black death is a really good pick that i hadn’t thought of at all before i went a-googling. kudos for getting that one. and your list definitely seems a bit more cold-war-influenced but like, our list didn’t really have the cold war *at all*, which didn’t seem quite right either :P
oh and: scientific revolution! i think that was actually our 10th pick, ultimately (was trying to remember a discussion from a week ago, orz—i remember we labored over whether “medical revolution” counted as an “event” or not and eventually decided smallpox vaccine / penicillin counted)
re: fire/wheel/etc: i am sure someone has studied to try and figure out if fire/wheel/cooking were “created once and then humans scattered all over the place” vs “discovered independently many times”, and i’d be curious what their conclusions are. the *cooking* thing is particularly interesting from this angle—there was a professor at my university whose whole body of research basically argued that the invention of cooking allowed us to have bigger brains, evolve to become more intelligent, etc (because we didn’t need as large of jaws to eat food). my understanding is that, in this professor’s youth, everyone regarded them as vaguely kooky, but apparently we *now* have evidence that cooking started back way further than we thought previously, and the professor’s timelines work out a lot better.
re: Gengis Khan: i think the interesting thing with the super-ancient empires is trying to figure out what their insidious/super-long-term impacts are. i picked Normans conquering pre-modern Britain because that dramatically transformed the English language & dramatically transformed what would become western European culture. i don’t know enough about Asia to really have an idea of what Ghengis Khan changed about the area (did it unify a bunch of previously-squabbling tribes, solidify the Mongolian identity, etc), and i don’t know enough about, say, Alexander the Great to say much other than “he sure did conquer a lot of stuff!” but of course i’m sure there’s more to be said than that :P
funnily enough, i was actually pretty reluctant to put anything American Revolution-related on my list, because like… we *were* just a shitty colony at the time, and we weren’t really a ~*~world power~*~ until WWII. hence me saying “eh, either American Revolution or French Revolution, both of ‘em kind of symbolize the same thing.” but the Yorktown pick in my friend’s list kind of drives home the “hey remember when we *beat the British navy* which like almost never happens and is hugely symbolically important” and like, okay, I guess the American Revolution was in fact a big deal :P
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2017-08-11 11:52 pm (UTC)oh and: scientific revolution! i think that was actually our 10th pick, ultimately (was trying to remember a discussion from a week ago, orz—i remember we labored over whether “medical revolution” counted as an “event” or not and eventually decided smallpox vaccine / penicillin counted)
re: fire/wheel/etc: i am sure someone has studied to try and figure out if fire/wheel/cooking were “created once and then humans scattered all over the place” vs “discovered independently many times”, and i’d be curious what their conclusions are. the *cooking* thing is particularly interesting from this angle—there was a professor at my university whose whole body of research basically argued that the invention of cooking allowed us to have bigger brains, evolve to become more intelligent, etc (because we didn’t need as large of jaws to eat food). my understanding is that, in this professor’s youth, everyone regarded them as vaguely kooky, but apparently we *now* have evidence that cooking started back way further than we thought previously, and the professor’s timelines work out a lot better.
re: Gengis Khan: i think the interesting thing with the super-ancient empires is trying to figure out what their insidious/super-long-term impacts are. i picked Normans conquering pre-modern Britain because that dramatically transformed the English language & dramatically transformed what would become western European culture. i don’t know enough about Asia to really have an idea of what Ghengis Khan changed about the area (did it unify a bunch of previously-squabbling tribes, solidify the Mongolian identity, etc), and i don’t know enough about, say, Alexander the Great to say much other than “he sure did conquer a lot of stuff!” but of course i’m sure there’s more to be said than that :P
funnily enough, i was actually pretty reluctant to put anything American Revolution-related on my list, because like… we *were* just a shitty colony at the time, and we weren’t really a ~*~world power~*~ until WWII. hence me saying “eh, either American Revolution or French Revolution, both of ‘em kind of symbolize the same thing.” but the Yorktown pick in my friend’s list kind of drives home the “hey remember when we *beat the British navy* which like almost never happens and is hugely symbolically important” and like, okay, I guess the American Revolution was in fact a big deal :P