Living in the period of the Hundred Years War, the legendary king-knight and fighter for the Holy Sepulcher, Richard the Lionheart was, according to his contemporaries, a real hero, a very tall man - his armor, which has survived to this day, is intended for a person … 165cm tall.
In 1945, the famous Soviet journalist Boris Polevoy, when visiting one of the ancient castles in Germany (where cultural values and objects of art looted from all over Europe were hidden), heard from the soldiers that he had a lot of knightly armor, but - that's bad luck, even in the most the largest of them was able to climb only the most puny of the soldiers. The height of this armor was 165cm, while the others were designed for people only one and a half meters tall.
So, people used to be smaller.
And here's another interesting fact: in the second half of the 19th century, English girls started menstruating at the age of 16. And, as one can confidently assume, based on the age of women in labor, in the Middle Ages, sexual maturation of women was unlikely to occur earlier than this age. But already in the second half of the XX century - at 13-14 years old.
It turns out that from about the middle of the 19th century, a phenomenon known as acceleration began.
The first attempts to conduct a census of the entire population of our planet or somehow more or less reliably estimate it refer again to the middle of the 19th century. And from that moment on, they (these estimates) become regular and show a steady and almost explosive growth - although for millennia the population on the planet has remained at about the same level.
Of course, we can assume that this is a consequence of the success of medicine and the improvement of living conditions - but only all this applies only to Europe and even then not everywhere (for example, Russia was almost not affected, the bulk of the population, even according to the data of 1914, are peasants, and a third of them and horseless and heartless, that is, they had almost no means of subsistence at all, let alone access to medicines or other benefits of civilization). What can we say about Africa, India and the Far East …
By the way, an interesting fact, but the Far Eastern medicine, thousands of years ago, successfully cured those diseases that remained incurable for European medicine in the first half of the 20th century (and only the appearance of penicillin changed something). While even in excellently equipped modern maternity hospitals there is little chance of surviving a premature seven-month-old baby, Far Eastern doctors argued thousands of years ago that such an infant is completely viable and healthy.
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And we observe an increased population growth by no means at the expense of the countries of Europe that enjoy all the benefits (after all, it has long been noted that the higher the standard of living of society, the less people want to burden themselves with children) - but at the expense of those who are deprived of these benefits, they are also deprived of high technologies of medicine and comfortable housing and other benefits of civilization.
After all, they had no reason for growth - as they lived for centuries, they should have continued to live at the same level.
Instead, in just a century and a half, the planet's population has grown from half a billion to as much as 6 - i.e. more than 10 times!
And this was during the period of 2 world wars, economic crises, epidemics of new unprecedented diseases, malnutrition and lack of drinking water for half of the world's population, unprecedented poisoning of the environment with chemical and then radioactive waste …
Never before has there been such rapid growth.
For thousands of years, the technical level of development remained at a low level, and sometimes even dropped even lower, as happened in the Middle Ages.
They say that the development and consolidation of cities has brought technological progress - but it is easy to see that this is not so. Most European cities had literally only thousands of inhabitants, and even the largest capitals - for example, Paris had between 35 and 50 thousand people. At the same time, in ancient Athens during the youth of Socrates, as is known from the census, there were about 20 thousand citizens, as well as many stateless persons and, of course, an entire army serving all their slaves - so that the total number of inhabitants is no less than 100 thousand. at the most conservative estimate. But Athens was by no means the largest city of the ancient world - Rome was far superior to them (which, however, was inferior to the Asian cities). In the Roman Empire, paved roads were built in 7 centuries - enough for two equators of the Earth, in some places they are still used today. And in Rome itself, all the streets with carefully arranged sidewalks and pedestrian crossings, and there was a water supply and sewerage system in every house, even in five-story buildings for the poor (compare this with the slops splashing out directly onto the street from the windows in medieval Europe - in Russia then at least there were gutters dug along the streets and washed in the baths)! And the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, in which water was delivered in abundance 7 tier from the ground. And even more ancient Babylon, with its 90-meter tower, a great many smaller brick buildings and two rows of walls, on each of which chariots could have parted (the Egyptian pyramids do not count, since they were built by some earlier civilization and therefore cannot be considered an achievement of the Egyptians). And many mechanisms - such as the Archimedes screw (which then served to raise water and is still used from auger conveyors of bulk cargo to a domestic meat grinder) or military siege and throwing machines on torsion bars (and now considered the most effective suspension solution for tanks and cars) or commonly used then the flywheel (according to modern views, it is an almost ideal energy storage with an efficiency of more than 99%).
They say that slavery made the development of technology unnecessary - but all these and many other technical solutions (such as the lathe) were actively used in the Ancient World, and the rich Romans, as burials show, dressed in Chinese silk!
But in the Middle Ages there was only decline and degradation. India and China will have to be rediscovered, and the lathe has to be reinvented, and torsion machines are forgotten in favor of bulky and much inferior lever trebuchets, and even they appear only at the end, almost simultaneously with the invention of gunpowder by the Europeans.
Gunpowder is still an incident. The Hindus used it in military affairs of the millennium BC, as evidenced not only by their epics, but also by the ruins of Mohejo-Daro, whose stones were melted as a result of the explosion of a powder store (as indicated by the nature of burning and the scattering of debris). For centuries, the Chinese have used gunpowder only for fun - after all, a warrior cannot be frightened by the noise of a shot. Much more practical is the rapid-fire crossbow, widespread in China and Manchuria until the end of the 19th century, capable of releasing its own half dozen arrows in 10 seconds (it was cocked in about the same way as with modern pump-action shotguns).
Europeans also had crossbows in abundance, but … the first century, the use of gunpowder was limited to frightening the enemy, and they did not even consider it necessary to load the hand-helds with a bullet - but why, if the accuracy of even the most advanced flintlock rifles during their heyday of the ball is such that it is not something that man, it was possible not to hit the horse (that's when they invented the battalion-style salvo).
Reliable (the steel bow was not afraid of getting wet), powerful (pierced most armor), accurate (from the chronicles it is known that even women confidently hit targets in more than 50 steps) and easy-to-use crossbows were abandoned - in favor of a handbrake without a bullet, because that is how the noise from the shot is greater, and the enemy is happy to be frightened by the roar!
We can continue to cite a lot of examples of the backwardness and, frankly, the savagery of Europeans, even after the beneficial educational influence of the Renaissance. As well as a lot of arguments - against progress, without which thousands of years have done very well and which certainly in those unnatural forms in which it was embodied, did not have natural roots under it (well, in fact, why build rail tracks from which one cannot turn away - when it's easier to drive steam carts on existing roads).
PS This reminds me of Gumilev's theory of cosmic rays, which, passing through the Earth, cause a surge of strength in the peoples through which they passed. But … for many millennia, the level of technology remained approximately the same, and the alleged "rays from space" caused the desire of peoples to expand their habitat, which led to the creation of new ethnic groups - always and everywhere, and never otherwise. And then something completely different happens, technical savages suddenly acquire such an unprecedented interest in technology that they start to invent engines, and ethnic groups are not created but destroyed, and instead of a real surge of culture, we soon see persistently popularized degradation!
Although there was no economic need for these engines yet. The steam omnibus was first invented in England and was actually banned by the decision of parliament. But after not so long, the first railroad is being built in the same place in England - I note, a much more labor-intensive enterprise and violating much more property rights than a steam cart called an omnibus.
All this was not necessary and not profitable then, but could only be useful in one case - in the case of a very distant globalization, i.e. that erasure of boundaries, the process of which - not yet completed - we see only now.
Who - already and precisely then (and not later) - made the decision to destroy all the old states against the will of their rulers and the peoples themselves?
Andrey Kleshnev
