ChickenLadyLovesLife

That’s a good Maxim to live your life by.

Next you’ll be telling me he didn’t invent kites.

Low life expectancy has always been caused mostly by high infant and child mortality

In demography, the life expectancy of a modern population is calculated by fitting a curve to the most recent infant and child mortality (< 5 years old) measurements. Not relevant to ancient Rome, but for the modern world life expectancy is not just heavily influenced by infant and child mortality, but is rather 100% a measure of infant and child mortality.

One reason lead was so plentiful is that a lot of the silver ore in Europe contains a hundred times more lead than silver by weight and the lead has a lower melting point, so the quest for silver produced an enormous amount of lead as a byproduct.

Wat. Rifling dates to the 16th Century. It was just prohibitively expensive before the mid-1800s so most troops were equipped with smoothbore muskets.

I mean, in the age of muskets and field cannons they didn’t really shoot at anybody in particular since the guns were not very accurate. They probably did try to hit the bagpipe dudes, though.