I think the theory is that modern jaws are too narrow to contain all the teeth, causing them to overlap and grow in "unintended" directions. The reason for the narrowness is lack of exercise in childhood due to the soft nature of prepared foods. I'm also a bit sceptical.
Not proof, but logic: Without machinery to do the work of processing food, it has to done by hand or not at all, which leads to a lot more jaw work. Especially if you're eating a lot of animals where you'll be eating off of bones. But even with plants too.
It is interesting that although Napoleon captured Moscow, the capital at that time was in Saint-Petersburg. Why didn't he go to the capital? This painting depicts Napoleon hopelessly waiting for a delegation from Russian Emperor with burning city in the background [1].
The capital was better fortified and the French wanted food and loot. So softer target sounds nice, especially if you think this crushes morale immediately and don't believe the opposition will go scorched earth (but they did).
> If I would take S.P., I would hold Russia by the head. If I take Kiev, I will hold Russia by legs. If I take Moscow, I will reach right into its heart!"
1. Napoleon's goal was to pursue and defeat the Russian army in the field, not necessarily capture cities. Going north would have meant releasing the pressure on the main russian field armies and let them engage his main force at their discretion while exposing his flank.
2. St. Petersburg remained the political and economic capital of Russia; St. Petersburg never displaced Moscow in real world importance.
3. St. Petersburg was shielded from land and sea with prepared fortifications on both and Napoleon lacked a fleet to effectively blockade it.
4. Its in the middle of a very dense forest and swamp, not the the best logistics and ability to maintain a siege.
The Nazis made the same choice in WWII and even though they were able to control the Baltics and had Finland as an ally never seriously threatened to take the city.
> The Nazis made the same choice in WWII and even though they were able to control the Baltics and had Finland as an ally never seriously threatened to take the city.
There was an 18 month siege of SP during WWII. SP starved and people there resorted to cannibalism to survive. I don't remember if it was ever taken but the Germans definitely tried to. And the situation there was ghoulish, so even if they didn't, they almost did.
You're correct and I'm wrong. Germany started negotiating Russia joining but this seems to have been disingenuous from Germany and part of the lead in to the attack on Russia.
It's more complicated than that. Go have a listen of the Mannerheim tape with Hitler. Hitler basically confesses to Mannerheim that Stalin was blackmailing Hitler with oil and that this was the casus belli for Hitler, but then Hitler had no idea of Stalin's tank manufacturing prowess and he says that if he had known he wouldn't have invaded Russia. Super interesting. You get the impression that though Hitler hated Russia and Russians, it was events that led to Barbarossa rather than Hitler's long-term plan -- things got away from his control real quick.
One theory I've heard for this, and sorry I don't remember the source, is that Napoleon suspected if he truly did take down the Russian royalty then he expected the rest of European royalty to unite and attack attack him.
he essentially invented the modern concept of conscription. there were press gangs and conscription-like things all through history but for the most part soldiers were professionals
He didn't invent it, the revolutionary government did and Bonaparte then inherited a massive experimented army after the French Republic having been at war for a decade when he took power.
> Also what surprises me, after years of several revolutions and chaos in France, how could Napoleon gather such a large army.
Conscription + France was basically the China of Europe at that point: it was almost as populated as the rest of Europe combined.
France then had a very, very, early demographic transition which dramatically limited its population. Had France followed the demographic path of England or Germany, France would have around 250M inhabitants today.
> France was basically the China of Europe at that point: it was almost as populated as the rest of Europe combined.
That doesn't seem to be correct. From Wikipedia: "During the Middle Ages, more than one-quarter of Europe's total population was French;[8] by the seventeenth century, this had decreased slightly to one-fifth. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, other European countries, such as Germany and Russia, had caught up with France and overtaken it in number of people." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_France
Because Napoleon didn't want to depose the Tsar, much less to conquer Russia, he just wanted to impose his (Napoleon's) will on the Tsar and on Russia as a whole when it came to strictly imposing the Continental Blockade against the British. A heavily defeated Russia wouldn't have helped him into achieving that.
> Because Napoleon didn't want to depose the Tsar, much less to conquer Russia... A heavily defeated Russia wouldn't have helped him into achieving [the blockade of Britain].
You think a heavily defeated Napoleon would help him a lot in that matter? Realistically, there was no third option, going in guaranteed than one of them would be heavily defeated.
At that point in time, Napoleon was in command of the largest and most heavily armed military force in history. And he assembled it to go beg the Tsar to blockade a third country? It doesn't make any sense.
It is also interesting that Russian army officers could talk to French without a translator, because Napoleon invasion happened in the period of "westernization", started by Peter the Great. The buildings were built in a Western style, calendar was changed to European, government, army and fleet were reformed, noblemen were required to shave their traditional beards, wear western-style clothes, used French language, and danced to classical Western music in events like balls and fought duels.
This is a major through-line in War and Peace. Native Russian characters write to each other in (untranslated-in-the-original! Hope your translation comes with footnotes!) French, and a significant chunk of the dialogue is in French as well.
It's a lot less interesting once you look trough the names of senior Russian officers - de Tolly, Bagration, von Benningsen, Wittgenstein, Osterman-Tolstoy.
One begins to suspect that the reason Kutuzov replaced Barkley was for a sort of reverse-DEI reasons.
I remember reading one of Peter the Great's orders regarding creating 10 new units in the army. Out of names of the commanders only 3-4 were Russian. So hiring foreign talent was also part of westernization.
How did you save me a click? Those bits were in this article. The guy that located the original report saved me some time.
You could only save somebody time if they skipped the content and started doing comments on HN anyhow, but that’s not all the information either, just a couple key points.
>Rather than the typhus pathogen, the team found traces of Salmonella enterica and Borrelia recurrentis, both of which can trigger symptoms such as high fever, fatigue and digestive problems.
"one that would see his army decimated by cold, hunger and disease."
2 things:
A)decimated means 1 in 10, not 9 in 10.
B) according to the wiki article, Napoleon had already lost 75% of his initial fighting force by the time he got to Moscow, before the withdrawal.
I am not sure an article on biology should include much history--I would certainly hope it did a better job on the biology...
Decimate is a word that often raises hackles, at least those belonging to a small but committed group of logophiles who feel that it is commonly misused. The issue that they have with the decline and fall of the word decimate is that once upon a time in ancient Rome it had a very singular meaning: “to select by lot and kill every tenth man of a military unit.” However, many words in English descended from Latin have changed and/or expanded their meanings in their travels. For example, we no longer think of sinister as meaning “on the left side,” and delicious can describe things both tasty and delightful. Was the “to kill every tenth man” meaning the original use of decimate in English? Yes, but not by much. It took only a few decades for decimate to acquire its broader, familiar meaning of “to severely damage or destroy,” which has been employed steadily since the 17th century.
The more language is allowed to drift, the harder it becomes to read old language. I think this is a particularly silly case, but in general, the complaint that people are misusing words shouldn't be met with "It's impossible to misuse words", which this argument implicitly is.
No one allows or disallows language to drift, there are no language enforcers. This argument is not “it’s impossible” but rather it’s pedantic to claim a word is misused, when it’s been used this way for hundreds of years and so the original definition is no longer applicable.
Bodies like the Académie Française do try to promote language standards ('enforce' is probably not the right word). But I'm not sure how successful they are.
Someone could of course institute language enforcers for English, but I'm very skeptical about both the enforcement mechanisms, and the usefulness of even a successful enforcement.
> If it is used a certain way by enough people, that is also an accepted definition.
This mentality seems to be prevalent in the USA, in Germany, on the opposite, many people see this topic differently - just because a lot of people use a certain word/term wrong does not make it right.
Using "literally" figuratively or, more precisely, as a hyperbolic intensifier [0], is a tradition employed by notable English writers who lived and died long before you were born.
Apologists for language attrition will assert that converging language into a handful of very simple words is doubleplusgood, and we should embrace the dumbification because that's 'just how languages work'.
But for a historical article, I did expect a slightly more nuanced take.
It seems that computer translation is not good enough to parse Pushkin's poems yet. I tried ChatGPT, the translation is at least readable, but written in a dumbed down language. Yours is not even readable.
Why would would use ChatGPT or any other kind of automated translation for a poem of famous poet who's probably been already translated in several languages including English?
https://archive.ph/EoayR
Check out the perfect set of teeth on the skull of the soldier shown in the article. Amazing how human dental health has changed since then.
the photo is here: https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/dna-reveals-real-killers-b...
(parent comment was posted before we merged the threads)
We’re talking about a foot soldier on Napoleon’s army, easy to keep a good set considering he could be 18-25.
And probably with limited access to sugar.
Probably, cane sugar was unavailable due to blockades and the Napoleonic expansion of beet sugar was only just starting.
1. The soldier probably died young
2. Good dental health has always been part of the screening to join a professional army
They were looking to analyze teeth. This might be selection bias.
Due to "softer" diets and all the sugar, right?
Harder diets were more common in ancient humans, and straighten teeth in childhood. I don’t know what the diet was like in 1800.
Do you have any proof? A doctor once mentioned this to me, but then I talked to an orthodontist and he called it BS
I think the theory is that modern jaws are too narrow to contain all the teeth, causing them to overlap and grow in "unintended" directions. The reason for the narrowness is lack of exercise in childhood due to the soft nature of prepared foods. I'm also a bit sceptical.
Not proof, but logic: Without machinery to do the work of processing food, it has to done by hand or not at all, which leads to a lot more jaw work. Especially if you're eating a lot of animals where you'll be eating off of bones. But even with plants too.
It is interesting that although Napoleon captured Moscow, the capital at that time was in Saint-Petersburg. Why didn't he go to the capital? This painting depicts Napoleon hopelessly waiting for a delegation from Russian Emperor with burning city in the background [1].
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Napoleon_in_burning_...
The capital was better fortified and the French wanted food and loot. So softer target sounds nice, especially if you think this crushes morale immediately and don't believe the opposition will go scorched earth (but they did).
> If I would take S.P., I would hold Russia by the head. If I take Kiev, I will hold Russia by legs. If I take Moscow, I will reach right into its heart!"
https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/27588/why-did-na...
Your comment has me remember a great graph of his army disintegrating. It’s such a good visualisation.
https://brilliantmaps.com/napoleons-invasion-infograhic/
His goal was the Russian army, they retreated towards Moscow and he pursued.
A bunch of reasons.
1. Napoleon's goal was to pursue and defeat the Russian army in the field, not necessarily capture cities. Going north would have meant releasing the pressure on the main russian field armies and let them engage his main force at their discretion while exposing his flank.
2. St. Petersburg remained the political and economic capital of Russia; St. Petersburg never displaced Moscow in real world importance.
3. St. Petersburg was shielded from land and sea with prepared fortifications on both and Napoleon lacked a fleet to effectively blockade it.
4. Its in the middle of a very dense forest and swamp, not the the best logistics and ability to maintain a siege.
The Nazis made the same choice in WWII and even though they were able to control the Baltics and had Finland as an ally never seriously threatened to take the city.
> The Nazis made the same choice in WWII and even though they were able to control the Baltics and had Finland as an ally never seriously threatened to take the city.
There was an 18 month siege of SP during WWII. SP starved and people there resorted to cannibalism to survive. I don't remember if it was ever taken but the Germans definitely tried to. And the situation there was ghoulish, so even if they didn't, they almost did.
SP was never taken by the axis.
Never taken, but it was a city in the Axis alliance while Russian and Germany carved up Poland.
I know no one who considers the USSR to have been an Axis power between the start of the war and Operation Barbarossa.
You're correct and I'm wrong. Germany started negotiating Russia joining but this seems to have been disingenuous from Germany and part of the lead in to the attack on Russia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German–Soviet_Axis_talks
It's more complicated than that. Go have a listen of the Mannerheim tape with Hitler. Hitler basically confesses to Mannerheim that Stalin was blackmailing Hitler with oil and that this was the casus belli for Hitler, but then Hitler had no idea of Stalin's tank manufacturing prowess and he says that if he had known he wouldn't have invaded Russia. Super interesting. You get the impression that though Hitler hated Russia and Russians, it was events that led to Barbarossa rather than Hitler's long-term plan -- things got away from his control real quick.
Wasn't Moscow the capital of Russia during WW II?
Yes. It became capital again in 1918 (Saint Petersburg had become capital in 1712).
One theory I've heard for this, and sorry I don't remember the source, is that Napoleon suspected if he truly did take down the Russian royalty then he expected the rest of European royalty to unite and attack attack him.
As I remember, after French revolution, there were coalitions of foreign monarchies with the goal of punishing France [1].
Also what surprises me, after years of several revolutions and chaos in France, how could Napoleon gather such a large army.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_First_Coalition
he essentially invented the modern concept of conscription. there were press gangs and conscription-like things all through history but for the most part soldiers were professionals
He didn't invent it, the revolutionary government did and Bonaparte then inherited a massive experimented army after the French Republic having been at war for a decade when he took power.
> Also what surprises me, after years of several revolutions and chaos in France, how could Napoleon gather such a large army.
Conscription + France was basically the China of Europe at that point: it was almost as populated as the rest of Europe combined.
France then had a very, very, early demographic transition which dramatically limited its population. Had France followed the demographic path of England or Germany, France would have around 250M inhabitants today.
> France was basically the China of Europe at that point: it was almost as populated as the rest of Europe combined.
That doesn't seem to be correct. From Wikipedia: "During the Middle Ages, more than one-quarter of Europe's total population was French;[8] by the seventeenth century, this had decreased slightly to one-fifth. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, other European countries, such as Germany and Russia, had caught up with France and overtaken it in number of people." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_France
Because Napoleon didn't want to depose the Tsar, much less to conquer Russia, he just wanted to impose his (Napoleon's) will on the Tsar and on Russia as a whole when it came to strictly imposing the Continental Blockade against the British. A heavily defeated Russia wouldn't have helped him into achieving that.
> Because Napoleon didn't want to depose the Tsar, much less to conquer Russia... A heavily defeated Russia wouldn't have helped him into achieving [the blockade of Britain].
You think a heavily defeated Napoleon would help him a lot in that matter? Realistically, there was no third option, going in guaranteed than one of them would be heavily defeated.
At that point in time, Napoleon was in command of the largest and most heavily armed military force in history. And he assembled it to go beg the Tsar to blockade a third country? It doesn't make any sense.
That’s what he had done to the Prussians and Austrians, yes.
It is also interesting that Russian army officers could talk to French without a translator, because Napoleon invasion happened in the period of "westernization", started by Peter the Great. The buildings were built in a Western style, calendar was changed to European, government, army and fleet were reformed, noblemen were required to shave their traditional beards, wear western-style clothes, used French language, and danced to classical Western music in events like balls and fought duels.
This is a major through-line in War and Peace. Native Russian characters write to each other in (untranslated-in-the-original! Hope your translation comes with footnotes!) French, and a significant chunk of the dialogue is in French as well.
It's a lot less interesting once you look trough the names of senior Russian officers - de Tolly, Bagration, von Benningsen, Wittgenstein, Osterman-Tolstoy.
One begins to suspect that the reason Kutuzov replaced Barkley was for a sort of reverse-DEI reasons.
And if you look at the people behind those names, you'll find that most of them were either born in the Russian Empire or moved there at a young age.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Andreas_Barclay_de_Tol... - moved to St Petersburg around the age of 3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Bagration - born in Russia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Wittgenstein - born near Kyiv
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Ivanovich_Ostermann-... - part of Russian nobility; the Ostermann name came from his great-uncles.
To add - there’s also an Austrian general named O’Reilly, and a famously subpar Macdonald for the French.
The French at the time were busy inventing nationalism. Someone suitably aristocratic could find a place as an officer basically anywhere.
> Austrian general named O’Reilly,
No contribution to military logistics or motor pool related just in case anyone else is tempted to read up on him to find out.
I remember reading one of Peter the Great's orders regarding creating 10 new units in the army. Out of names of the commanders only 3-4 were Russian. So hiring foreign talent was also part of westernization.
> Salmonella enterica is a bacterium that causes enteric or paratyphoid fever and is acquired by ingesting contaminated food or water.
> Borrelia recurrentis is a bacterium that causes relapsing fever, which is transmitted by body lice.
Saved you a click
How did you save me a click? Those bits were in this article. The guy that located the original report saved me some time.
You could only save somebody time if they skipped the content and started doing comments on HN anyhow, but that’s not all the information either, just a couple key points.
> You could only save somebody time if they skipped the content and started doing comments on HN anyhow
as is customary
Examples from 13 soldiers out of 500,000 — very representative, indeed.
We already know who brought down Napoleon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe_(TV_series)
With no small amount of help from Capt. John "Lucky Jack" Aubrey and Dr. Stephen Maturin.
>Rather than the typhus pathogen, the team found traces of Salmonella enterica and Borrelia recurrentis, both of which can trigger symptoms such as high fever, fatigue and digestive problems.
[flagged]
"one that would see his army decimated by cold, hunger and disease."
2 things: A)decimated means 1 in 10, not 9 in 10. B) according to the wiki article, Napoleon had already lost 75% of his initial fighting force by the time he got to Moscow, before the withdrawal.
I am not sure an article on biology should include much history--I would certainly hope it did a better job on the biology...
From https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/decimate
Decimate is a word that often raises hackles, at least those belonging to a small but committed group of logophiles who feel that it is commonly misused. The issue that they have with the decline and fall of the word decimate is that once upon a time in ancient Rome it had a very singular meaning: “to select by lot and kill every tenth man of a military unit.” However, many words in English descended from Latin have changed and/or expanded their meanings in their travels. For example, we no longer think of sinister as meaning “on the left side,” and delicious can describe things both tasty and delightful. Was the “to kill every tenth man” meaning the original use of decimate in English? Yes, but not by much. It took only a few decades for decimate to acquire its broader, familiar meaning of “to severely damage or destroy,” which has been employed steadily since the 17th century.
The more language is allowed to drift, the harder it becomes to read old language. I think this is a particularly silly case, but in general, the complaint that people are misusing words shouldn't be met with "It's impossible to misuse words", which this argument implicitly is.
No one allows or disallows language to drift, there are no language enforcers. This argument is not “it’s impossible” but rather it’s pedantic to claim a word is misused, when it’s been used this way for hundreds of years and so the original definition is no longer applicable.
>there are no language enforcers
Bodies like the Académie Française do try to promote language standards ('enforce' is probably not the right word). But I'm not sure how successful they are.
Someone could of course institute language enforcers for English, but I'm very skeptical about both the enforcement mechanisms, and the usefulness of even a successful enforcement.
We are all language enforcers, forcing it to drift in some ways and stopping it from drifting in others.
I suppose that is true and kind of a fun perspective!
Which language, Latin or English? Who says that in English it needs to have the same meaning as in Latin?
Heck, I've reminded about false friends. For example library ("librărie") in Romanian is the place where you buy books, not rent them.
My particular thing is to avoid Latin plurals in English, but I'm never sure how far to take it. Definitely forums, but axises is possibly annoying.
Look in any dictionary and you'll find that that decimate means to devastate aswell.
Language is what people speak not what people proscribe in books or the internet.
Exactly. If it is used a certain way by enough people, that is also an accepted definition. Dictionaries lag actual speech and language I suppose.
> If it is used a certain way by enough people, that is also an accepted definition.
This mentality seems to be prevalent in the USA, in Germany, on the opposite, many people see this topic differently - just because a lot of people use a certain word/term wrong does not make it right.
If frequency of use is an argument, one could argue that to decimate might not even be a word.
Correct. To decimate is the infinitive form of the verb decimate.
Prescribe, and it's both of these things.
You are figuratively killing me with your literalism.
Literally, anytime someone uses the term decimate, I assume they don't actually know what it means unless they explicitly state that they do.
These days some would've written, "you are literally killing me . . ." (which I find deplorable).
Using "literally" figuratively or, more precisely, as a hyperbolic intensifier [0], is a tradition employed by notable English writers who lived and died long before you were born.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literally
And someone would have replied "I could care less" (incorrectly implying they do care, even if it's a little bit) :(
I don't mind that one because it does not risk destroying the usefulness of a previously useful unambiguous word.
Yes, that phrase stuck out to me also.
Apologists for language attrition will assert that converging language into a handful of very simple words is doubleplusgood, and we should embrace the dumbification because that's 'just how languages work'.
But for a historical article, I did expect a slightly more nuanced take.
Why is this new word “dumbification” and not “smartification”?
Great day Borodin
We are brotherly feasts commemorating,
firmly: “Were the tribes,
Disaster threatening Russia;
Not all eh Europe there was?
Whose star led her!..
But we began to train hard pyatoyu
And chest took the pressure
tribes, obedient to the will of the proud,
And is was an unequal dispute.
And what? a disastrous escape,
kichas, they have forgotten now;
Lost Russian bayonet and snow,
Pogrebshy their glory in the desert.
Familiar feast beckons them again -
Chmielna for them Slavyanov blood;
But it will be hard for a hangover;
But guests will long dream
on close, cold Novosel,
Under the northern cereal fields!
It seems that computer translation is not good enough to parse Pushkin's poems yet. I tried ChatGPT, the translation is at least readable, but written in a dumbed down language. Yours is not even readable.
Why would would use ChatGPT or any other kind of automated translation for a poem of famous poet who's probably been already translated in several languages including English?