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Dead soldiers' teeth reveal diseases that doomed Napoleon's army

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Dead soldiers' teeth reveal diseases that doomed Napoleon's army

#61

Post by cryptonector »

hunterpayne wrote: post #58
cpleppert wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bunch of reasons. 1. Napoleon's goal was to pursue and defeat the Russian army in the field, not necessarily capture cities. Going north would have meant releasing the pressure on the main russian field armies and let them engage his main force at their discretion while exposing his flank. 2. St. Petersburg remained the political and economic capital of Russia; St. Petersburg never displaced Moscow in real world im…

> The Nazis made the same choice in WWII and even though they were able to control the Baltics and had Finland as an ally never seriously threatened to take the city. There was an 18 month siege of SP during WWII. SP starved and people there resorted to cannibalism to survive. I don't remember if it was ever taken but the Germans definitely tried to. And the situation there was ghoulish, so even if they didn't, they…

SP was never taken by the axis.

Re: Dead soldiers' teeth reveal diseases that doomed Napoleon's army

#62

Post by hunterpayne »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #10
readthenotes1 wrote: post #4

"one that would see his army decimated by cold, hunger and disease." 2 things: A)decimated means 1 in 10, not 9 in 10. B) according to the wiki article, Napoleon had already lost 75% of his initial fighting force by the time he got to Moscow, before the withdrawal. I am not sure an article on biology should include much history--I would certainly hope it did a better job on the biology...

You are figuratively killing me with your literalism.

Literally, anytime someone uses the term decimate, I assume they don't actually know what it means unless they explicitly state that they do.

Re: Dead soldiers' teeth reveal diseases that doomed Napoleon's army

#63

Post by paganel »

bigbadfeline wrote: post #60
paganel wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Napoleon didn't want to depose the Tsar, much less to conquer Russia, he just wanted to impose his (Napoleon's) will on the Tsar and on Russia as a whole when it came to strictly imposing the Continental Blockade against the British. A heavily defeated Russia wouldn't have helped him into achieving that.

> Because Napoleon didn't want to depose the Tsar, much less to conquer Russia... A heavily defeated Russia wouldn't have helped him into achieving [the blockade of Britain]. You think a heavily defeated Napoleon would help him a lot in that matter? Realistically, there was no third option, going in guaranteed than one of them would be heavily defeated. At that point in time, Napoleon was in command of the largest an…

That’s what he had done to the Prussians and Austrians, yes.

Re: Dead soldiers' teeth reveal diseases that doomed Napoleon's army

#64

Post by soared »

card_zero wrote: post #26
soared wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one allows or disallows language to drift, there are no language enforcers. This argument is not “it’s impossible” but rather it’s pedantic to claim a word is misused, when it’s been used this way for hundreds of years and so the original definition is no longer applicable.

We are all language enforcers, forcing it to drift in some ways and stopping it from drifting in others.

I suppose that is true and kind of a fun perspective!

Re: Dead soldiers' teeth reveal diseases that doomed Napoleon's army

#66

Post by dang »

purple_basilisk wrote: post #7

Check out the perfect set of teeth on the skull of the soldier shown in the article. Amazing how human dental health has changed since then.

the photo is here: https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/dna-reveals-real-killers-b...

(parent comment was posted before we merged the threads)

Re: Dead soldiers' teeth reveal diseases that doomed Napoleon's army

#67

Post by georgeburdell »

travisjungroth wrote: post #38
bluedino wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Due to "softer" diets and all the sugar, right?

Harder diets were more common in ancient humans, and straighten teeth in childhood. I don’t know what the diet was like in 1800.

Do you have any proof? A doctor once mentioned this to me, but then I talked to an orthodontist and he called it BS

Re: Dead soldiers' teeth reveal diseases that doomed Napoleon's army

#68

Post by smogcutter »

username332211 wrote: post #52
codedokode wrote: post #50

It is also interesting that Russian army officers could talk to French without a translator, because Napoleon invasion happened in the period of "westernization", started by Peter the Great. The buildings were built in a Western style, calendar was changed to European, government, army and fleet were reformed, noblemen were required to shave their traditional beards, wear western-style clothes, used French language,…

It's a lot less interesting once you look trough the names of senior Russian officers - de Tolly, Bagration, von Benningsen, Wittgenstein, Osterman-Tolstoy. One begins to suspect that the reason Kutuzov replaced Barkley was for a sort of reverse-DEI reasons.

To add - there’s also an Austrian general named O’Reilly, and a famously subpar Macdonald for the French.

The French at the time were busy inventing nationalism. Someone suitably aristocratic could find a place as an officer basically anywhere.

Re: Dead soldiers' teeth reveal diseases that doomed Napoleon's army

#69

Post by ciupicri »

codedokode wrote: post #27
lovegrenoble wrote: post #20

Great day Borodin We are brotherly feasts commemorating, firmly: “Were the tribes, Disaster threatening Russia; Not all eh Europe there was? Whose star led her!.. But we began to train hard pyatoyu And chest took the pressure tribes, obedient to the will of the proud, And is was an unequal dispute. And what? a disastrous escape, kichas, they have forgotten now; Lost Russian bayonet and snow, Pogrebshy their glory in…

It seems that computer translation is not good enough to parse Pushkin's poems yet. I tried ChatGPT, the translation is at least readable, but written in a dumbed down language. Yours is not even readable.

Why would would use ChatGPT or any other kind of automated translation for a poem of famous poet who's probably been already translated in several languages including English?

Re: Dead soldiers' teeth reveal diseases that doomed Napoleon's army

#70

Post by ciupicri »

cpleppert wrote: post #51
codedokode wrote: post #13

It is interesting that although Napoleon captured Moscow, the capital at that time was in Saint-Petersburg. Why didn't he go to the capital? This painting depicts Napoleon hopelessly waiting for a delegation from Russian Emperor with burning city in the background [1]. [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Napoleon_in_burning_...

A bunch of reasons. 1. Napoleon's goal was to pursue and defeat the Russian army in the field, not necessarily capture cities. Going north would have meant releasing the pressure on the main russian field armies and let them engage his main force at their discretion while exposing his flank. 2. St. Petersburg remained the political and economic capital of Russia; St. Petersburg never displaced Moscow in real world im…

Wasn't Moscow the capital of Russia during WW II?
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