century
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodletting

Also, dams (especially in the Western US) are responsible for billions of gallons of lost water through evaporation of water sitting in reservoirs. Combined with the rapid depletion of underground aquifers (The Ogallala for example took ~500 million years to fill, and is at risk of being depleted entirely in the next 50-100 years at current usage). There's a risk of turning the breadbasket of America into a barren wasteland totally unfit for industrial agriculture.

Antidepressants are also something future people will point to as being something at best woefully ineffective and in many instances detrimental to the well being of its users. An unfortunate example of a particularly prescription-zealous era in western medicine propelled by the active machinations of pharmaceutical companies. Between kickbacks for doctors that incentivizes throwing pills at patients, regulatory capture of oversight bodies (like the FDA) by former drug company execs and diligent lobbying for legislation in their favor the current era of western medicine will undoubtedly be seen as pill-happy. Already we see lots of fingers being pointed about the "opiate epidemic" spurred by the wheeling & dealing of prescription painkillers.

you might be retarded

Guise, guise
Guise?
Salamanders can extinguish flames you guise

>CSI: Chinese Scythe Inspector

I'm not sure if this is a bad meme, but the native americans (at least in MesoAmerica and South America) did. We've found toys with wheels, wheelbarrows, wheel-roll tracks, etc...

The oligarchy will get it first.

The proles will resent them so much that the oligarchy will get lots of plastic surgery to avoid getting hunted down for being im-morties.

Tfw we actually have God-kings.

Also the war on drugs will probably be seen as a colossal fuck-up. Like, "what the fuck were they thinking" kind of thing. It never achieved anything it set out to do bloated the justice system with non-violent offenders, bloated police budgets and in many respects only prodded the drug suppliers to grow larger, more organized & more violent. It'll be the "prohibition" of the 20th and early 21st century.

Not without draft animals, no. It's like you don't know anything about how wheels were actually used.

>what is a hand drawn cart
Granted, a sled could do the same thing, but a cart would still be preferable in most conditions

>other half of the hemisphere still can't into wheels

Chemotherapy should hopefully be up there

Considering how we operate day-to-day, it's not that surprising. Most people have kinds of superstitions and rituals that they never question, lucky charms is an obvious example. If someone has a lucky bracelet, they're not going to do controlled tests on its luck because they already fully believe in the luck, due to whatever reason.

It's interesting how there are some parallels with Chinese traditional medicine, with its 5 poles, focus on herbs and food, and diseases caused by excesses of heat, water, etc. The humours were just the european version of that style of thinking.

Nutrition without a doubt. The fact that the top medical research into nutrition totally changes the paradigm every 10 years or so indicates we really don't understand it.

Doesn't help that we have all there Veeky Forums-tier wive's tales like "it's just oats n proteins brah" muddying the pool for the public.