Bret Devereaux

Which brings us to: 6) Comparative Evidence - or (favorite Jurassic Park reference), "the frog DNA." Basically, if you don't know, fill in the blank with a similar, but more modern society which is better attested in the evidence. 42/52

Absolutely, comparative is the weakest form of evidence - it is what you use when you have nothing, but have a gap which has to be filled with *something* - comparative evidence is better than guessing... 43/52

...or in mid-19th century scholar fashion, just assuming ancient elites were just like your fellow British/French/German/American aristocrats. The good news is that comparative evidence can be brought to bear on any question. 44/52

The bad news is that societies are different! Societies separated by centuries tend to be *really* different. Comparative evidence thus works better when you have a reason to think things are less different. 45/52

For instance, subsistence patterns. Ancient people needed to eat too and had similar bodies (and thus dietary needs) to modern humans, so you can sometimes reason from early modern subsistence patterns to ancient ones (but beware tech/selective-breeding!) 46/52

Comp. evidence is easily the worst source of bad-pop-history-mistakes (that I talked about above). It goes like this: Scholar1 estimates in technical lit. something based on little bit of hard evidence and some comparative evidence. Clearly signals that this is guesswork. 47/52

That guess might be the number of mules in use by the Roman army (based on more modern army pack animal usage). It might be the direction of currency flows in the first century CE (based on modern econ. theory). But it's a guess, not firm. 48/52

Writer2 puts together general survey of question, incorporates Scholar1's guess, but text is meant for general audience, so the guess is not signaled. It looks like we *know* that fact, when we don't! 49/52