i'm not sure if this belongs in ask science or in here, but a recent submission got me thinking: how were the mentally retarded viewed by their peers during prehistoric times?

did retardation exist back then? would there be a way to distinguish a retarded "tribe" member from the rest? how so, considering the barbaric nature of man at the time. it would seem that in the absence of civility, retardation wouldn't be as big of an issue.

what would happen to someone who was born retarded? would the parent's give them special treatment? would they get any sympathy from the rest of the tribe? would they be looked down upon? (IE: weakest member of the pack dragging the tribe down.) or would they be abandoned?

these questions and more i am wondering, thanks.

I know the French Revolution did have spillover effects in still-French colonies, most notably Haiti, but what about Quebec? For a place whose motto is "Je me souviens" ("I remember"), surely the Quebecois must have been keenly interested in events taking place in the home country?

Sort of a separate question, but when the Revolutionary Wars began, was there any activity in Quebec in support of France?

You see in almost all movies, TV shows, and even video games where formations of soldiers, large and small, would be marching in cadence while moving on and off the battlefield. Was this actually done, or would large formations/phalanxes etc simply keep their form without cadence, seeing as much of the time they would be marching over uneven ground, and not all had drummers?

On the wikipedia page about the art historian EH Gombrich there is this intriguing passage:

During World War II, Gombrich worked for the BBC World Service, monitoring German radio broadcasts. When in 1945 an upcoming announcement was prefaced by a Bruckner symphony written for Wagner's death, Gombrich guessed correctly that Hitler was dead and promptly broke the news to Churchill.

A bit of context: Gombrich was an Austrian-born Jewish emigre who lived in Britain during World War 2 and eventually became a British citizen. His mother was a classically-trained musician and former pupil of Bruckner's.

How would Gombrich have correctly deduced Hitler's death by hearing the Bruckner symphony? Was the announcement that followed the symphony the announcement of Hitler's death? Can anyone clarify how the death of Hitler was made public in Nazi Germany? How did Gombrich break this news to Churchill? Was Churchill in the same room as Gombrich, and if not how would Gombrich have contacted Churchill?

I'm not talking about white supremacist movements, of course.

The fact that many today's advanced countries (France, Germany, UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Nordic countries, Japan, Australia, Canada, US...) are what they are dates back to centuries of more favourable and advantageous conditions or is it mostly results of more recent events?

Also, are trends reversable and such countries will eventually lose their spot (due to slowed growth in some of them), or is it the case that "they are there to stay"?

Hello, I am working on a paper concerning reasons that Caesar would need to have a decisive victory in Gaul, and I wished to discuss that he was in debt and victory would bring money to him.

I read all over that he was in debt, but I can never find references to specific sources. I need a primary source or a secondary source that will reference or argue why he was in debt.

If he really was in debt, where does it say it, and if he was not in debt, why is it so commonly stated?

I'm interested in a brief synopsis of why the city-state model is ineffective, or alternatively, the reason why a territorial state or a nation state is currently preferred.

Possible shaping questions:

1. What are the disadvantages of living in a city-state?
2. Around when did the city-state model phase out of history?

Bonus: Are there any examples of city-states being joined by political or military alliances (like that of Athens and Sparta) but in a more permanent fashion, while retaining autonomy?

I'm looking for a very general explanation of what some of the major events in history (that happened to them) would look like to a Native American, with respect to the culture they were brought up in.

I'm trying to get my bearings straight with some of the highlights of human and pre-human history. Can anyone confirm or deny the following account (and feel free to elaborate where it seems helpful--particularly in regards to technology, which is my main interest)?

Australopithicus evolved from earlier primates in central Africa about 2 million years ago (rough timeline), and at a certain point spread out from jungles to savannahs. The latest species of this genus used very primitive stone tools. From Australopithcus the first hominid species evolved, and from that hominid, several other hominids evolved. Some of these hominids were increasingly human-like and started fashioning more sophisticated stone tools like the hand axes.

Australopithicus had at some time spread out from the jungles to the savannahs of north/central Africa and eventually through Asia. Hominids also began in Africa and spread throughout the world. When humans finally did likewise, about 50,000 years ago, wherever humans arrived there coincided an extinction of the other hominid species in that region. Humans also spread farther than previous hominds, to more northern climates and eventually the Americas.

At this point people are hunting, gathering, and in particular a lot of the plants that they like the best are having the best odds of reproductive success. The environment was adapting to the presence of humans, and slowly turning into a form that would allow for domestication much later. Wolves may be staying closer to human camps for whatever reason, possibly to get our food scraps. Any aggressive dogs get killed, which was also applying selective pressure on their population to transform them into a domesticatable form, namely the dog. Climate change might also have driven humans and animals toward scarce water resources where they would have to live together. Possibly with early forms of cattle, sheep, or pigs, humans would have to make sure that the animals don't die out. That means killing the right ones at the right time for food but also protecting the herd from other predators, etc., which could have laid the foundations for early sherpherding.

About 10,000 BCE we see some societies slowly adopt practices that would morph into agriculture. In the Fertile Crescent the Natufians gather wheat and other crops that can last over a year after harvesting if they're kept dry. But the need to carry the wheat causes them to build storage structures and tend toward sedentism, although much of their diet still derived from hunting. Due to the Younger Dryas they had to abandon these structures and return to foraging, but with the retreat of the Younger Dryas they might have re-settled areas where domesticable plants and animals were available.

The Catalhoyuk civilization may have represented a joining of people practicing sedentary crop gathering and shepherding. This constituted a very nearly agricultural society, although it's not clear that crops fully depended on humans for reproduction and therefore may not have been fully agricultural.

Other people developed agriculture independently in other regions, including the Indus Valley, two eastern Chinese peoples along the Yellow and Yangzi rivers, the Central American Olmecs, and the South American Norte Chicos. Less is known about these origins because we haven't yet conducted the necessary archaelogical research.

Societies tended to wax and wane in their development of agriculture, sometimes abandoning it completely, probably because it was more work than it's worth. However, when a society developed agriculture, it would afford it more power in the ability to give larger gifts at inter-tribal meetings and in the ability to raise larger armies in wars. Agricultural societies would then often forcefully dominate neighboring societies or neighboring societies would adopt agriculture in response, as an attempt at defending themselves.

Internally, these societies would develop increasingly complex political structures. In general a leader would justify his (usually a male) power by religious claims, or by claiming that he could defend the civilization and wage wars for the profit of the civilization. Still, priest and military classes would often grow separately but in some parallel. Increasingly, people would perform specialized work. Their living quarters were initially compact and communal but continually become more spaced and distinct.

Socieities relevant here are the Minoans, Egyptians, Akkadians, Sumerians, and Chinese. Later the Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Aryans, and Hittites would be the relevant, large societies, and then Mycenaeans, Greeks, and a host of others, I'm sure. A complex struggle between various of these would ensue, which I'm not yet able to even attempt to describe or even understand.

After agriculture the most significant technological advances to come would be writing and bronze work. Writing probably came as an evolution from the artistic representations that had begun in even the earliest human and other hominid tribes, tending toward greater abstract symbolic representations. It was also necessary to have an agricultural society in which an educated class could develop and share a writing system.

Bronze working required the amalgamation of copper and tin. The discovery of copper probably came around by accident. We know some pre-agricultural people used malachite (copper ore) as ornament because it's a pretty blue rock, and ground it up as body paint. Since copper melts at the temperature of a camp fire, it is plausible that some could have fallen into a fire and they'd have observed the resulting pure metal the next day when they dug through the fire site. They had pottery enough to perhaps be able to shape the metal into rudimentary tools, but since copper alone is soft, they probably couldn't have made extremely useful tools with it. But as they then perhaps tried burning more rocks at higher temperature to see if they could get metal out of them, they may have discovered tin, and then discovered that the resulting mixture makes for a very strong metal that could make tools strong enough to take down trees and even be used for building material in some rare cases.

Iron followed after this, and while iron is stronger and makes better tools and weapons, this usually isn't a huge advantage for the overall success of a society. Rather, the significance of iron is the advanced technology necessary to smelt it, and societies that produced iron were remarkable because of their underlying social organization and greater knowledge in general.

So is this roughly accurate, did I get anything wrong or miss really important points?