The achievements of the Greco-Romans were made possible by a colossal volume of coinage. As early adopters they had no competition: little coin flowed outward and those states who held mines built up unbelievable treasures. A thread on the most momentous human invention: It was possible in the poorer parts of 19th century France to encounter children who had never before laid eyes on a coin. Their parents might receive pay in the form of grain or clothing and pay for goods in potatoes or chestnuts. There is never nearly enough cash to meet demand

Teenagers across northwest Europe were once expected to leave home and work as wandering laborers until settling down to marry in their 20s. This custom is much older than most think: the Germanic retinue of Tacitus, the warband, is a creation of these same life-cycle servants. The Venetian ambassador Trevisano, visiting England in 1498, reported to his Italian readers that the English do not love their own children and so force them out of the house at tender ages, never to return. In exchange they take in unrelated children, who they then exploit.

Christianity has historically helped to spread monogamy, exogamy, and consensual marriage around the world. None of these practices, though, originate in the Bible. They are all European traits which have piggybacked on to the Catholic Church. Where, exactly, do they come from? In 1539 Philip of Hesse wrote to Martin Luther, asking him if bigamy was Biblically permissible. His first wife was ugly, smelly and drunk but these were then not grounds for divorce. Luther wrote back, admitting that "God not condemn polygamy.. but even seemed to countenance it”

In 18th century England young men and women had complete freedom to select their spouses. This distinguished England not only from India or China but France and Germany. Where did this freedom come from and what are its consequences? A thread on "Marriage and Love in England": To start, a love story. John Paston was a 15th century aristocrat. While John is away from home, his 20 year old daughter Margery pledges herself to his bailiff, Richard Calle. The family is outraged: her brother writes she will end up selling candles on the street.

Those who attempt to understand the Industrial Revolution often travel down a dead end. Every old economy is mostly agrarian, so European agriculture must have been unusually good, right? But European grain yields were actually awful and they somehow succeeded in spite of them. Take this standard account from Robert Allen. It notes that on the eve of the Industrial Revolution English grain yields were good by the standards of northwest Europe, which itself “reaped yields twice those in most other parts of the world”. This is misleading in the extreme.

Why do the Somali have such thin bodies and large foreheads? This physical type is often explained as an adaptation to desert heat, but occurs in no other desert population outside Africa. The real culprit is milk anemia, a disease common in pastoralists and, once, in Europeans. There are other African peoples, all pastoralists, that share many aspects of the Somali “look”. The type goes by many names: Hamitic, Cushitic, Ethiopid. Because they are often tall, the Belgian anthropologist Jean Hiernaux categorized them as “Elongated African".

I grew up in rural Minnesota, about the least English part of the US. When my family went on vacations to "Real America" it dawned on me that we were not yet fully assimilated. We were Minnesota nice, but the Old Americans had something we didn't: they were "gentlemanly". On vacation, my family went out to a Arizona VFW to celebrate my sister's 10th birthday. As he was leaving this long faced cowboy looking man congratulated her and casually handed her a 20. I was amazed at that. Minnesotans are _very_ nice, but they don't do things like that.

This thread is all about your legal options if you were to travel back in time to medieval Europe and murder someone. It's also about measuring the decline of the extended family and the origins of English individualism. On Bertha Phillpotts' "Kindred and Clan in Past Time". Say as an example you traveled back in time to 14th century Sweden and murdered somebody. This is who and what you would have to pay: plaintiff 7 marks, King 4 marks, parents 2 marks, brothers 1 mark, 1st cousin 1/2 mark, 2nd cousin 1/4th, 3rd cousin 1/8th.

If you ask a population genetics guru to list the most interesting, unusual peoples in Europe they'll tell you all about the Saami, the Sardinians, the Basques. These groups are interesting because of their isolation; the English are interesting in exactly the opposite way. The old People of the British Isles project promised to use fancy clustering techniques to sort Britain into little genetic units. And it worked, sort of: they found two different clusters in Pembrokeshire, three in the Orkneys, but could not tell apart Kent from North Yorkshire

The Upper Midwest was first colonized by New Englanders, “Yankees”. After heroically clearing the land and founding the first towns, Yankee Man vanished. His place was taken by Germans, who have come to dominate the rural Midwest by being everything the Yankee was not. Maps of US ethnicity today show an impressive German dominance in Midwest counties. What’s interesting about this pattern is that in large part it came about after German immigration had ended. The Germans arrived, rooted themselves to the land and waited for the Anglo to leave.

Kenneth Pomeranz has argued that before 1750 the economies of China and Europe were not so different; Europe’s leap forward being attributable to a favorable supply of coal. But the differences in early modern interest rates between Europe (~5%) and China (~25%) are huge: A 25% interest rate sounds awful, but was actually typical of much of Asia and better than other places, like Korea or Jakarta, where 50% _average_ rates were not unheard of. In economies like this why would a person with capital ever do anything but lend it out?

The most likely explanation for the enduring short stature and narrow build of East Asian peoples is that such a body type is an adaptation to an effectively vegetarian diet: in quite a few parts of pre-modern Asia 80-90% of calories were derived solely from rice. One of the most striking differences noted by Western travelers to Asia was how few horses and cows existed in the countryside. Important men were carried around in sedan chairs like “300”’s Xerxes, something which struck Europeans as inherently grotesque.

The great majority of people worldwide are lactose malabsorbers. They can usually drink a bit of milk without major digestive upset but their bodies were not designed to guzzle the stuff. Within Europe even most Russians or Italians are malabsorbers: it's West Euros who are odd. What separates the lactose tolerant people of the Atlantic coast from the rest? Milk production in Europe today is closely correlated with grassland productivity, itself a function of the amount/consistency of rainfall. The correspondence with lactose tolerance is almost perfect

You can use Arabic names to measure Islamization in the Middle East, Biblical names to measure Christianization in Egypt. But if all you had to go on was first names you would conclude Christianity only reached Western Europe after 1000, when the first French "Jeans" appeared.

https://twitter.com/crimkadid/status/1595181932161245185

Across all of Western Europe Germanic names were dominant in 1000, even in places like Italy where Germanic languages were never widespread. The onomastic effect of 1066 was initially only to replace one set of Germanic names with a different set (William, Robert, Richard).

Jonathan Hutchinson was a Victorian era surgeon who had what some called an obsession with the idea that eating rancid fish was the true cause of leprosy. His 1906 book on the subject is now just a mocked Victorian curio, but I will show you how close he was to the truth. By 1600 leprosy was extinct in most of Europe. In some places though the disease lingered on, above all in Norway, whose last leper died only in 1946. Medical historians debated for decades “What is it that makes Norwegians so uniquely disgusting?”, which I thought was funny.

The first PC of genetic variation in Norwegians separates the part Siberian sections from the rest: such ancestry is rare. The second PC is identifies Agder as the most isolated region of the country: old anthropologists also thought they were odd.... nature.com/articles/s4143… When Alette Schreiner began to measure Norwegians she started in Agder, particularly Valle, "..because it is probably the most secluded, most conservative place in all Norway; its inhabitants are still living in many respects in the saga period, and mingle little with outsiders."

Mormons can spot other Mormons; researchers say the chief giveaway is their healthier appearance, especially their skin. But I'm starting to think there's more: to me it seems a bizarre number of Mormons have jet black hair. The last four LDS Presidents:

https://x.com/crimkadid/status/1349798800861376514

And the four before that:

Here are some basic notes on Tutsi genetics/appearance: Hutu and Tutsi DNA is very hard to find online, but Razib managed to snag some from his readers and demonstrated that the two groups are very distinct, with Tutsi appearing similar to Maasai , both sharing a minor Middle Eastern element absent in Hutus. gnxp.com/WordPress/2019…

Alexandra Daddario attracts a lot of attention as maybe the most good looking/frighteningly white woman in America. Daddario is so beautiful that it should be obvious we're not dealing with a real American here. So, where in Europe can we find her good looking cousins? Her father is mostly Italian, but photos show she inherited her aqua blue eyes from her mother, who is English/German on one side and Hungarian on the other. So, which ancestry type is more likely to produce someone who looks like Snow White?

The truly great Norm Macdonald, one of the world’s few interesting people, is dead. Some notes on Norm’s strange life for devoted fans: Norm dropped out of high school when he was 15, then spent 10 years as a semi-criminal drifter, working as a lumberjack, picking tobacco, moving furniture, and stealing typewriters for re-sale on Indian reservations.

There was a lot of media coverage on the 2020 finding that average body temperature has declined 1.2 degrees F since 1880, probably due to lower inflammation. Somehow though, no one asked the obvious question: wouldn't a higher metabolic rate help keep 19th century people thin? There were three sets of measurements in the study, one in the late 19th century, one in the 1970's, and the last in 2010. Amazingly, the samples from the 1970's had temperatures closer to those from the 19th century!