Why do we think our ancestors were stupid?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 15 ก.ย. 2024
- Do you think the War of the Worlds radio broadcast caused a panic? Or that people once ran from a movie of a train? If so, you've fallen into a common trap! But don't worry, you're in good company if you did, because this is basically just how humans have operated for a minute.
Why do we think our ancestors were stupid? Why do we think people in the past were terrible people, morally corrupt and cruel and easily manipulated? The question is as complicated as it seems, and don't worry, this video essay does GO SOME PLACES.
Listen to the full interview with Marsha P. Johnson and Randy Wicker:
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As a history buff for medieval history I am WELL acquainted with the whole “wow we sure are better and smarter than the people of this time period” like, fun fact they brushed their teeth and probably had better teeth than we think due to a greater lack of sugars in their diets.
too true! my ancestors were primarily fat and protein eaters, with the majority of their carbs coming from foods like wild rice, squash, and corn. not very many opportunities for sugars to destroy their teeth or inflame their bodies.
The funniest thing about actually seeing the train footage is how the perspective isn't even anywhere in the train's path it's just, standing on the train platform.
That made me laugh, too. It's footage of a train pulling into a station, as they're known to do, except completely silently, as they never are. Why don't we have a rumor that the people watching "Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory" thought they were going to be trampled? At least the horses are walking straight at the camera.
Damn. I came here for, "No. They weren't that stupid" and I got that, but also walked away with, "And you're likely making the same mistakes they did when you come into a subject with only part of the information and make assumptions about the entire thing."
Great video.
The part where you talk about Stonewall not existing in isolation as the "start" of LGBTQ+ liberation efforts, we love to think of history of single events and single people making major changes to history seemingly in a vacuum, which is wrong and so often dangerous in so many ways. No one single person can change history and no single event, revolution, or movement is birthed in isolation without years, decades, even centuries of causes building up to it and subsequent events and movements reshaping its very impact.
well said!!
Whenever in media or conversation the topic of "killing H*tler as a baby" comes up I have to think of this. I suppose it's easier to think of it as something that wouldnt have happened without that One Person instead of being confronted with the reality of the situation.
I mean, Hitler is dead and yet we are still troubled by these ideologies today. Even if he wasn’t the face, it’s clear that people readily accept this hateful worldview. It’s very insidious
Expanding on the stonewall point as someone whos done organizing work: The idea that change comes from a handful of big events is so insidious. People don't recognize the small work of people in the past making change on a variety of levels from local to national effect and from varying degrees of radical to moderate action. So they dont see the value in showing up to meetings ever week and carefully planning demonstrations and campaigns and neighborhood organizing. So people just sit around waiting for the next big event thats going to change it all. Everyone wants a big hero moment, not persistent, sustained, often frustrating and boring organizing.
"The fact that history is also produced outside of academia has largely been ignored in the theories of history... Such an impact does not lend itself easily to general formulas..."
- Michel-Rolph Trouillot
When I read Candide, I realized I had been underestimating historical people by not giving them enough credit for being funny. I didn’t realize I was considering humor a modern invention. I learned my lesson while reading and laughing my butt off (iykyk).
I was gonna say "I had that story dispelled like a YEAR ago!" and then I started wondering who I heard that from, then saw this was from a year ago, so there we go. Keep bein' awesome, Jenna.
I always love how neatly and accessibly you present complex topics into shorter videos, while still encouraging folks to do further research of their own! Another good'un here too :)
I think it's really helpful to see some ancient graffiti to dispel the notion that people used to be chaste or simpletons. People have been drawing dicks and writing " was here" for as long as we've been drawing or writing. Throughout time and across boarders we're all basically the same, just in different circumstances.
I live near the famous Pont du Gard aqueduct in southern France and visit it frequently. When you walk right up to it, you immediately see that it's absolutely covered with graffiti, chiselled into the Roman stones over untold centuries.
This was a great video on a really interesting topic! I remember watching an Adam Neely video on the myth of the "Medieval Tritone Ban" which started me down a few paths related to things that I believed (or at least accepted as plausible) simply because I had heard them over and over again. As Adam says in his video, "repetition legitimizes."
Good thing it's not super easy to spread misinformation nowadays...
Repetition legitimizes.
@@felipevasconcelos6736 "Repetition legitimizes" is definitely a good idea to legitimize through repetition, so i'll contribute
@@endmark_3447Legitmacy comes from repetition.
@@felipevasconcelos6736 you can say that again!
Its a great day when Jenna posts!
I won the bet but watched to the end anyway, because as someone who does consider themselves a historian, it's just that good! So thank you for it!
(and, if anyone feels the itch to read more theory about how historians deal with this topic, I do recommend David Lowenthal's "The Past is a Foreign Country")
Jenna now owes you two likes
I was never really under the impression that people were more stupid back then than the idea that a lot of people lacked real context for the technology at the time. In the same way 80% of people don't even know what 10% of the right click button does in the windows file explorer, even when it would help them immensely when doing basic tasks(as someone who tried doing tech support for family and friends before realizing its a sysiphean task from how many of them don't have even basic literacy). Its not so much they're stupid than it is nobody told them or they didn't really take any interest in the subject matter until it was quite literally put in front of them through advertisement or happenstance. I didn't realize people actually meant 'yeah people in the past were stupid for this'.
Agreed. I'd always interpreted the train movie myth as "this is what a normal human reaction to a realistic moving picture would be if you had never seen one before". Like, any one of us would also mistake it for reality if we were in that situation, witnessing for the first time something that the vast majority of people had never witnessed. We're the weird ones for having a society where it's a normal, everyday experience.
@@hectormunhoz5766 I try to imagine what it would be like if movie technology advanced to a point where entirely realistic, solid-looking holograms would materialize around us. We already have some of that in the form of VR, and people's reactions can be pretty extreme!
Wow, I felt so smart for knowing about the Train movie and War of the Worlds one, but you totally got me on Marsha P Johnson! Interesting stuff, thanks for this!
Super interesting and very insightful. I agree that we are extremely biased in representing what we want. I often try not to be biased, but sometimes it feels unavoidable, especially when it comes to history. Nevertheless, it's something we should strive to improve and work on.
Jenna, you deserve so many more subscribers! Great video!
I'd argue there is a fair amount of increased literacy in many topics which has shown an increase in intelligence, but at the same time, I think people were as cunning as as are today, but they just didn't have many of the same mental tools that we have and the wealth of information. I've heard some argue we are headed towards idiocracy which I think is flat out wrong. Adding tools often just translates or scales the problem sloving one has to do.
Loved the concept of these "trivia" pieces being analysed for why they became a widespread notion - not "what does this 'fact' say about THEM back then" but "what does this 'fact' say about us and how we conceive of history and THEM". What are we choosing to focus on? Why is this the narrative? And, as you suggested, what aren't we seeing all around this piece of trivia?
I've noticed these "why do we think people in the past were stupid" is coming up a lot in TH-cam videos nowadays, and I do think it's a reaction to the "wait, maybe progress isn't inevitable" you cite. But I also do think that misses a critical component of reality in that people in the past *did* often know less about the world than us, by virtue of being in the past. Knowledge and understanding take time to accumulate, so of course people understood (and still understand) the world in flawed ways. If you don't know what germs are, disease could be anything that might fit the bill: miasma, a witch's curse, god's punishment, imbalanced humors... It's not stupidity on their part, but expecting people in the past to "be like us" does a disservice to how different their basis of their knowledge would be. It makes our truths and understanding universal, rather than things that can be lost via the destruction of that knowledge, e.g. the book burnings you mention.
At the same time that we have gained knowledge, we have also lost a lot of information. And the more distant we become from the building blocks of our knowledge base, the harder it becomes to figure out where we go wrong. Also, so much of what we know today would not be as useful in the past as you might assume. Lastly, we live in the so called Information Age, and yet stupidity still abounds. We live in a different world than our ancestors, but not a smarter one.
Yes. I also think people tend to devalue the skills and knowledge that people did have. I can drive a car and write a computer program. But I can’t navigate by the stars or use a loom. People do the best with the technology and knowledge they have access to and being less knowledgeable doesn’t mean they are stupid.
@@alexisc3658 I agree. My brother once said to me "people accused others of being witches because to them, witches were *real*". They made logical decisions based on their knowledge about how the world worked, and so do we. You discuss the loom, and that makes me think: I remember watching Bernadette Banner talking about fast fashion by making a piece and discussing how long it took, and realizing that as a privileged American I had no knowledge of how much work creating clothes was. Someone from the 1800s (and today's factory sewists) would be acutely aware. Part of reading about the past is also realizing how much they know that you don't.
This video is such a good essay and I am thrilled that the thesis is to listen to historians. I love reading historical non-fiction and learning more context about events I already know about. My love of historical non-fiction came directly out of my childhood love for historical fiction and wanting to learn more about the context and historical events behind the novels I read. Thanks for another great video Jenna!
Commenting mostly to show engagement, but here's an "I was there" - I was contracting at a Silicon Valley tech company when Blair Witch Project came out and I heard a couple of different water cooler groups talking about whether the movie was a documentary. Strip that fact from context and you might say, wow, those tech people back in '99 were so stupid!
But actually... the first marketing push for Blair Witch Project DID kind of winkingly imply it might be real, including a straight-faced kayfabe promo special that aired on the SyFy channel. And none of the water cooler crowd had seen the movie yet, they just saw some ads or heard some hype, and made some idle conversation about it. I told them I'd read an early review that confirmed it was fiction and everyone was like "Okay, well, that settles that."
They didn't "believe" it was a documentary, they were just bandying the idea around because they weren't sure. Which was exactly why the initial Blair Witch promotional campaign tried to preserve that ambiguity-- because it gave people something to talk about, so their movie got more word-of-mouth. Scratch most of these stories and you'll probably find they originate that way. Just hype or exaggeration because it makes a better story that way.
Excellently said!! I think about how the millions of people in the past, distant and near, probably have a lot of the same feelings as we all do, even if the experiences and culture is vastly different. But then, also, there’s little way to know, as the language and conversations of Now are possibly incompatible with the Then. And what about the future, how different will we look to their eyes?
There was a Jacob Geller video that brought up the Train movie and war of the worlds myths, I believe it’s the Men Who Could Not Stop Crying… . Great minds think alike! Also, I’m not sure if this is what you’re referencing, but the Blair Witch Project has local legends about the production, and those stories, while much more recent and less historically relevant, have been told with similar hyperbole and intentions. It’s the Train myth twisted, the local farmers and landowners would spook the Movie Makers, frightening and fooling those West Coast city students. At least, that’s just the story I’ve heard.
Great stuff Jenna!
Having studied ancient history, I've always had to navigate the assumption that say, the Romans were ignorant about stuff like the economy, and didn't understand inflation properly. Obviously they will have been working with some communication limits, but it always struck me as a nonsense approach - they clearly understood the mechanism that could be applied to economic systems, but that doesn't always result in perfect decision-making.
And, well, we can look around us with our superior economic understanding right now... we probably shouldn't be throwing any stones in our extremely fragile glass house?
very insightful! i've been listening to some history podcasts lately and it really does make me appreciate that people have always been people
"Jenna Stoeber... That name sounds familiar, but I'm not subscribed. OH! One of my favorite minds on the Internet started their own TH-cam channel!" I'm late to this party, but no less delighted.
That was very eye opening for me, and honestly… a little bit humbling. I think I’m gonna need to rewatch the video a couple times to absorb it well since it was so dense with ideas. Either way, thank you for making this :)
I was just thinking about the train thing this weekend. "I should look that up, see if that's true," I thought, then immediately forgot. Thank you for making up for my weekend lazies.
I'm so happy someone made this video because this is a thought I've had for so long but I haven't been able to put it into words.
The way the belief in gradual progress over time just bc of a "natural inclination" towards it, was best illustrated to me was strangely through Disco Elysium. I think, they make it very clear in that game, that it is the most placid and status-quo upkeeping form of "leftism".
Might have also been my personal believes influencing my reading of the game, of course but regardless.
Jenna, I think this might be your best video (out of many many amazing videos). Thank you for writing about this important topic!
Very good video. I like that there was no music; it makes it more serious
I haven't heard any of these myths outside of the War Of The Worlds one, and kind of figured some people believed it, but most peopls didn't.
Though as to whether I'm smarter than my ancestors....uh....one of my ancestors was Jefferson Davis, so I'd like to think of him as an idiot.
8:05 I believe there was a study done some time ago that observed this: people whose primary language had fewer words for colors actually could see fewer colors than people whose primary language more colors for words, and could not distinguish shades of those colors as well. It could be said that a narrower vocabulary literally narrows your perception. Even physically.
That's one of those myths. The truth is more boring, they would just call yellow things honey-colored or whatever. Which to me explains why the word "red" gets invented first, you don't always want to call something blood-colored
@@yitzakIr if it was a myth, the counterexample you gave isn't a good one. "Honey-colored" would just be the word for "yellow" in that language. Like how the word for the color "orange" is also the word for the fruit in English.
I really liked this one and this is such a good perspective. Thanks for making such a great video (as always)
I ducked a bit the first time something flew at me in VR. I assumed the train reaction was sorta like that.
One of my favorite examples of historical brilliance are the use of polders in the Netherlands. Basically a lot of the land is below sea level and prone to flooding, and eventually (circa 16th century) they got sick of it. So how do you prevent lakes from flooding and turning the landscape into marshes for years to come? You build dikes around them and use windmills to drain the encircled bodies of water into a nearby river, obviously. Now you have a bunch of soft, smelly, shitty soil full of rotting aquatic life left behind--what are you supposed to do with that? Plant a ton of reeds to firm up the soil so that it can be tilled, and then torch those reeds to enrich the soil with a ton of carbon, obviously. Now you have more land, and that land has crazy good soil for agriculture. Repeat this process until you want something more challenging, then start doing it to the FUCKING OCEAN. Construction of polders didn't kick into high gear until the 1900's, but that's do to technological and construction challenges--not lack of ingenuity. Today, about 17% of the Netherlands surface area is man-made, hence the saying "God created the world, but the Dutch created the Netherlands." On top of that, the Netherlands is the world's second-highest grossing agriculture exporter. It is less than 3/4 the size of West Virginia.
Thank you for this. I've always especially enjoyed your videos and work. Your personality is a joy also. I also rewatch cyberpunk red on Polygon sometimes.
What a fantastic feature, Jenna!
I find it especially thought provoking that while yes some of 1984 is literally occuring, the actual analogous situation is how we forget the content and context of history. Ever since 3rd wave (Edit: 4th wave) feminism started up in the early 10's? I've been wondering what exactly the historical pattern of progressing civil rights looks like and how that feminist moment matched with previous movements.
I never really cared enough to research it because as a straight cis white man there was really no place for me to affect anything anyway, but I do relate to that loss of context and detail of the actual labor involved. I was homeschooled with christian materials so a lot of modern history was... glossed over, so I feel like the sanitization of history in education is more harmful than book banning.
Third wave feminism started in the 1990s but yeah. I’d argue that book banning and history sanitizing are two arms of the same mechanism but I do wish people paid more attention to what history books say (or don’t say).
will watch, like, and comment on all your videos!
based on the thumbnail I thought there will be something about the movie Changeling. It's based on a true story about police returning a child to a mother and the mother realising it's not her kid. Which kind of fits in with the theme of people being dumber in the past.
After further research it turns out that Angelina Jolie starred in Changeling and not Nicole Kidman
I remember watching a Doctor Who episode from a few years back where a neon*zi criminal went back in time, not to _kill_ Rosa Parks (there where reasons why that was impossible), but just to keep her from sitting in the bus chair that one specific day. Because apparently that would lead to an alternate future _evil USA!_
I'm used to fun nonsense in DW but that was the 1st time it genuinely made me tune out. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of how history works. History is always written _collectively._
As a kid, I heard an anniversary re-broadcast. I didn't hear the opening, and was wondering *what* was going on. This couldn't be real. But here it was on the radio, like the news. This was confusing. Then my mom explained what was going on.
I have no idea how accurate it is but Gore Vidal's Creation is one of favorite books and only enjoyable because the people are people and could be contemporary in another context.
The joke's on you Jenna! I was planning on staying till the end, liked and subscribed preemptively!
But yes, i wouls have lost the bet as well
I follow the news/events everyday, and only by looking at multiple contrasting information sources, and 'boring' records can I get some semblance of an idea as to what is happening. That is how I try to address biases.
In regards to 'the future is always better than the past', based off archaeology and dental analysis, medieval (~800AD - ~1500AD) peasants Did eat healthier then 95% of humanity today; in addition to not being surrounded by mass concentrations of pollution.
I won our bet, but I watched to the end and left a like anyways.
Since I'm commenting, folks who are curious for a War of the World situation that actually traumatized more people should read into BBC's Ghostwatch. Their disclaimer (a phone line running during the show) crashed on them.
Great video Jenna. With technology, we can see falsehoods or exaggerations or half-truths trotted out as facts ("oops, you caught me? then it's 'satire'") in real time. And even with fact checks put out almost as quickly, motivated reasoning and algorithmic echo chambers mean it doesn't matter. Per Twain, the lie can make it halfway around the world, but the truth can't reach your angry uncle's news feed. It makes me sincerely sad.
YUP! Especially the stuff about Stonewall. There was a lot more going on at that time than just Stonewall.
This was for real an awesome video, not what i expected from Jenna but great!
It’s not that i think that we are smarter per se than the average historical person. I think modern culture places a strong emphasis on the value of information and rationality that previous societies have not been able to implement in the same way. A large portion of the world now receives a basic education that they didn’t back then, information is more accessible especially after the internet came around, and empiricism as a value has been generally embraced when it previously had not been. Other societies definitely valued information in a similar way, but did not have the tools or resources to work with it like we do. Additionally, there are just a lot more humans now. I like to think of knowledge like the adage of standing on the shoulders of giants; nowadays, we have way more shoulders to stand on. We’re more knowledgeable simply by aggregate. I don’t think these people had like lower IQs or anything, but i also think that education systems today teach not just specific things like math or science but also logical strategies that can be applied to the world at large, often times smuggled into those regular subjects. We also have the advantage of time, which has provided insights into the way things work we didn’t have back then. People definitely were historically just as capable of the cognition we do today, but they weren’t given the resources to realize that potential. It’s like how people are taller now than in historical times, simply because we have better nutrition now.
Marking the date in my calendar. See you in 100 years!
Great video, Jenna!
I was going to stay for the end of the video anyway
hell yes Jenna this is terrific
Haven't watched the video yet but that's my favorite youtube thumbnail ever
Beautifully succinct and striking!
Excellent video! Thank you for making it.
Great work!
50 seconds movie? And people say tiktok is running our brains
Really liked this video!
Cool video.
Also very much enjoying your podcast
Great video as always Jenna!! Loved it!
Really enjoyed this video and I also have to say that doubleplusungood has somewhat distressingly made it's way into my mental vocabulary!
Thanks
Very good video!
This is a message I always need to hear
There's another legend that whereas the first French audience ran in terror when they saw the approaching train, the first Russian audience broke into tears because they remembered Anna Karenina's suicide. This served to cement the common cliché that the French are foolish and superficial while the Russians are cultured and profound.
In any case, why shouldn't an early cinema audience respond to what they see on the screen? Cf. "The Exorcist" or "Jaws," let alone any modern slasher flick. People are supposed to respond, otherwise there's no purpose to cinema.
Jokes on you, Jenna, I could not lose the bet because I had already liked the video before the anectode even started!
Great video! I am gonna caution you on one point though. You compare similarities between the behavior of US news media today and US news media 100 years in the past, and that's good. But then you conclude that this means this behavior is core to humanity, and that's bad. It's the same kind of trouble that evolutionary psychologists get into when they generalize the ancient past by studying freshmen at their school.
Honestly, I wouldn’t blame my ancestors for being freaked out about a train on film. The amount of times I’ve flinched at a TikTok of a soccer ball or a golf ball coming at the camera is genuinely embarrassing. I’m no better than anybody who ran away from the train. If anything, I’m worse, because video isn’t a new thing anymore, and I should probably know better.
How am I to learn anything from this video without a memable moment to which I can remove all context?
This is a worthy argument, but i don't find myself entirely convinced by it. Actual ground-truth fact is a fractal thing: there is always more that you COULD uncover, were you able.
At some point, you do need to accept that editorialization is an inescapable part of recording, because it's the only way to make the record coherent and memorable. Cliff's Notes are not NewSpeak; they are a tool of review.
This video is so good!
People like mythology and simple stories they can retell to their children. They'd much rather tell the story of Rosa Parks, the random black woman who was fed up having to go to the back of the bus and just, on a whim, decided to sit where she pleased rather than Rosa Parks, the well-educated civil rights activist who was part of an organized campaign that included Claudette Colvin and many others who were all part of a big lawsuit.
It also obscures details, like the fact that they chose Rosa Parks as the face of the boycott because she was light-skinned and not pregnant like Claudette was at the time. The story doesn't sound nearly as sweet when you factor in the realities of colorism and religious conservatism.
Thank you for the drag king representation ❤️❤️❤️
NEW JENNA
This is great
I absolutely believed the War of the Worlds story, but by the time I heard the Train Movie story, I was old enough to be skeptical. They knew what figurative things were. They had photographs, they had books. Speaking of books, I think it's interesting that we never hear about people who tuned into a radio play about a forty year old book and thought "oh, I read this once."
It's not like we're not ignorant now. We believe people got scared by a 50 second clip of a train. We believe that people panicked and rioted over a radio play. We believe that a bunch of Japanese kids got seizures from an episode of Pokemon. Look into it, the entire situation was eerily similar to the War of the Worlds broadcast.
There were a number of children who did have seizures, but it's due to a very specific light flashing pattern. The majority of these children recovered with no other further neurological episodes. Pokemon was on the verge of being cancelled due to a nationwide panic, but it was due to these children and their parents begging for understanding from the overreaching government. Instead, common sense laws were passed so people could better understand neurology. Basic neurology.
This is why you see things about THERE ARE FLASHING LIGHTS. PLEASE DON'T GO IN HERE IF YOU'RE SENSITIVE on things more and more these days. For most people, you won't know you are prone until you have one.
Okay but, it is much easier and much more widespread to be "smart" in the modern era. At a certain point that realistically wasn't that far back in history if we're being entirely honest, it didn't exactly matter if you had more developed critical thinking abilities than your neighbor or had more ingenuity because the resources didn't exist to capitalize upon those traits as they exist in the modern era.
Now you could argue (probably fairly correctly) that being "smart" or "stupid" really doesn't matter much in the modern world either, but at least the infrastructure for that difference to be something noticeable actually exists on some level that is commonplace.
A moderately educated person with some baseline level of intellectual curiosity can absolutely take advantage of largely-unrestricted access to the collective archive of knowledge accrued by humanity just being in their pocket and is thus at least functionally "smarter" than pretty much anyone in a vacuum.
I understand that the point I'm making really isn't what the video was about (and honestly before this video showed up in my algorithm I hadn't put much consideration into whether or not my ancestors were "stupid") but I think the answer to the question posed by the video is "because they probably were, at least by most measurable or recorded metrics."
I salute your integrity to Like your own videos
Hell yeah Jenna content
One thing I think modern people have no idea about is honor both the good and the horrible and why it exists for very understandable reasons.
Well, I'm pretty stupid. And I am made from my ancestors, ergo...
Anyway, great video! Love the game of telephone comparison.
Do people actually think our ancestors were stupid?
My immediate reaction to the title of the video was "I don't think that."
Barring obvious differences like access to public education, my expectation would be that our ancestors are just as smart as we are.
I've heard it, but thought it was silly. So I'll stay. Was going to watch the whole thing anyway though.
I heard of the train thing but did not believe it. I totally think people in the past were not smart because they were just like us and we are not geniuses now.
excellent :)
I think part of the problem with satire or other deliberately false narratives getting spread as truth comes from, for lack of a better word, sincere credulity. Because people will hear or read a story in some context where they aren't necessarily thinking critically about it, but when they mention it to others they have to process it more actively, and the instinct (one I know at least I've done) is that when you remember something that would make the larger point nonsense, you should assume you're misremebering that point specifically, and so you either remove it from the retelling or alter it to a nearby account that makes lore sense.
Snopes the urban legend and rumor checking site got somewhat annoyed people were citing them and included some stories that they made up from whole cloth and then confirmed as true, with a link to a citation taking the user to basically an April Fools reveal (though I don't think it was that season). One of the made up stories was that Mr. Ed, the talking horse from black and white TV, was actually a trained Zebra because they couldn't find a trained horse. And that you couldn't see the stripes because they were invisible on black and white televisions (including side by side photos). I absorbed all this, but when I was retelling the story, I came to that part and assumed I must have misread, and the all black photo was actually a _painted_ zebra, and the trickery was obvious in person, but hidden by the limitations of the camera. Which both removes the obvious "gotcha", but also provides ammunition for someone who finds the unaltered version, where they can assume _that_ has the misunderstanding.
This video is neat
I don't need a bet to stay, but I still lost it :(
!remind me 100 years
Trying to reckon with the objective, true reality that history is complex and nuanced and people have, on the whole, been doing their best for most of human history and my kneejerk instinctual reaction that everyone in the past was a shit-caked racist, barely capable of more than growing a turnip or commiting marital ****.
So...what would be easier...
A modern person transported back in time trying to live....
Or a person from the past transported to today trying to live?
Disease means the former would be easier but besides that my money's on the latter
I tend to assume we are getting far dumber and dumber with social media 😅
I'm my ancestors aren't stupid why can't grandma use a tv remote after being shown how every week for decades?
Bold of you to assume TH-cam will be here in 100 years, but I'll take that bet!
I think "People from the past no longer exist" is how agism works. Those people *do* exist, we just put them in care homes and*forget* they exist, and that's part of the individualistic and ablist society we live in.
Not to be a killjoy about everything 🙃
If I knew it was a myth then do I have to stop watching the video?
My ancestors were Greek, and as such invented everything the Muslim caliphates, and Chinese did not. So they were super smart!!