"A single mass killing of more than 140 children and over 200 camelids directed by the Chimú state, c. AD 1450."

Cuts transecting the child's sternum and displaced ribs suggests that "the chest had been cut open, perhaps to extract the heart." For most skeletons "No other evidence of perimortem trauma was observed" indicating the extraction of the heart was done on live victims.

As Spanish chronicler Cristóbal de Molina described "children had their live hearts taken out, and so the priests offered the beating hearts to the huacas to which the sacrifice was made."
Children were brought from across the region to be sacrificed next to the Chimú capital.
"Variability in forms of cranial modification and stable isotope analysis of carbon and nitrogen suggest that the children were a heterogeneous sample drawn from multiple regions and ethnic groups throughout the Chimú state."

There is a notion that largely peaceful hunter-gatherers are pressed into violent conflict due to population pressure and resource scarcity, but if you check with HGs, 'why are they fighting?' They would often respond It's about Women and Vengeance.

In a sample of 111 conflicts between Australian aborigines whose proximate reason can be discerned, 58% were about Women, 28% were about revenge, and a minority were about territory or material plunder; "Territorial conflicts, if not totally absent, remain negligible: this motivation appears only in three occasions...The two main causes of conflicts are retaliation and, above all, rights over women." When Napoleon Chagnon told the Yanomamo, a relatively war-like Amazon tribe, that American academics think that they fight over "game animals and meat," they laughed and responded: "We do like meat, we like women a whole lot more!"

Rates of physical aggression in children tracked since infancy are highest in the youngest ages and then decline over time.

As Saint Augustine would put it: "The feebleness of infant limbs is innocent, not the infant’s mind. I have personally watched and studied a jealous baby. He could not yet speak and, pale with jealousy and bitterness, glared at his brother sharing his mother’s milk. Who is unaware of this fact of experience?" There are also significant sex differences in physical aggression between girls (pink) and boys (blue) that are present since age 2.

Technological innovation has largely been driven by a small elite.
"drawing on patent records linked to census data. We document that the rise of innovation during Sweden’s industrialization can largely be attributed to a small industrial elite belonging to the upper-tail of the economic, educational, and social status distribution." Half of all Swedish inventors came from a highly elite background, and another third from the upper middle class.

2% of Hungarians have surnames ending in "y"; they were adopted in pre-modern times by elite families, signifying their origin. These "..y" surnames are still highly overrepresented among Hungarian elites.

"29% of all Hungarian prime ministers since 1848 came from a ...y named family", 43% of Austro-Hungarian PMs, and one French President whose father belonged to the lesser Hungarian nobility, Nicolas Sarkozy. Also, two of the ten Hungarian Nobel-laureates had a ..y surname. This study tracking elite surnames among skilled professionals and academics in Hungary shows that "social mobility rates under communism were the same as in the subsequent capitalist regime."

The abolition of slavery was advanced by Capitalists and industrialization.

British MPs who were industrialists or were sons of industrialists were the most supportive of anti-slavery bills. For other elites, there was "no correlation between attitudes towards abolition and being a merchant, a member of the landed elite or aristocracy, or having attended Oxford or Cambridge." The most common occupation of the signers on the 1806 Manchester anti-slavery petition, one of our earliest surviving anti-slavery petitions, was related to manufacturing.

The grand destruction of sedentary steppe areas of Eurasia by the invention of cavalry and the coming of Scythian-Cimmerians.🧵
"In the steppes of the North Black Sea and Azov Sea, as in the other steppe areas of Eurasia, the Iron Age corresponded with the transition of the Eastern European inhabitants from sedentary, pastoral agrarian people to nomadic, animal breeding tribes. By the 9th century B.C. the numerous steppe settlements including surface and subterranean dwellings used by the Bronze Age population had disappeared." Scythians would later ravage the Near East
"Scythians ruled Asia for 28 years and devastated everything through their violence and overindulgence. They laid everybody under tribute but as if that were not enough they raided and robbed everything each people had" - Herodotus

Germans accounted for 19% of the ministers in the Russian Empire, despite being around 1% of the empire's population.

Most of these Germans were 'Baltic Germans' incorporated into the empire during the conquests of the Great Northern War (1720). Only 80 years later, we already see that Germans have risen into positions of high prominence in the Committee of Ministers of Alexander I. Detailed origin of ministers.
The other non-foreign non-Baltic German ministers are probably Volga Germans brought in by Catherine the Great.
"The six ministers of German descent were either two or three generations removed from their families' immigration to the Russian Empire."

Linear B tablets mention Women taken as war captives from Anatolia, showing Mycenaean Greeks were raiding the region of Troy.
"These descriptions often use the word lawiaiai, ‘captives’, which is the same word used by Homer to describe women seized by Achilles."

Note that the Iliad begins with Achilles' rage about Agamemnon not handing him a captive woman (Briseis). The Mycenaeans were very familiar with the coasts of West Asia, and many places there are referenced in Linear B tablets.

Greco-Roman writers were the first to use coordinates of latitude and longitude to map places, and the first to lay down geometrical treaties specifying how to project regions onto maps.
This transformed Geography from a mere itinerary, schematically displaying places, into a real science based on mathematical principles.

Ptolemy's Geography, written around 150 AD, gives the coordinates of 8,000 different places, on top of being a monumental achievement in pre-modern mapping, when these coordinates are compared to modern Greenwich coordinates, a tight correlation is seen (0.98) between the numbers, indicating a remarkable degree of accuracy.
Comparison of Ptolemy’s longitudes and latitudes with real values.
ancientportsantiques.com/ancientmaps/cl…

Jokes from the "Philogelos", the oldest surviving joke book (dated 4th century AD).🧵
208. Someone asks a cowardly boxer, ‘Whom do you have a fight with today?’ With a polite gesture in the direction of his opponent, he answers, ‘With that dear sweet gentleman over there.’

A Frankish Odyssey.
Around 279, Emperor Probus defeated the Germanic people in a series of wars. As part of the peace agreement, Germanic groups were resettled throughout the empire. This included a group of Franks who were resettled in the region of Pontus on the coast of the black sea, but almost as soon as they were settled, the Franks rebelled.

Taking control of a fleet stationed in an Euxine harbor, they sailed out of the black sea into the Mediterranean, pillaging their way through Anatolia, Greece, and North Africa. They ravaged the famous city of Syracuse in Sicily and tried to take Carthage, but were repulsed. Eventually, they reached and passed the Pillars of Heracles into the Atlantic Ocean.
From there, they coasted from Hispania to Gaul, passing the British Channel until they returned to the shores of their home. Here's Edward Gibbon's description of the odyssey from his history:
"Of all the barbarians who abandoned their new settlements, and disturbed the public tranquillity, a very small number returned to their own country....The successful rashness of a party of Franks was attended, however, with such memorable consequences"

The share of rulers whose birth year is known can be used as a measure of the quality of recordkeeping in a given society at a particular time.
When the elite bureaucracy that produces and maintains historical records is poor, we get the names of rulers but not accurate numerical information, such as the year of their birth.

Statistical evidence for the previous statement can be seen in the fact that medieval European regions with a greater share of rulers with a known birth year have a higher per capita production of manuscripts and higher rates of numeracy among the elite( by looking at the degree of age heaping in their recorded ages).

Now, keeping all this in mind, let us look at the quality of recordkeeping since the start of the Roman Republic. 🧵
Rulers in the time of the Roman Republic were the consuls. Due to various historical reasons, we have data on all Roman consuls, 737 people, serving between 509 BC - 31 BC.
The % of whose birth year is known by century can be extracted from the digital prospography of Rome.

Late Bronze Age collapse in west Anatolia.
Number of archaeological sites in west Anatolia from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age, from 435 to 120. Data from the Luwian site atlas
luwianstudies.org/siteatlas/adva…

What Luwian hieroglyphics looked like.
Luwian was the main language spoken on the western coast of Anatolia in the Bronze Age, and was likely the language of Homeric Troy.
This inscription was found in Hattuša, the Capital of the Hittites. omniglot.com/writing/luwian…

35 percent of men in medieval England were called John.
More than half of men were named John or William.
From data from the 1377-1381 poll tax. historynewsnetwork.org/blog/4078

Ruina montium, "wrecking of mountains", A Roman mining technique in which pressurized water was used to crack mountain walls.
Pliny's description: "The third method will have outdone the achievements of the Giants. By means of galleries driven for long distances the mountains are mined by the light of lamps—the spells of work are also measured by lamps, and the miners do not see daylight for many months.

The name for this class of mines is arrugiae; also cracks give way suddenly and crush the men who have been at work, so that it actually seems less venturesome to try to get pearls and purple-fishes out of the depth of the sea: so much more dangerous have we made the earth!" "Las Médulas, the most important gold mine in the Roman Empire. The spectacular landscape resulted from the ruina montium mining technique"

Since the invention of exact perspective in the 1420s, which was followed by other artistic innovations, the price of paintings in Renaissance Italy tripled.
This is true even when controlling for characteristics of the painting and who painted them, indicating that the increase in the quality of paintings driven by these innovations was driving up demand, making paintings more profitable. "The expected compensations of a young apprentice (unaware of his future talent) were increasing during the fifteenth century. But a similar increase in profitability also applies conditioning on the talent of the painter...reaches levels in the 1480s that are about three times those of the 1420s."

Prehistoric Uralic speakers were on the eastern edge of Siberia. They met Indo-Iranian speakers moving east, received some genetic admixture, adopted horses and bronze metallurgy, and then journeyed to the west to conquer Finland.
"Yakutia_LNBA is associated with migrations of prehistoric Uralic speakers. We show that Yakutia_LNBA first dispersed westwards...into West Siberian communities associated with Seima-Turbino metallurgy....Seima-Turbino period individuals were diverse in their ancestry, also harbouring DNA from Indo-Iranian-associated pastoralists...Thus, both cultural transmission and migration were key to the Seima-Turbino phenomenon, which was involved in the initial spread of early Uralic-speaking communities."

88 papyrus documents mention the size of the cargo of ships entering Ptolemaic Egypt.
A general increase can be seen over time, such that by the mid-2nd century BC, the average size of the cargo of 37 ships entering the port of Alexandria was 179 tons!

This general increase in the size of ships and the capacity of ports is largely due to the achievements of Hellenistic Greek engineers in shipbuilding and port construction, one example of which is the Mega-Ship of Ptolemy IV Philopator, which had an unprecedented 4000 rowers and required the construction of a dry dock for its launch (c. 200 BC) which could be flooded by opening it to the sea and drained by "means of engines (organois)" after the ship returned to it. Plutarch's description of the 'Tessarakonteres', the 4000 rowers.

Historic European marriage and household types from data on 11 million individuals in 256 regions from 1700 to 1927.
"Female SMAM" - Average age of Marriage for Women.
"Female Service" - % of unmarried women working as servants among unmarried women.
"Marriage-Headship difference" - is the avg number of years since marriage to becoming head of a household.
"Proportion of Nuclear families" - looks at the Proportion of single-family households. Date can be represented as two clusters, an Eastern and Western pattern of Marriage