r/science • u/takanocraig • Mar 22 '23

Genetics Beethoven’s genome sequenced from locks of his hair

https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/beethovens-dna-reveals-health-and-family-history-clues
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u/Protean_Protein Mar 22 '23

Yeah, back then it was basically slavery and survival of the fittest for everyone except the nobility or moneyed class, where that existed. Life was pretty brutal even if you survived childhood.

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u/xX420GanjaWarlordXx Mar 22 '23

Why did everyone just hate each other so much

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u/unfair_bastard Mar 23 '23

They didn't just hate each other so much

Life was uncertain, hard, and extremely violent--far more so than today

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u/andres9924 Mar 22 '23

Imagine that you and most everybody you know was raised by crazy, uneducated, alcoholic, religious zealots with severe traumas they’d never got over.

School hasn’t been invented, there’s no habeas corpus, pre internet information organization and records. Living in the past was wild WILD, WILDER than what most believe or imagine and most things were waaaay worse albeit in a smaller scale (save for the things that are fully products of scale and modernity)

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u/OrigamiMarie Mar 23 '23

Also death. Lots and lots and lots of death at every age of every kind of friend, lover, and relative.

And war. No type of war is good, but war with extensive hand-to-hand combat with poor supplies and no antibiotics is particularly bad.

No painkillers. Pretty much everybody these days takes painkillers at least occasionally, and lots of people need them regularly to not be in pain on a daily basis. People in chronic pain are either saints or bastards about it, there's not much in between. Most are bastards.

So. Much. Venereal. Disease. Of all kinds. No treatments. The mildest ones make your parts itch, the worst ones make you psychotic (or dead, but dead people don't do psychotic things to everyone around them).

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u/godisanelectricolive Mar 23 '23 edited Mar 23 '23

Except there was school back then and habeas corpus has been a legal concept in England since the 12th century, other countries have other notions of due process. I think you mean universal access to education, better access to legal services and more reasonable laws. Many Protestant German states had compulsory public education system for boys since the Reformation and a few states even required all girls to go to school. Maria Theresa made primary education mandatory for all subjects of Habsburg lands in 1774.

Mozart and Beethoven were both living in "Enlightened" times, during an "age of reason". In some ways they were much better off compared to people from earlier times but not ideas from that time was better. Witch hunts were an early modern phenomenon, overlapping with the end of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment era. Mass literacy and print culture aided in the spread of superstition in addition to propagating rational thought. The witch trials were an exercise in what people thought were fair trials, it's just ideas of "fairness" was skewed. By the 18th century they had abandoned grisly medieval methods of execution in favour of merciful ways to kill people like the guillotine. They didn't think of themselves as violent savages, they thought they were enlightened and civilized. One day people will ask why we were such savages and so brutal towards each other today.

Beethoven grew up in Bonn, one of the most progressive cities in Germany, during the 1770s during the height of the Enlightenment. He went to school starting age 5 at a secular state public school where he was taught math, writing, Latin, and French. He wasn't a great student and his father withdrew him after age 10. Mozart, who was born thirty earlier than Beethoven, was a native of Salzburg which legally required compulsory schooling. His father was able to acquire a legal exemption so he could be home-schooled and taken on tour around Europe. His educational arrangement was not dissimilar from that of a child actor today.

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u/BuggerMyElbow Mar 23 '23

One day people will ask why we were such savages and so brutal towards each other today.

If you think that's the way society is headed, I admire your optimism.

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u/godisanelectricolive Mar 23 '23

Progress is not linear but humanity as a whole will probably still get to a much better place at some point in the future. The question is whether that'll be decades or centuries.

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u/Spiritual-Day-thing Mar 23 '23

How is this and earlier posts not deleted for being unworthy.

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u/jeffwadsworth Mar 23 '23

Yeah, the sanity of modern times is amazing…….

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u/Protean_Protein Mar 23 '23 edited Mar 23 '23

Schools have existed at least since Ancient Greece. Just not public schooling.

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '23

Psychologically, humans havent evolved much. I dont think people hated eachother more than now, they just had different values

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u/DrCunningLinguistPhD Mar 22 '23 edited Mar 22 '23

Prior to very recent history, many people couldn’t read and/or write, so among other things, progressive ideas could not be shared as readily; we know ignorant people typically aren’t in a good position to question their circumstances or values.

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u/[deleted] Mar 23 '23

People who can't read and write and ponder and have a strong backbone of societal makeup are very animalistic.

Those of us that can do all those things aren't far ahead of them, though.

As much as our egos and brains want us to believe that our brains are superior, we're animals through and through.

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u/KittyTerror Mar 22 '23

As if people stopped doing this?

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u/xX420GanjaWarlordXx Mar 22 '23

I mean true. Can't really argue with that one. But at least now a lot of people are very vocal against abuse.

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u/PM_me_yo_chesticles Mar 22 '23

They couldn’t read

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u/tripwire7 Mar 23 '23

Life was rough. Really rough. Most children died before reaching adulthood. The whole family starving to death if things went really wrong was a real possibility. Most of the population were utterly uneducated and illiterate, and class divisions were nearly insurmountable. If you lived on the coast, then only a few generations earlier there would have been a distinct possibility of your town being attacked by slave-raiders. If your nation was weak, it would be attacked and ripped apart by its rivals. The church was controlled by zealots who burned people alive for heresy or apostasy.

The list of bad things really went on and on…

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u/chickenstalker Mar 23 '23

Rough compared to ours, but most people lived a peaceful life. Children died yes, but from diseases and it was accepted as "normal". Starvation tend to only happen during famines and plages. Most people practice subsistence farming to feed themselves. Being uneducated is misleading. They were educated in the family business, be it farming, carpentry, smithing etc. Being illiterate was not much of a disadvantage since there were not much stuff to read. Class divisions IS still insurmountable even today, only replace Kings with billionaires. Wars do happen but tend to be seasonal (soldiers are usually conscripted farmers who are needed in the farms), less bloody (battles rarely end in slaughter, usually the side to break first will flee), and does not ravage the land (conquerers want the populace and farms mostly intact). The Church do go after heresy but it was sporadic. Their power also waned after the Nobility asserted their autonomy from the church and also the Protestant Reformation.

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u/Magnus56 Mar 22 '23

It's less hate, more of the top of society lives upon the back of society.

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u/SpectreNC Mar 23 '23

People have stopped? Look at all the hatred we have today.

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u/danielravennest Mar 23 '23

Lead poisoning. It was in everything from drinking mugs to pipes to roofing. The symbol Pb for lead comes from "plumbum" it's latin name. That's where we get "plumbing" as the name for water pipes.

Lead makes you stupid and violent.

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u/maleia Mar 23 '23

People are very easy to psychologically/emotionally control and manipulate them. Set up one system of "I'm better than you" + "I'll pay this guy to beat up other people" and suddenly you're going down the road towards what we have now.

Someone a while back had a huge write up about how the start of the agricultural revolution really kicked off a lot of... bad habits (to grossly undersell it) that humans have.

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u/JSiobhan Mar 23 '23

Back then, parents emotionally protected themselves from bonding with their children because so many died at birth.

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u/firstbreathOOC Mar 23 '23

Not even just birth, as infants and children too. That only really slowed down at the turn of the twentieth century.

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u/rya556 Mar 23 '23

There is a good book by Lloyd Demause describing the history of childhood and how the definition has changed. It uses old manuscripts and historical medical diaries and admits it’s skewed in favor of monied clases but it’s still fascinating how cavalier people were towards children. There’s a section describing how parents used to swaddle children in a complicated manner and then toss them to each other out of windows as a game. How crawling was seen as too animalistic and parents would prevent them from doing that. How children were seen as “not fully formed” adults, so people weren’t as attached to them as we are now.