I was recently reading Plutarch's 'How to Profit by One's Enemies' essay, and he says the following:

"Primitive men were quite content if they could escape being injured by strange and fierce animals, and this was the aim and end of their struggles against the wild beasts; but their successors, by learning, as they did, how to make use of them, now profit by them through using their flesh for food, their hair for clothing, their gall and colostrum as medicine, and their skins as armour, so that there is good reason to fear that, if the supply of wild beasts should fail man, his life would become bestial, helpless, and uncivilized."

This seems to indicate that Plutarch was aware that there was a period before his time where people lived a more brutal life with less knowledge and ability to manipulate their environment. That taming and domestication were new developments. It attests to some knowledge of a life without cities and without agriculture - but he's not talking about contemporary 'primitives' outside of the Empire, he's talking in the past tense, about historical people who led to his present, and an uncivilised state of being which might return again if supplies of natural resources were to run out.

Would there have been any realistic concept of hunter-gatherer societies existing before agriculture, or was this conjecture? I understand that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle ended ~3000 years before Rome, how would any knowledge of those times be recorded or passed on?

If there was knowledge of these people, would Plutarch and his contemporaries have had an idea there had been less developed societal interaction also? That written language for instance was a new invention and had not always existed?

I'm curious if there is anywhere online with resources I could use to piece together what my hometowns road network used to look like. Unfortunately I live far from where I grew up so anything involving the visiting a history centre or something like that isn't possible. Specifically, I'm talking about Athens, Ga.

If a new student to French wanted to compare their levels to those of these people, at what level can their literacy be measured?

For example Jean could not read or write (correct?) so would this mean a beginner to the French language would already surpass her intellect after a few academic semesters? If she was religious, is there any reason why she could not learn through the church.. I mean she would have to read the Bible right?

Did Napoleon simply have an accent or was he obviously not entirely fluent either? Is there any way to know their knowledge/fluency of the French language?

China may have been militarily incompetent during these times, but wouldn't civil unrest eventually destroy the puppet governments Japan planned on establishing? What was the Empire's long game?

So here's whan question that has been in my head for a while now: How did the first explorers in Center and South America understand the natives? I mean, in my case, it's kind of easy to learn German because it shares some carecteristics with other languages I know, Spanish, Portuguese, French and English are very different from the lucayo, taíno or arawak languages. How did they manage to communicate and how did they learn their language?

I am being ethnocentric here and asking about the western concept of marriage specifically.

It's late 1944, early 1945, everything is pretty much lost, Hitler orders Speer to destroy Germans infrastructure, but the order to use chemical weapons against the hordes of soviet men pouring into Germany never came.

I've been invited in some interview which is related and I want to bring with me legit knowledge of the history and culture of it.

There was no photo ID back then. Why did they accept their banishment to the forest and not just walk to another fiefdom or community and pass off as a traveler or something?

What were soldiers in navies such as ancient rome, egypt, or greece equipped with? I would think armors like chain mail would cause you to drown if you fell off your vessel.

I believe it is in the third paragraph of the piece.

I saw there were other threads about it, but they were over a year old without very good answers. Hearing from someone who specializes in this field would be awesome.

This applies not just to Europe but the whole world over

Seems a lot of important texts came in span of a few hundred years.

Tao Te Ching and Old Testament
Plato, Aristotle, Euclid and Confucius
etc

• Leonardo Da Vinci

Thanks in advance.