Uriah

The first proper W. European villages arose in the 8th century. There is a bit of a chicken/egg debate with regards to feudalism and villages, but villages definitely came first and may have made feudalism possible by making it easier to control peasants https://www.utpjournals.press/doi/abs/10.3138/cjh.48.2.22 …

In both Europe and the Caucasus feudalism was accompanied by the introduction of new heavy plows, the carruca and Caucasian gutani which allowed for the exploitation of heavier soils. The gutani was pulled by a team of 16 oxen, which necessitated communal ownership of livestock.

It didn’t work this way exactly everywhere but the general trend was heavy plows pulled by many oxen> communal ownership of animals and land>villages> feudal exploitation.

Feudalism is a broad term, and feudalism was more transient in some countries (England) than others, whereas some got off scot-free (Norway). My definition of a "feudal country" is one where the labor demands of lords were imposed for the better part of a millennium.

In places in which women perform real physical labor they often quit breastfeeding early and sometimes avoid the practice altogether, as was the case until recently in Catholic Germany and Russia. The effects on infant mortality were horrendous.https://twitter.com/crimkadid/status/1334934056874676224 …

There’s a correlation of about -0.5 between % lactose tolerant and the CI: e.g. French are the most wide faced and LI people in Western Europe. Feudalism seemed to interrupt selection in this area; the only people who ended up lactose tolerant and brachycephalic are the Germans.

By any standard the lives of these peasants were harsh, but there’s something that made it worse. Many tasks were performed by the community and there were long days peasants spent surrounded by others, not just friends or family, but everyone: people they didn’t like, assholes.

Other than maybe Jews or Parsis no one is truly adapted to city life, because high mortality from diseases made old cities population sinks. The active community life and cooperative agriculture in rural villages though produced much the same effect.

Feudal communities were practically states within themselves. Because lands and animals were communally owned, they were jealously guarded and interlopers were automatically assumed to be thieves. A peasant spent his whole life in a glorified pen.

Agricultural life in mountains resembled feudalism in that it required constant cooperative activity and geography naturally restricted movement in much the same sense feudal lords did: you only have so far to wander when boxed in mountains.

Peasant life was a thresher. The people who couldn’t cut it were partly those who couldn’t meet the physical demands without succumbing to exhaustion and infection, but also those who felt penned in, who dreamed of what life would be like on the other side of the mountain.

Okay, so life was stressful, but what does that have to do with skull shape? Why do different species of domesticated animals invariably end up with short, broad skulls?

Two researchers at Harvard made note that in animal studies high levels of glucocorticoids inhibit the outward development of the upper jaw. They decided to measure if the same relationship between skull form and stress reactivity occurred in humans: https://sci-hub.se/https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-8624.1995.tb00950.x …

I suspect that the outward development of the jaw is paralleled by outward development of the shoulders because brachycephalized people are usually quite broad, and outside of cold mountains, long limbed in the sense of the stereotypical “European supermodel”.

If someone had the gall to autopsy people from different European populations with this in mind I think what they would find is that brachycephalic peoples would have smaller adrenal glands in the kidneys, which is the most consistent byproduct of animal domestication

Alpine peoples are resistant to the stressful effects of hard labor partly because they are dull: they do not need constant novelty and stimulation to be happy. They are perfectly content to live in the same place forever, feel no pressure to throw it all away and emigrate.

Slavs are so normal. So many guys I’ve met are described by their friends as: “He is just a nice, regular guy. Normal and unpretentious”. I have to resist the urge to call them “boring”, which they aren’t, but they do talk about a restricted range of practical subjects.

There’s a real monotony to them: every Slav with a blog I read writes exclusively about his own country and often very practical, mundane aspects of it. Every Frenchman takes odd excuses to start talking about France. The Caucasians though, are the absolute worst

The most brachycephalic peoples in Europe (Balkans) and the Middle East (Caucasians) are so ethnocentric and willing to throw down on a moment’s notice that it would probably be beneficial for the UN to forcefully separate them to avoid any more predictable violence.

But you see this in all the broad faced countries, or you used to anyways. The constant revanchism, the racially tinged ultra-nationalism which distinguishes the Germans or Koreans from their neighbors.

These peoples fight so often partly because they are brave, but also because they are not deterred by the hard, boring work of real soldiers, which can be so draining it makes deadly combat seem like a relief. If you could handle feudalism, you can handle war.