Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle (2016) • Hacker News Board

Re: Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle (2016)

#51

Post by marshray » Wed, Sep 09, 2020, 8:57 PM UTC

dragontamer wrote: post #29

marshray wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They weren't called the Dark Ages for nothin'.

Dark Ages are traditionally 500 AD. The period of ~1000 BC was solidly Bronze age, before the classical era or antiquity (~500 BC), before the Roman Empire, before the fall of the Roman Empire leading to the Dark Ages.

We were discussing 1000 AD.

"The "Dark Ages" is a historical periodization traditionally referring to the Middle Ages (c. 5th–15th century) that asserts that a demographic, cultural, and economic deterioration occurred in Western Europe following the decline of the Roman Empire."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)

Re: Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle (2016)

#52

Post by ImprovedSilence » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 3:08 AM UTC

golergka wrote: post #38

credit_guy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was not really "prehistory". About 100 years before the event here the battle of Kadesh [1] happened. Tens of thousands of soldiers are believed to have participated in that battle. Not sure anyone "before the 1990s" was thinking that people were peaceful during the Bronze Age. 3200 years ago was almost to the day contemporaneous with the Trojan war [2]. That was not a time when people were peaceful and "concern…

> That was not a time when people were peaceful and "concerned with trading and so on". In relative terms, Pax Romana definetly was such a time.

Not sure what you're getting at. Pax Romana was over 1000 yrs after the Trojan War was suspected to have happened.

Re: Slaughter at the bridge: Uncovering a colossal Bronze Age battle (2016)

#53

Post by jjoonathan » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 7:07 PM UTC

smabie wrote: post #31

jjoonathan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, sounds like p-hacking. Still, supporting a proper army is a massive economic undertaking, so it seems likely that army sizes (and battle sizes) started relatively small and grew over time. Maybe this new finding actually does suggest that scale-up happened earlier than most previous legitimate estimates. My money's on p-hacking though.

P-hacking what?

If p is the probability of the null hypothesis and you want a low p value to promote your alternative hypothesis, you can obtain the low p value by choosing a garbage null hypothesis like "prehistoric civilizations lived in peaceful harmony with each other." Just about any other theory looks brilliant next to such hot garbage.