And then I thought, we've known for some time that dead men make good fertilizer.
https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/200th-a...
Did grave robbers plunder battlefields?
31–40 of 72 posts
Re: Did grave robbers plunder battlefields?
#32Anyone who's played enough dwarf fortress knows that goblinite[1] is one of the most important sources of metals. [1] https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Goblinite
[deleted]
Re: Did grave robbers plunder battlefields?
#33And then I thought, we've known for some time that dead men make good fertilizer. https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/200th-a... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterloo_Soldier
In Belgium we (not me) used the corpses from the famous waterloo battle to refine sugar.
Re: Did grave robbers plunder battlefields?
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
For anyone confused how grave robbing would contribute to sugar production: "In a new book, an international team of historians and archaeologists argues the bones were depleted by industrial-scale grave robbing. The introduction of phosphates for fertilizer and bone char as an ingredient in beet sugar processing at the beginning of the 19th century transformed bones into a hot commodity. Skyrocketing prices prompted…
To this day, most white sugar is made with animal bone char and therefore not vegan. Brown sugar is sometimes but not always vegan.
Is this case in most of the world ? I've done a walk through of a few different sugar cane based sugar mills and seen the use of some coal based carbon ( calcium carbonate , if memory serves correctly) and this was back as early as 1990).
Brown sugar is white sugar with molasses, or at least it is in Australia. If your white sugar isn't vegan, your brown sugar is not either.
Re: Did grave robbers plunder battlefields?
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember hearing that there were so many mummies around from Egypt that they were used as fuel in some cases... Humans never have valued far enough removed dead... And surely yes, if I were local peasant near battlefield I would go and pick through it after everyone is gone. Or at latest when most of the stink is gone... Metals at least had value.
> there were so many mummies around from Egypt that they were used as fuel in some cases Likely, but it seems they aren’t 100% sure of that at the Encyclopædia Brittanica. https://www.britannica.com/list/7-surprising-uses-for-mummie... : “It was claimed by author Mark Twain that mummies had been used as fuel for locomotives. In his 1869 travel book called The Innocents Abroad, Twain describes the first railroad in Eg…
To use on the english trains ?
Re: Did grave robbers plunder battlefields?
#36And then I thought, we've known for some time that dead men make good fertilizer. https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/200th-a... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterloo_Soldier
In Belgium we (not me) used the corpses from the famous waterloo battle to refine sugar.
The secret of Belgian chocolate, revealed
Re: Did grave robbers plunder battlefields?
#37... in the modern era. It's a given that fabric and metals are high cost of production from raw inputs, and pre-mechanisation would be far too valuable to just leave in the fields. Post mechanisation the problem is logistics. (The factory war era pretty much begins with the Napoleonic war: Marc Brunel (Isembards father) made boot making machines and block making machines for the british war supply chain. You can see…
>at the end of the day, what's the difference between a dead man's remains and a bucket of piss?
On long enough timescales there's no difference at all
Re: Did grave robbers plunder battlefields?
#38And then I thought, we've known for some time that dead men make good fertilizer. https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/200th-a... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterloo_Soldier
In Belgium we (not me) used the corpses from the famous waterloo battle to refine sugar.
> we (not me)
of course not you flemish, it must've been those perfidous walloons, hoor
Re: Did grave robbers plunder battlefields?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember hearing that there were so many mummies around from Egypt that they were used as fuel in some cases... Humans never have valued far enough removed dead... And surely yes, if I were local peasant near battlefield I would go and pick through it after everyone is gone. Or at latest when most of the stink is gone... Metals at least had value.
> there were so many mummies around from Egypt that they were used as fuel in some cases Likely, but it seems they aren’t 100% sure of that at the Encyclopædia Brittanica. https://www.britannica.com/list/7-surprising-uses-for-mummie... : “It was claimed by author Mark Twain that mummies had been used as fuel for locomotives. In his 1869 travel book called The Innocents Abroad, Twain describes the first railroad in Eg…
We know, anyway, that they used untold millions of cat mummies for locomotive fuel. In other news, Egyptians mummified millions of cats.
Re: Did grave robbers plunder battlefields?
#40And then I thought, we've known for some time that dead men make good fertilizer. https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/200th-a... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterloo_Soldier
In Belgium we (not me) used the corpses from the famous waterloo battle to refine sugar.
Yes indeed. Science.org recently published an interesting interview [0] on exactly that, that even made the HN front page.
[0] https://www.science.org/content/article/now-we-know-where-de...