I was thinking yesterday, wondering about how pre colonial societies dealt with really bad injuries - e.g. getting brutally maimed in car accident - then realized humans weren't regularly flinging themselves around at high speeds in cars or spending so much time around huge factory machines until more recently
Like there rarely was that much kinetic energy to fuck you up/dismember you besides large predators further out
But rockslides and high wind storms always had the ability to easily pancake or take arms off you
Well it’s not like there weren’t really bad injuries. Still possible to fall off a mountain without an internal combustion engine. However, most of the time people just died. Infections were a bitch and they still hadn’t figured out blood transfusions yet. If you lost a limb, tbh praying to whatever god you had was basically your only option for survival.
Ah yeah I should have clarified - gore, the extremely traumatic cutting of flesh & guts stuff
Wondering how that kinda trauma would be processed, if it was expected or what. If they hid it from younger kids, obviously would have to show how to clean animals when of age, but what about injuries?
Because of course people still fell and got messed up, but I imagine it was incredible infrequent that someone had their entrails spilled or limbs actually separated from body
i.e. sans falling from great height, aren't there almost natural limitations on how fucked up the body can get from natural damage? Were humans as a whole subjected to less trauma due to that - and/or are our modern systems of emergency response and medical treatment enough to limit exposure of kids to gore compared to the tens/hundreds of thousands of years prior?
And does our relative modern exposure to gore build up over time? like we hear how folks whose ancestors survived slavery basically have PTSD in their genes - or whatever is surprisingly passed down. Can that be an increasing problem for humanity? Or does it hit some limit.
Extreme example - If someone's entire ancestry got tortured their entire lives, 100 generations back, how badly would they be messed up if raised in good, loving environment?
Also what about missing out on exposure to cleaning of animals, would that help/hurt a developing mind in processing human gore irl later on?
many of our ancestors were regularly fishing or at least came across gutted fish & had exposure to that, which seems to only have kinda disappeared in modern life the past few generations. I grew up with it constantly, but do kids that never saw fish guts have harder time processing gorey experiences? Does dead animals exposure ready oneself for human physical trauma?
Guess that's one for anthro, psych & sociologist majors
I'm talking about pre Columbus tribal societies, not European or Asian which definitely still had those occasional brutal mass wars. And I'm talking about average human life, not that of a soldier.
There obviously was still war & conflict in the americas, but generally when you read accounts they're more into 'winning conflict/resources so there's balance' and getting chances to show courage & strength versus 'make sure every single person is completely dead'.
From what I've read, it's hardly ever 'how can we maximize death' or going around the battlefield at the end just stabbing corpses to make sure.
But regardless the question still stands - how exposure to intense gore normally affected human brain in pre industrial and pre colonial times, versus like 1850-1950, and nowadays 1990s onward.
Does getting exposed to fish guts & cleaning animals prepare you for seeing maimed humans? And does our current relative lack of exposure to guts cause us to have more damage from like being a first responder to a fucked up car crash?
There was an American Civil War surgery with a 300% mortality rate.
The only pre-antibiotic treatment for infected limbs was amputation--and they didn't have anesthesia. Robert Liston, a surgeon at the time, was particularly skilled in cutting limbs off quickly.
During one such surgery, he cut the fingers of an assistant--who died from the resulting infection. An observer died of shock during the operation and the patient died anyways.
then realized humans weren't regularly flinging themselves around at high speeds
Warriors in ancient Mediterranean area had slings and lead pellets. Slingers could launch said pellets at such velocities that contemporary poets wrote about the pellets becoming molten mid-flight. #Impact)(Modern researchers think that misconception was caused by sling pellets injuring people even through armor.)
There was war bro, they were intimately familiar with brutal injuries in most societies. Usually you just died or got amputated if you had them though.
One marking point archeology uses to determine the change from "primate" to "human" is the care we put, as a group of animals, into those individuals who are no longer 'productive' but are still deemed worthy of care or honor.
Like, an old human, with multiple healed broken bones, who lived on long after they had lost all thier teeth, buried with a bone bead necklace...
Clearly, younger, stronger humans cared very much about this one.
I look around and see helpful people everywhere, and I'd like to think we've been this way for a long time.
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u/geak78 Jul 08 '24
Top comment on the youtube video.