Paul Is History @PaulIsHistory

@stats_feed How was Mary I worse than her father?

@Dodge900 @MichaelButtonX Lack of fossils doesn't mean you can just make stuff up.

@MichaelButtonX I often think this about Ireland. There's so few dinoaurs, animals, hominids or humans found before 10000BC. Not a good environment for fossilisation so any time before that is a total mystery. We know lots was going on in Britain so surely Ireland wasn't completely empty.

Settlements and farming have always seemed like a chicken and egg situation. Comparing how construction and farming evolved side by side at Göbekli Tepe is fascinating:

Long before the two World Wars of the 20th century, the world fought what Winston Churchill called the real first World War, and it made Britain the world's superpower. The man who helped ignite it would later become one of the most famous people in American history. In 1756, war broke out in Europe with Britain and Prussia (a German Kingdom) facing off against France, Austria, Russia, and Spain to control North America and India. The war quickly spread to 5 continents. Prussia should have lost. Frederick the Great was surrounded by three larger armies. At one point, Russian troops briefly occupied Berlin. Then came the "Miracle of the House of Brandenburg". Tsarina Elizabeth died in Jan 1762 and her successor Peter III was obsessed with Frederick and pulled Russia out of the war. That's what saved Prussia. Meanwhile, in North America, fighting had been ongoing since 1754. In May of that year, 22-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Washington led a small British colonial force into the disputed Ohio Country. At Jumonville Glen, his force and their Indigenous allies attacked a French detachment, and the French commander Joseph Coulon de Jumonville was killed. The incident sharply escalated the Anglo-French confrontation in North America. A few weeks later, the French defeated Washington at Fort Necessity. These events helped trigger the French and Indian War, which then merged into the much larger Seven Years’ War when Britain and France formally went to war in 1756. Britain beat France to control Canada, take over France's slave trading posts in Africa, and even in India, a British clerk named Robert Clive defeated France. That one battle gave Britain control of Bengal and eventually, all of India. Britain even captured Manila in the Philippines for a short time. Meanwhile Portugal, who were loyal to Britain, fought off Spain at home but were unable to do so in South America and lost Uruguay. The war lasted until 1764 and about 1 million people died. The resulting Treaties of Paris and Hubertusburg more than any others, created the modern map. Britain became the dominant empire however it had doubled its national debt to win. To pay for it, it taxed its American colonies, leading to the American revolution, led by the same George Washington who helped trigger the Seven Years War as a young officer. France's empire largely collapsed and went bankrupt, eventually triggering the French Revolution in 1789. Napoleon was obsessed with Frederick The Great and he was motivated by revenge for France's humiliation in the seven years war, leading to the Napoleonic wars 40 years later (similar to how WW1 led to WW2).

What kept our homo sapians ancestors out of Europe for tens of thousands of years? 👀 The answer might surprise you.

@Demeter_Erinia Fixing electrical connections

@forbiddenmerch @grok Hey @grok Did Auschwitz have GAS CHAMBERS?

For the Rapa Nui who lived on Easter Island, moving huge moai statues was not just a spiritual thing but also a competitive hobby. Different communities on the island would compete to build and move the biggest statues. After cutting the statue out of the Rano Raraku quarry, they would walk the statue standing up. Transporting a 20-tonne moai could take 40 people. A full move to the far side of the island (20km) could easily be 2-4 weeks with 8-hour days. Although the vast majority of moai were placed within 6km of where they were dug. Moving the status was a big community event and most likely, a massive celebration would occur once it was complete. There was a competitive rivalry among groups to see who could build and move the largest statues, like a team sport today. We may see building and moving heavy things as a waste of energy, but people in a thousand years might look back at us and think sports were a waste of energy. The largest moai erected is the Piro Piro, neear Rano Raraku quarry. The total length of its body, with two-thirds buried, reaches 11 meters, making Piro Piro the largest moai ever extracted from the quarry and erected. The tallest moai erected on a platform, called Paro, was almost 10 metres (33 ft) high and weighed 82 tonnes. It was put in place 6km from where it was quarried. According to tradition, it was a widow who commissioned the construction of this moai in memory of her late husband. The last original standing moai, it was felled around 1838–1840. The Rapa Nui sometimes got too ambitious. El Gigante is the largest moai ever carved, measuring about 71 to 72 feet (21.6 to 22 meters) tall and weighing an estimated 145 to 270 tons, but they were unable to raise it. Of the roughly 900 to 1,000 statues documented by archaeological surveys like the Easter Island Statue Project, only about 288 were successfully transported and erected on coastal platforms. The Rapi Nui had already stopped building and raising statues in the 1600s. The island's palm forests had largely been eliminated by rat predation, cutting off timber and rope supplies needed to move the moai. The birdman cult took over. The Rapa Nui were still doing well in the early 1700s; however, once Europeans arrived in 1722 and again in 1770, disease hit them hard. In 1770, the moai were still standing but by the time Captain Cook arrived 4 years later, the Rapa Nui had knocked down most of the statues as a result of inter-clan warfare. The first statue to be reraised reraised was at at Ahu Ature Huki in 1956. Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl, who encouraged several islanders to raise the statue. This task was accomplished with a dozen men and 18 days of effort. Rapa Nui were probably the best opportunity to find out the full explanation for why and how ancient societies moved heavy things. Unfortunately, evil colonialists robbed us of that chance.

For those who say we couldn’t do what the Egyptians did even with modern technology, the Romans moved the Lateran Obelisk, one of the heaviest objects ancient Egypt ever made, weighing approximately 450 tonnes, from Egypt to Rome in AD 357. They used techniques such as compound pulleys, winches, capstans, wooden lifting structures and specially constructed transport ships. As far as we know, the older ancient Egyptian civilisations didn’t have much of that. But if you don’t believe the conventional archaeological narrative, all you have to do is suggest that the Egyptians may have had technology similar to that of the Roman Empire and it would at least be an interesting debate. There’s no need to jump to ancient aliens or an advanced civilisation whose technologies have been lost.

@MichaelButtonX Mount Rushmore

Where did Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament, come from? And what the bible get right and wrong? For 2,000 years the Canaanites who lived in the Ancient Levant worshipped a full pantheon of Gods. At the top was El, the old father god, the creator, and "Father of Years." His wife was Asherah, Queen of the Sea. Their 70 sons were the gods of the 70 nations. They included Baal, the storm god who rode the clouds. Yahweh wasn't on that list. The oldest mention of Yahweh in history isn't from Israel at all. It's from Egypt. Around 1400-1300 BC, at the temples of Soleb and Amara West, Pharaoh Amenhotep III lists the enemies of Egypt. One group is called: "The Shasu of Yhw." The Shasu were desert nomads living south of Canaan, in Edom, Seir, Midian. The exact place the Bible keeps saying God comes from. The Bible itself remembers this. It never says Yahweh came from Egypt or Canaan. In its oldest poems it says: "The Lord came from Sinai and dawned from Seir... He shone forth from Mount Paran." Deuteronomy 33:2 "God came from Teman..." Habakkuk 3:3 "Yahweh went out from Seir, marched from Edom." Judges 5:4 Before he was creator of the universe, his full title was Yahweh Sabaoth: Yahweh of the Armies. He was the god of war. The Song of the Sea, Exodus 15:3, one of the oldest lines in the Bible, says it bluntly: "Yahweh is a man of war; Yahweh is his name." The Kenites who worshipped him were coppersmiths and their god protected the forge and the weapons made in it. They lived in Midian (northwestern Saudi Arabia and southern Jordan). According to Exodus along came Moses, an Egyptian-raised Israelite, and he fled to Midian. He married the daughter of Jethro, a Midianite priest, a Kenite. And it is in Midian, on a mountain called Horeb, that Moses met a god in a burning bush who says his name is YHWH. Moses then brought that southern war god north. Regardless of whether you believe Exodus or not, the idea that there were real Kenites who came to Canaan is a real possibility. The Israelite identity may have been a merger of indigenous Canaanite villagers, the Kenites, and perhaps a small group of Semitic slaves who really did escape Egypt. Around 1200 BCE, during the Bronze Age Collapse, when the great empiresof Egypt was weakend, and others such as Hatti, and Mycenae all collapsed, about 250 tiny new villages appeared almost overnight in the highlands of Canaan. Archaeology shows all kinds of animal bones but no pig bones. Yahweh absorbed El. The Bible starts calling him "El Shaddai" and "El Elyon", titles of the old father god. He absorbs Baal's imagery too as rider of clouds and thunderer. And for centuries, ordinary Israelites worshipped him exactly like a Canaanite god: with a wife. In 1975 at Kuntillet Ajrud, a desert truck-stop in Sinai, 800 BC, archaeologists found blessings written on storage jars: "I bless you by Yahweh of Samaria and by his Asherah." "I bless you by Yahweh of Teman and his Asherah." At this stage Israel wasn't monotheist. It was monolatrist. The command was "no other gods before me" — not "there are no other gods." Psalm 82 even shows Yahweh standing in the council of El, judging the other gods. Then came the Babylonian exile. In 586 BC Babylon destroyed Jerusalem including the first temple and intellectuals were exiled from Judah to Babylon in modern-day Iraq. In that crisis, prophets made a radical claim, "We weren't destroyed because Yahweh was weak. We were destroyed because we worshipped other gods. Yahweh let Babylon do this to punish us. There never were other gods. And if Yahweh can use Babylon to punish us in Judah, then he's not just the god of Judah. He's the god of Babylon too. He's everywhere." So now El is Yahweh. Baal is Yahweh. Worship of his Asherah is dismissed as idolatry. The name YHWH (Hebrew did not have vowels), probably meaning "He Is" or "He Causes to Be", becomes unspeakable. He is now the invisible, universal God. This is when monotheism actually becomes monotheism. If you read Genesis carefully you notice something weird. In some chapters God is called Yahweh from the very beginning. He walks in the garden, he closes the ark, he is superhuman and personal. In other chapters God is called Elohim, a generic title meaning "God" or "gods." He is distant, cosmic, speaks through dreams and angels. And he isn't called Yahweh until Moses meets him at the burning bush. It's the result of two different source traditions stitched together. In 1780, scholars realized Genesis was combining two identifiable sources: J source (Judah, 950 BC): Uses the name Yahweh exclusively from creation onward. God is anthropomorphic. E source the Elohist (Israel, 850 BC): Uses Elohim exclusively. God is more remote. Only after Exodus 3 does E start calling him Yahweh. During the Babylonian exile, the Priestly source (P) and Deuteronomist (D) wove J and E together into the first five books of the Old Testament we have now. That's why you get two creation stories, two flood stories, and God with two names and two personalities. One is the southern war god the Shasu knew. The other is El, the old Canaanite father god. The Bible is the story of how they became one. After the Babylonian exile, the Jews returned home with their new beliefs. The God of War became the God. Maybe that's why the world is the way it is today.

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@25YearsAgoLive Opposition to the EU and anti-globalisation are two of the many things that have switched from left to right wing politics over the last 25 years (2026 timeline post)

Were women having more sex with Neaderthals with men? Why? New research published Feb. 2026 in Science analyzed the X chromosome from Neanderthal and modern genomes. They found a 62% excess of Homo sapiens DNA on the Neanderthal X, and almost no Neanderthal DNA on our X. This would appear to mean it was mostly Neanderthal men banging Homo sapiens women. While first contact was 250,000 years ago, mixing peaked around 47,000 years ago. Homo sapiens and Neanderthals lived full-time side by side in the Middle East and Europe for 7,000 years. We lived in the same valleys and caves. According to archaeologists: "They saw each other as socially appropriate mates." We were of similar height, made tools, and buried our dead. In reality, while each gender may have been having similar amounts of sex with the other side, children of male Neanderthals / female Homo sapiens pairs had a better chance of surviving and passing on their genes to the next generation. They would have been raised by Homo sapiens communities, which were thriving. Children of female Neanderthals / male Homo sapiens would have been raised by Neanderthal communities, which were then struggling. That's probably a better explanation than male Neanderthals / female Homo sapiens sex being more common. Genetically, female interspecies hybrids are less likely to be infertile than male hybrids, which may have been a factor in explaining why the Neanderthal Y chromosome vanished entirely from the modern human gene pool, while their autosomal DNA survived. Early Homo sapiens in Europe had 6-9% Neanderthal DNA. Today non-Africans have 1-2%. The DNA stuck because it saved us. Neanderthals had lived in Eurasia for 300,000 years. Their immune systems knew the local viruses and bacteria. When we interbred, we got their immunity genes: TLR1, TLR6, TLR10, and HLA variants that fight Epstein-Barr and other viruses. Half of Europeans still carry them. We got an instant immunity upgrade for a continent we'd never lived in. The trade-off: those same genes make us worse at fighting some DNA viruses today and more prone to allergies. We didn't outbreed Neanderthals. We absorbed them. What we don't know is if sex was consensual or not, and if they formed family bonds and raised children together (unlikely in my opinion). The contact 250,000 years ago is also fascinating and will be covered in a later post.

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The Troubles of Northern Ireland started with a false-flag attack. In March and April 1969, bombs began exploding at electricity and water installations across Northern Ireland. The IRA was initially blamed. But the attacks were actually being carried out by loyalist extremists associated with the UVF and Ulster Protestant Volunteers. Their objective was to create a security crisis, make it appear that republican violence was escalating, and undermine Northern Ireland Prime Minister Terence O'Neill, who was attempting to introduce reforms that would benefit Catholics. Nationalists felt the reforms didn't go far enough. 30 March: Electricity substation at Castlereagh was bombed. 4 April: A major water pipeline was attacked. 20 April: Bombs struck the Silent Valley water system and an electricity pylon. More water-supply bombings followed. The situation became serious enough that British troops were assigned to guard key public utilities. On 28 April 1969, Terence O'Neill resigned due to his inability to stop the bombs which unionists led by Ian Paisley (pictured) were blaming on the IRA. In response to the bombings with Unionists continuing to insist it was the work of the IRA, sectarian violence erupted in August 1969. Loyalists rioted and burned down Catholic homes. The British Army was deployed. The IRA's inability to defend Catholics led a hardcore group to split off and eventually form the Provisional IRA, the dominant republican paramilitary organisation during the Troubles. In October, UVF member Thomas McDowell was fatally injured when a bomb he was planting at a power station in Ballyshannon exploded prematurely. The UVF were forced to claim responsibility, proving they, not the IRA, were responsible all along. But by then it was too late. The British Army had already been deployed, the move towards the creation of the Provisional IRA had started (they were created in December) and the ball towards 30 years of violence had started rolling.

@BeefStewtoo I was agreeing with you

@HopliteColumbia @BeefStewtoo Cranes can lift up to 5000 tonnes. The heaviest rocks in the pyramids were 80 tonnes. Where are these rocks that we can’t lift with modern technology??

Why did Stalin order the Great Purge from 1936 to 1938 in the Soviet Union? I've read a lot of Stalin's speeches and one thing that stands out is that he was insecure about looking weak on the international stage, with Hitler on the rise in Germany and continued tension with the West. He was very successful at using espionage himself, so assumed that he must have spies in his own midst. But spies were rarely found in the USSR in Stalin's time. The isolated way he set up the Soviet Union and how it was ruled, the state control over all communication methods, and the sheer fear of the gulag, meant it was impossible for foreign countries to penetrate the USSR with spycraft. Stalin instead interpreted spies not being found as Soviet intelligence agencies not doing a good enough job of finding them. Stalin thought he was being outsmarted by foreign agencies and he couldn't have that. To avoid looking weak with foreign leaders, he ordered the Great Purge. He knew the vast majority of people tortured and killed were innocent, but he thought it would be worth it to kill a million people including many Communist Party members and military generals to find 1 German spy, 1 British spy, 1 American spy, to show that he wasn't to be messed with, and to scare any spies that were not caught into stopping their activities or leaving. Stalin even had bugs in party members state-provided homes and got daily reports on what they were saying. Anyone with any kind of foreign connection were targeted. Many foreign communists who had been exiled and initially found refuge in Moscow were killed during the purge. The March 3, 1937 speech he made at the height of the purge is one of the most interesting. Here is his attempt to explain himself: "Some of our leading comrades, both at the center and at the periphery, not only failed to discern the face of these wreckers, diversionists, spies, and killers, but proved to be so careless, complacent, and naive that at times they themselves assisted in promoting agents of foreign states to responsible posts". "Take, for example, the bourgeois states. Naive people might think that exceptionally good relations exist between them as states of the same type. But only naive people can think like that. In actual fact, far from neighborly relations exist between them. It has been proved as surely as two times two is four that the bourgeois states send to each other's rear [ask] spies, wreckers, diversionists, and sometimes also killers, who are given the task of penetrating into the institutions and enterprises of these states, of setting up their agencies and "in case of necessity," of disrupting their rear in order to weaken them and to undermine their might. So is the case at the present time. So also was the case in the past. Take, for example, the states in Europe at the time of Napoleon I. France was then swarming with spies and diversionists from the camps of the Russians, Germans, Austrians, and English. And, on the other hand, England, the German states, Austria, and Russia had at that time in their rear no fewer spies and diversionists from the French camp. Agents of England twice made an attempt on the life of Napoleon and several times roused the Vendee peasants in France against the government of Napoleon. And what was the Napoleonic government? A bourgeois government which strangled the French Revolution and retained only those results of the revolution which were advantageous to the big bourgeoisie. Needless to say, the Napoleonic government did not remain in debt to its neighbors and also undertook diversionist measures. So it was in the past, 130 years ago. So the matter stands today, 130 years after Napoleon I. Now France and England are swarming with German spies and diversionists and, on the other hand, Anglo-French spies and diversionists are active in turn in Germany. America is swarming with Japanese spies and diversionists and Japan with American. Such is the law of the interrelations between bourgeois states. The question arises, why should the bourgeois states treat the Soviet Socialist state more gently and in a more neighborly manner than towards bourgeois states of the same type? Why should they send to the rear of the Soviet Union fewer spies, wreckers, diversionists, and killers than they send to the rear of the bourgeois states akin to them? From where did this assumption come? Would it not be more true, from the point of view of Marxism, to assume that the bourgeois states would send to the rear of the Soviet Union two and three times more wreckers, spies, diversionists, and killers than to the rear of any bourgeois state? Is it not clear that for as long as we have capitalist encirclement, we shall have wreckers, spies, diversionists, and killers sent to our rear by agents of foreign states?" All this was forgotten by our Party comrades and, having forgotten about this, they were taken unawares".