It's important to have data to back our unsurprising assumptions. Lots of unsurprising assumptions have turned out to be false.

Indeed. Relatedly, here's Popular Science's list of articles in the category "Science Confirms The Obvious": https://www.popsci.com/tags/science-confirms-obvious/

I’d be more interested in a list called “Science Disproves the Obvious”. Anyone got one laying around?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconception... is about the best I know of.

This some fantastic reading. Some insightful, some hilarious: "Steak tartare was not invented by Mongol warriors who tenderized meat under their saddles."

Maybe a confusion of tartar the sauce with Tatars the central Asian nomads?

There’s possibly something there though, even if the steak tartar version is incorrect. Bret Deveraux claims the aim was to preserve meat into a kind of jerky: “On the move, meat could be placed between the rider’s saddle and the horse’s back – the frequent compression of riding, combined with the salinity of the horse’s sweat would produce a dried, salted jerky that would keep for a very long time.”[1]

His stuff is very well sourced, but also he’s self-admittedly talking outside his area of expertise there. So who knows.

[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/12/11/collections-that-dothraki-hord...

This is the first time I hear of this (https://xkcd.com/1053/).

I had always assumed they had the same etymology. It didn't help that in Spanish all of these words maintain the 'r' between the 'a' and 't': tártaro, ra, Tártaro, Tartaria.

Here there are 3 different etymologies: https://dle.rae.es/t%C3%A1rtaro and here there's another one: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauce_tartare

Although I don't know if the Wikipedia article should be trusted, since the English version one (Tartar sauce) states: "The word Tartar is a Turkic word that is the name of Tatar people."

Huh! Also funny that the French wiki is so much more extensive. The quote from the English version is the complete section!

Seems like a western adaptation of tatziki or tarator sauce, plus some orientalist confusion over who to call “tartars”. Interesting stuff!

> Somehow I fail to see how this is surprising.

Validating assumptions is useful science.

yeah, but it's also been published on the bbc and posted here.

I don't think that this quote is what the article boils down to. IMHO the key information is rather: ""However, severe trauma was prevalent across the social spectrum."

At all levels they found a significant number of skeletons with bone fractures.

Yes, the injury rate may be similar, but the sources of these injuries are likely not. Amongst the ruling classes, horses were the danger. Ride a horse and you will break more bones than the guy who walks to work. Be a friar working in a hospital, not toiling in the fields nor riding horses, and your fracture rate would be much lower.

Also violence, but in different forms.

For lower classes, regular street brawls will produce a lot of injuries. Upper class people will get into some street violence, but the presence of retinues will drastically reduce their incidence. On the other hand, for upper classes (but not monks) war and training for war will produce a ton of injuries, many fatal. Learning to fence and joust are very dangerous activities even in modern times.

>> Learning to fence and joust are very dangerous activities even in modern times.

Horses. Even today, horses are profoundly dangerous. Go to any hospital warn dealing with neck injuries. Young men fall off motorcycles, and so are generally a little older (16+). Young girls break their necks falling off horses. That particular fall (head first off a horse) is horrible. The neck takes all the load. Helmets protect the skull, not the neck. Obama once said that if he had sons there would be a conversation about them playing football. If I had daughters, they would not ride horses.

I’ll also mention that fencing used to be wildly dangerous to train in. When I learned to fence (Italian school longsword) we practiced with plastic swords and lacrosse gloves. Compared to wood swords with leather gloves this is an incredible safety improvement, and still we broke fingers from time to time. Even modern longsword fencing helms[0] (sport fencing helms can’t handle the abuse) are much tougher thanks to the presence of pre-drilled plate which provides better visibility without reduced protection[1].

0 - https://i.pinimg.com/originals/4a/15/22/4a1522079ba2951466fb... This type is necessary if you wish to practice with steel swords, among other protective equipment. Steel can cave in regular fencing masks.

1 - Against cutting blows, which is the main issue in practice. Such a plate would be disastrous in actual war, since it would guarantee that any arrow making contact would “bite” rather than deflecting.

Every time I see an evil comic book-style villain with a scared face I am reminded that that look is based in realty. Pre-war, many well-to-do Germans took part in a style of fencing that resulted in regular injuries to the face. A scared face was a badge of status. There were several prominent WWII leaders with facial scars not from battle but from fraternal fencing organizations. A few years later and the comic book supervillains had scared faces too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_fencing

Interesting. When I took modern foil fencing classes, it wasn't dangerous in the slightest. The training foils (the long thin bendy swords that people usually think of when they think of fencing) are extremely flexible and have a button on the tip. You score a point by pushing that button against your opponent in a score zone of their body. You wear an electrified vest over your torso with a long wire leading back to the score machine, and when the opponent's sword tip touches your vest it completes an electric circuit. If that circuit is completed at the same time the opponent's foil tip button is depressed, they score a point. Both people have full cage facemasks, and there's almost zero chance of injury short of tripping.

Epee fencing, on the other hand, uses a heavier, stiffer sword, so when you poke somebody it can bruise.

Sabre fencing is the third modern fencing style, and allows you to score points with the blade (slashing) instead of just the point as with foil and epee. I've never done it but have heard it is the most physical style of the three.

This photo is of an epee match, but displays the still considerable flexibility of the weapon and the electrification wires that trail behind each combatant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89p%C3%A9e#/media/File:Fin...

It’s worth mentioning how much heavier and more energetic a longsword is compared to modern sport fencing weapons. A fencing saber weighs 500g (~1.1lbs) by regulation. Longswords on the other hand tend to weigh in the 3-4lb range based on the size of the fencer. Longswords are also relatively inflexible in the cutting direction to avoid a “whipping” effect, although they’ll flex on the thrust for safety.

For comparison’s sake here[0] is a very high quality practice fencing blade in a historically correct style. The weird shape is to help maintain the correct balance after the edge and point have been thickened to avoid injury.

We didn’t really go for point based scoring, since we were attempting to replicate a historical fencing school. In actual fights it is incredibly common for both combatants to fatally injure each other in an exchange, so we recognized the idea of dual hits where both combatants were struck. With both steel and plastic weapons the impacts are loud enough to not require any special detection equipment.

[0] - http://www.albion-swords.com/swords/albion/maestro/sword-pra...

Melanie Reid [0] is a journalist and experienced horse rider who broke her neck and back in 2010 aged 53 [0]. She now writes a weekly article ('Spinal Column') that describes her continuing experiences of being tetraplegic. Very insightful concerning the resultant life-shattering injuries.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanie_Reid

But your risk of bacterial infection probably skyrockets

I guess most research shouldn't be surprising, otherwise there'd be an eureka every day

There's certainly value in their finding. My comment was more targeted at the usual HN audience perhaps expecting an intellectually stimulating story.

Can't say much for hospital inmates but, bear in mind that friars in medieval Europe often had their days filled with plenty of hard physical labour as well, and often tended to farm plots for the benefit of their monasteries and church lands with lots of their own sweaty work. It was not what we would today consider a sedentary job at all. Though yes, a labourer would have been much more likely to suffer injuries regardless... One good fictional account of medieval life among all classes: Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follet. Wonderful reading and realistically depicted in most ways.

Just because it isn't surprising doesn't mean it isn't interesting.

No, it doesn't. But it is very likely that one thing comes from the other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interest_(emotion)

Perhaps for some here (including myself) this data helps imagine a more detailed approximation of what life was like there in that time period.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

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What did you think the % of bone fractures would be before you read the article?

> Somehow I fail to see how this is surprising.

Yes! who cares about the lives of such lowly peasants.

/s

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

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