Post by The Dungeon Master on Feb 14, 2017 19:50:51 GMT -6
21 Answers
Jordan Ambra
Jordan Ambra, Entrepreneur, programmer, artist, polymath
Written 3 Apr 2015
We are really terrible storytellers.
Specifically, I mean telling stories to communicate values, thoughts, history, and culture.
Every night before I tuck the kids into bed, I tell them a story about someone in our family. Sometimes I embellish, other times I try to stay as true as memory allows me to. Now the stories are fun to share, whereas they were difficult years ago when I first started.
But you know what these stories do? They connect the kids into my life and family, many of whom live far away, or are dead, or probably will never meet my kids. Now they know the story about how my brother threw away my uncle's cigarettes to keep him healthy. They know about how much my family loves making pie (see: eating pie). They've heard about where we grew up, and going on vacations as a kid, and the wild things we did and the trouble we got into. They'll hear more about how I met and fell in love with their mother, how crazy hard and how crazy fun life can be, and the struggles and successes we've had.
And they'll understand us. That's really the missing piece in our world culture now. We forego community and relationship and mutual understanding of our families in favor of thirst for more information. Both are worthy pursuits, but understanding has taken a backseat, at least in part due to missing stories.
We have replaced the richness of oral history with visual delicacies instead. There is value in visuals, particularly in communication of information and detail, but the imagination lies fairly dormant during a movie in contrast to a song or an old man's tale.
And I hope to change that, at least a little, for our family and our children. Previous generations did this because they didn't have any other tools to pass down a legacy, or were too poor to afford them. And, without a TV in the pub, somebody had to be the entertainment--why not share a story and make everyone feel something?
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Related QuestionsMore Answers Below
What are some skills that most people used to have, but now very few people have?
What was the most expensive colour used in medieval manuscripts?
Would any medieval food be considered tasty to modern people?
What are some of the most useful skills to know?
What are things that you don't know how to do that most people know?
Anonymous
Anonymous
Written 3 Apr 2015
Let's imagine that on one fateful day, John Doe, the absolutely average citizen, wakes up just outside of a small village during the Middle Ages, somewhere in Europe, maybe France or England. Let's assume for simplicity that he knows the modern language of the specific region. Would he be able to survive? What could he achieve using his modern-day knowledge and skills? Could he "invent" or prove something significal?
To elaborate more, he does not know much about farming or working with wood or metals, besides being a hobbyist DIY-er, but even there, his skills usually depend on a Home Depot and power tools being available. He does know his high school maths, physics, chemistry and biology, but of course relies on calculators or computers for more convoluted operations (e.g. looking up results of trigonometric functions). He also knows everything that is considered trivially known as of today's standards, e.g. the basic principles of heavier-than-air flight, matter being composed of atoms, the crude anatomy of the human body, the existence of microorganisms, etc.
There's a book written about it: Crusade in Jeans (2006)
More on this topic: What could an average modern human achieve in medieval times?
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Tim O'Neill
Tim O'Neill, I have a M.A. in Medieval Literature and have studied most aspects of the period for many years.
Updated 6 Apr 2015
Many medieval people developed mnemonics to a high level of skill in a way few people can manage today. In an age where literacy was low and written texts expensive, the art of memory was highly prized and carefully cultivated. People trained in the ars memoriae were living databases of information. As well as people who used the formal systems of mnemonics based on techniques such as the "mind palace", there were troubadors who could remember thousands of songs and minstrels, scops and skalds who could recite epics hours long or even over several days, purely from memory. Very few people can do these things today.
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Kris Lim
Kris Lim, I provide advice at your own risk.
Updated 16 Apr 2015
Waking up without an alarm clock.
While travelling, how to keep track of the number of days passed. Very important if you were to need to arrive on a specific day, not earlier nor later.
How to keep track of time and estimate how much sunlight time is left. Especially important to decide when to build a shelter for the night when travelling in the wild. For example to gather wood and build a shelter needs an hour and it gets dark by 7. That means by hook or by crook you need to stop whatever you're doing by 5.30pm with a buffer of half an hour. Done without watches.
Having a sixth sense to know when dangerous animals are nearby especially while travelling in the jungle.
Knowing how to start a fire.
Dealing with simple cuts and bruises without band aid, iodine, sterile gauzes or clinics.
Knowing whether someone is actually who they claim they are (the authorities etc.) since there were no picture IDs at that time. In short whether to trust someone or not.
Performing simple repairs around the house.
Not needing to watch TV.
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Boniface Muggli
Boniface Muggli, Interested and reads much history, especially the Roman Empire and early Europe.
Written 10 Jun 2015
I'd suggest a few possibilities:
Know how to remember and correlate an astounding variety of measures and scales--coins were a hodgepodge of a dozen pennies per shilling and all sorts of other ratios. Most people had little access to coins outside of cities, but similar varieties of units existed in liquid measure, solid measure (both weights and volume), length, and area. Then, measures from one region to the next, sometimes one town to the next, could vary somewhat.
Memory of stories, relationships, debts and contracts--since few were literate in the Middle Ages. Even those that were, such as monks, often prized their ability to memorize large quantites of texts--one abby's requirement to become a monk was to have memorized at least the Psalms (150) and the four Gospels.
Bartering. For just about everything.
Entertainment--especially in those long winter days and nights when there was little else to do.
Weaving cloth, and even making the thread beforehand. There is a reason women are called "the distaff sex." When not occupied with other work, most women were occupied with twisting thread out of fibers.
Farming and raising food. Remember that about 98% or more of all people were rural, and mostly involved in farmwork, or closely related occupations, such as blacksmiths or millers. Nowadays, some are involved in that sort of thing, either as hobbies (gardens) or professions--but farmers and ranchers are about 2% of the population, so 90+% of the people no longer really know how to raise their food.
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Kamia Taylor
Kamia Taylor
Written Apr 6, 2015
I agree with Chris Bast that there are some humans somewhere, especially those interested in survivalist living, that may do some or even all of the things that medieval people used to do. But that wasn't your question. Your question was what MOST modern humans don't do. There are many. To name just a few:
Spinning cloth; weaving, even to a certain degree sewing. If stores were suddenly empty and not to be refilled, it would be interesting to see how people would then clothe themselves.
Feeding themselves, whether hunting, gathering or farmin. Again if the stores are empty, can you imagine all 33 Million people in say, Los Angeles, trying to feed themselves. Most of them don't even have a clue where to forage for wild foods and/or how to grow something as simple as an apple or a tomato. And modern agriculture is so dependent on a limited number of seed strains and massive inputs of fertilizers that were they gone, many, many would starve.
Drawing together into a community. You still see it more in smaller towns, but in large cities each person seems to want to remain independent, disconnected and autonomous.
Living without electricity. I've seen blackouts on the West Coast and panic and riot ensued.
Living without an abundance of water. We've only just begun to see the wrangling that will occur as water becomes scarcer and scarcer. People in Medieval times had to carry whatever the drank and used, so they learned how to conserve admirally.
Building their own home or shelter, even roads or bridges. We have farmed out all of this to so-called experts, and probably couldn't construct something if we wanted to. But these experts are aging and not being replaced. It's going to be interesting as infrastructure keeps falling apart.
Healing themselves. We've become a nation of relying upon the someone, the doctor and the other guy. Previously in every village there was someone who knew what to do, and even two or three generations ago, grandmothers' recipes were cherished, because if a doctor were three-weeks' ride away you had to do something.
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Gustavo Andrés Ibarra
Gustavo Andrés Ibarra, Fin-tech full-stack developer.
Written Nov 3
I found some clues regarding the words included in your question:
Useful, medieval, modern.
The nature of human intelligence is to develop skills according to its time and current technology.
For example, think about how we have replaced simple sum and subtraction skills because our smartphones make it so easy to get a digital calculator when having to calculate the bill at a restaurant.
This may sound as if humans are getting dumb or losing important mathematical practices, however, think of it as if it is also natural to lend some brain tasks to machines in order to develop new ones and be prepared for them as well.
So when I think about usefulness, I like to think about what skills do I need to meet today’s necessities.
For example, I no longer need to know how to make an axe out of wood and iron, but I do need to know how to take the most out of my computer by learning how to program or make a simple website.
Man and machine interaction has always been intimate, one cannot evolve nor exist without the other. As we develop better and more efficient machines, we develop ways of using them, useful skills.
Regarding storytelling (as Jordan Ambra pointed out) and other abstract skills, I believe it works the same way. We no longer read much books, but we consume a lot of audiovisual material. You can find as much garbage in a book or in a story as you can find many values in a movie. It depends on the aim of the author. But that’s an answer to another question.
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Catherine Gibson
Catherine Gibson
Written Apr 10, 2015
I think there are a lot of the things most average American's have lost the ability to do. A big one is the ability to safely store and preserve food. Until very recent advents in refrigeration, year round cold storage was not available unless you lived in extremely northern climates. Cold cellars will work for some things, and you'd need to know what, and how to monitor the foods and when and how to purge spoiling food, How to make pots, baskets, and other wooden structures by hand as storage vessels, how to smoke and cure meat, fish and birds. You'd need to gather nuts and seed, trap migrating birds and small animals like squirrels, rabbits, and other rodents for regular food use. How to brew mead, beer and cider so as to preserve your harvests of grain, honey and apples. Beekeeping without modern hives too.
Plus cooking over an open fire with spits and very basic pots. A lot of outdoor cookery does happen today but, I see a LOT of pretty advanced cast iron pots and pans. The average medieval person would have some crockery, a few plates, and few mugs, knives for each person and perhaps a big pot, a poker and a pan. Someone in the village would need to be a smith or you'd be looking at just having pottery of your own manufacture to cook in over an open fire. So there would be lots of soup, beans and porridge in a corner of an ashy bed of coals. All the wood for the home, the cooking, building and smoking would have to be done with very basic hand tools and the average family in the middle ages might have an axe and hatchet to get the job done. If the village had a sawyer, you might be able to get logs sawn, but most likely the splitting, planing and mortise & tenoning would be done by you. And you or a neighbor would need to understand the basic principles timber frame architecture.
Since there were frequent famines and crop failures and no social services other than limited charity; begging, pleading for aid from the clergy, unless you could make and preserve every last scrap of food you might very well starve. Many did. Snares and hand made bows and arrows, and fletching and string making and rope making all would be done by you. Learn how to make soap and launder in a stream, cut hair and fabric with a knife, sew by hand and possibly make your own needles with thorns or wood. Metal needles would be prized implements and used until they literally wore away to nothing. Pins are expensive too. Make you own buttons and fasteners for clothes, as well as likely making your own shoes. Others have mentioned sewing and fabric, textile production already.
Oh, as well as skinning, butchering and tanning your catch. Rendering fat for use in cooking, oil lamps and medicines (which had already been addressed). You'd need to learn to live without proper beds, as we know them and make do with the floor and perhaps a "mattress" of rushes, leaves or hay and blankets. You might have a canvas or heavy cloth sheet between you and the bedding, as Henry the VII did, but very likely not. If you kept geese or ducks and were able to accumulate the down and feathers, you'd need to know how to clean and prepare them for use in pillows and beds. But, since these were so valuable, most likely you'd sell them for extremely rare cash and continue to make do with hay or leaves. Apparently beech leaves are very nice and sweet smelling. Oh I forgot, learn to live with lice and bugs in your day to day world. Lice grooming and cleaning were extremely important.
Don't forget, the land (game, trees, fish in the streams) belonged to the nobles or the church. Unless you were a craftsman or tradesman you were probably a serf, so a percentage of everything you produced belonged to the lord. You couldn't hunt freely, there was very little public land beyond the greens or commons, and you spend an enormous amount of your life engaged in the process of finding food and fuel.
Finally, you'd need to learn how to barter and bargain; knowing the relative value of what you can produce and what you couldn't produce so as to negotiate fair deals. There was some regulation of fair weights and measures and prohibitions against adulterated foods, but nothing like the USDA or FDA so caveat emptor.
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Chris Bast
Chris Bast
Written Mar 22, 2015
I'm not really sure there is anything. Richard Feenstra cites low-tech or no-tech navigation, but survival experts and outdoorsmen actually use those skills all the time. I personally know an avid hunter who knows all sorts of no-tech navigation skills and swears by them. He can find north using the North Star and even guesstimate the time of day by the distance between the sun and the horizon. His wife insists he take a compass with him when he goes hunting but he says he never uses it.
I don't think there is any skill once practiced in the Middle Ages that isn't still practiced today. Perhaps not as widely practiced, but still done.
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Otto Hahn
Otto Hahn, Chemist, programmer, freelancer and entrepreneur
Written Apr 4, 2015
The bankers , traders and priests used roman numerals to do arithmetic in a checker board called the exchecker. It is a really complicated method no one uses today.
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Richard Feenstra
Richard Feenstra, Doctor of educational psychology
Written Mar 22, 2015
Navigation skills. Over several hundred years technology to help navigate the globe and our local environments has steadily improved and in the last few decades the Internet and GPS has all but replaced the useful skill of being able to figure out East from West or distance traveled without the use of technology.
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Daniel Montano
Daniel Montano, I can read English.
Written Apr 17, 2015
I'm going to keep it to things that would still be useful to a modern person. Cooking over an open fire is definitely a lost art to many but also one not much needed in modern life. So:
-Navigating a city.
-Haggling and bartering.
-Telling stories.
-Handling animals, wild or stray.
-Walking long distances economically.
-Enduring odors.
Mind you that these are all still very present in many regions and cultures. They may be lost to the average USA city dweller but precisely because they are still useful, they are still used.
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Cesar Contreras
Cesar Contreras
Updated May 22, 2015
Many excellent answers! I'd add a few courtesy of my grandfather, a man born and raised in an old rustic Spanish town and who became a sailor when he was 11:
Sail with mechanical tools. Know the stars and the passage of time.
Weave rope
Grow and care for livestock and then properly butcher them for human consumption
Build the machines and everything else needed to process said animal food for better taste and preservation (make sausages for example and dry meats and salted meats, which endure time way better without spoiling)
Plant and grow most common grains and vegetables.
Treat simple wounds and aches
Those are some I can think of that I, as an engineer working in a tech company, would have very little chance of being successful at
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Tom Weidig
Tom Weidig, PHD theoretical physics and financial/risk analyst
Written Apr 5, 2015
The most useful skill has to be riding and caring for a horse. Virtually no-one can ride any more, but in the Middle Ages it was the only way to travel distances.
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Joe G Kearns
Joe G Kearns
Written Apr 4, 2015
Walking. Most people in those days could walk almost any distance. This in turn kept them very fit. This in turn probably helped them fight off diseases that would have otherwise killed them. However the list of diseases that could kill you was pretty long so that fitness was only giving you a small edge.
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Dorothy Clark
Dorothy Clark, works at Entrepreneurs
Written Apr 3, 2015
Women controlled contraception and fertility using the herbs they grew in their gardens or found in the forest.
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Andrew Fe
Andrew Fe, Majored in history; minored in English (avid reader of sci-fi and history)
Written May 22, 2015
Fighting.
The average medieval person of any rank and either gender knew how to wrestle and knife/club fight from an early age.
They had a frightening grasp of casual violence.
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Raymond Davis
Raymond Davis
Written Mar 23, 2015
I think the average medieval commoner was forced to be more self sufficient just to survive. Despite a lot of ignorance about the wider world, native intelligence may actually have been higher.
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Michael Elijah
Michael Elijah, Scientist
Written May 18, 2015
Forming operative clans. How many modern men can come together with no ego and build a colony? Most modern humans don't. I used to teach in the military with lessons from my grandfather how to build and run an army to build an operative unit from the scratch, from knowing no one. The ancients knew they cannot work alone and they have to know how to heighten their chance of survival of their group with as minimal ego as possible to maximize their operatives. To repeat, most modern humans can't.
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Keith Allpress
Keith Allpress
Written Apr 5, 2015
Making mead. Water quality in Europe was poor so for thousands of years Europeans have brewed liquids to drink. So much so that we have evolved an enzyme to break down alcohol.
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Rich Canino
Rich Canino, worked at Redaction
Written Apr 17, 2015
Farming. We have relatively few farmers. Almost everyone in the medieval period were farmers.
Dying of Cholera. We're not as good at that now, having sanitation.
Jordan Ambra
Jordan Ambra, Entrepreneur, programmer, artist, polymath
Written 3 Apr 2015
We are really terrible storytellers.
Specifically, I mean telling stories to communicate values, thoughts, history, and culture.
Every night before I tuck the kids into bed, I tell them a story about someone in our family. Sometimes I embellish, other times I try to stay as true as memory allows me to. Now the stories are fun to share, whereas they were difficult years ago when I first started.
But you know what these stories do? They connect the kids into my life and family, many of whom live far away, or are dead, or probably will never meet my kids. Now they know the story about how my brother threw away my uncle's cigarettes to keep him healthy. They know about how much my family loves making pie (see: eating pie). They've heard about where we grew up, and going on vacations as a kid, and the wild things we did and the trouble we got into. They'll hear more about how I met and fell in love with their mother, how crazy hard and how crazy fun life can be, and the struggles and successes we've had.
And they'll understand us. That's really the missing piece in our world culture now. We forego community and relationship and mutual understanding of our families in favor of thirst for more information. Both are worthy pursuits, but understanding has taken a backseat, at least in part due to missing stories.
We have replaced the richness of oral history with visual delicacies instead. There is value in visuals, particularly in communication of information and detail, but the imagination lies fairly dormant during a movie in contrast to a song or an old man's tale.
And I hope to change that, at least a little, for our family and our children. Previous generations did this because they didn't have any other tools to pass down a legacy, or were too poor to afford them. And, without a TV in the pub, somebody had to be the entertainment--why not share a story and make everyone feel something?
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Related QuestionsMore Answers Below
What are some skills that most people used to have, but now very few people have?
What was the most expensive colour used in medieval manuscripts?
Would any medieval food be considered tasty to modern people?
What are some of the most useful skills to know?
What are things that you don't know how to do that most people know?
Anonymous
Anonymous
Written 3 Apr 2015
Let's imagine that on one fateful day, John Doe, the absolutely average citizen, wakes up just outside of a small village during the Middle Ages, somewhere in Europe, maybe France or England. Let's assume for simplicity that he knows the modern language of the specific region. Would he be able to survive? What could he achieve using his modern-day knowledge and skills? Could he "invent" or prove something significal?
To elaborate more, he does not know much about farming or working with wood or metals, besides being a hobbyist DIY-er, but even there, his skills usually depend on a Home Depot and power tools being available. He does know his high school maths, physics, chemistry and biology, but of course relies on calculators or computers for more convoluted operations (e.g. looking up results of trigonometric functions). He also knows everything that is considered trivially known as of today's standards, e.g. the basic principles of heavier-than-air flight, matter being composed of atoms, the crude anatomy of the human body, the existence of microorganisms, etc.
There's a book written about it: Crusade in Jeans (2006)
More on this topic: What could an average modern human achieve in medieval times?
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Tim O'Neill
Tim O'Neill, I have a M.A. in Medieval Literature and have studied most aspects of the period for many years.
Updated 6 Apr 2015
Many medieval people developed mnemonics to a high level of skill in a way few people can manage today. In an age where literacy was low and written texts expensive, the art of memory was highly prized and carefully cultivated. People trained in the ars memoriae were living databases of information. As well as people who used the formal systems of mnemonics based on techniques such as the "mind palace", there were troubadors who could remember thousands of songs and minstrels, scops and skalds who could recite epics hours long or even over several days, purely from memory. Very few people can do these things today.
247.1k Views · View Upvotes
Kris Lim
Kris Lim, I provide advice at your own risk.
Updated 16 Apr 2015
Waking up without an alarm clock.
While travelling, how to keep track of the number of days passed. Very important if you were to need to arrive on a specific day, not earlier nor later.
How to keep track of time and estimate how much sunlight time is left. Especially important to decide when to build a shelter for the night when travelling in the wild. For example to gather wood and build a shelter needs an hour and it gets dark by 7. That means by hook or by crook you need to stop whatever you're doing by 5.30pm with a buffer of half an hour. Done without watches.
Having a sixth sense to know when dangerous animals are nearby especially while travelling in the jungle.
Knowing how to start a fire.
Dealing with simple cuts and bruises without band aid, iodine, sterile gauzes or clinics.
Knowing whether someone is actually who they claim they are (the authorities etc.) since there were no picture IDs at that time. In short whether to trust someone or not.
Performing simple repairs around the house.
Not needing to watch TV.
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Boniface Muggli
Boniface Muggli, Interested and reads much history, especially the Roman Empire and early Europe.
Written 10 Jun 2015
I'd suggest a few possibilities:
Know how to remember and correlate an astounding variety of measures and scales--coins were a hodgepodge of a dozen pennies per shilling and all sorts of other ratios. Most people had little access to coins outside of cities, but similar varieties of units existed in liquid measure, solid measure (both weights and volume), length, and area. Then, measures from one region to the next, sometimes one town to the next, could vary somewhat.
Memory of stories, relationships, debts and contracts--since few were literate in the Middle Ages. Even those that were, such as monks, often prized their ability to memorize large quantites of texts--one abby's requirement to become a monk was to have memorized at least the Psalms (150) and the four Gospels.
Bartering. For just about everything.
Entertainment--especially in those long winter days and nights when there was little else to do.
Weaving cloth, and even making the thread beforehand. There is a reason women are called "the distaff sex." When not occupied with other work, most women were occupied with twisting thread out of fibers.
Farming and raising food. Remember that about 98% or more of all people were rural, and mostly involved in farmwork, or closely related occupations, such as blacksmiths or millers. Nowadays, some are involved in that sort of thing, either as hobbies (gardens) or professions--but farmers and ranchers are about 2% of the population, so 90+% of the people no longer really know how to raise their food.
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Kamia Taylor
Kamia Taylor
Written Apr 6, 2015
I agree with Chris Bast that there are some humans somewhere, especially those interested in survivalist living, that may do some or even all of the things that medieval people used to do. But that wasn't your question. Your question was what MOST modern humans don't do. There are many. To name just a few:
Spinning cloth; weaving, even to a certain degree sewing. If stores were suddenly empty and not to be refilled, it would be interesting to see how people would then clothe themselves.
Feeding themselves, whether hunting, gathering or farmin. Again if the stores are empty, can you imagine all 33 Million people in say, Los Angeles, trying to feed themselves. Most of them don't even have a clue where to forage for wild foods and/or how to grow something as simple as an apple or a tomato. And modern agriculture is so dependent on a limited number of seed strains and massive inputs of fertilizers that were they gone, many, many would starve.
Drawing together into a community. You still see it more in smaller towns, but in large cities each person seems to want to remain independent, disconnected and autonomous.
Living without electricity. I've seen blackouts on the West Coast and panic and riot ensued.
Living without an abundance of water. We've only just begun to see the wrangling that will occur as water becomes scarcer and scarcer. People in Medieval times had to carry whatever the drank and used, so they learned how to conserve admirally.
Building their own home or shelter, even roads or bridges. We have farmed out all of this to so-called experts, and probably couldn't construct something if we wanted to. But these experts are aging and not being replaced. It's going to be interesting as infrastructure keeps falling apart.
Healing themselves. We've become a nation of relying upon the someone, the doctor and the other guy. Previously in every village there was someone who knew what to do, and even two or three generations ago, grandmothers' recipes were cherished, because if a doctor were three-weeks' ride away you had to do something.
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Gustavo Andrés Ibarra
Gustavo Andrés Ibarra, Fin-tech full-stack developer.
Written Nov 3
I found some clues regarding the words included in your question:
Useful, medieval, modern.
The nature of human intelligence is to develop skills according to its time and current technology.
For example, think about how we have replaced simple sum and subtraction skills because our smartphones make it so easy to get a digital calculator when having to calculate the bill at a restaurant.
This may sound as if humans are getting dumb or losing important mathematical practices, however, think of it as if it is also natural to lend some brain tasks to machines in order to develop new ones and be prepared for them as well.
So when I think about usefulness, I like to think about what skills do I need to meet today’s necessities.
For example, I no longer need to know how to make an axe out of wood and iron, but I do need to know how to take the most out of my computer by learning how to program or make a simple website.
Man and machine interaction has always been intimate, one cannot evolve nor exist without the other. As we develop better and more efficient machines, we develop ways of using them, useful skills.
Regarding storytelling (as Jordan Ambra pointed out) and other abstract skills, I believe it works the same way. We no longer read much books, but we consume a lot of audiovisual material. You can find as much garbage in a book or in a story as you can find many values in a movie. It depends on the aim of the author. But that’s an answer to another question.
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Catherine Gibson
Catherine Gibson
Written Apr 10, 2015
I think there are a lot of the things most average American's have lost the ability to do. A big one is the ability to safely store and preserve food. Until very recent advents in refrigeration, year round cold storage was not available unless you lived in extremely northern climates. Cold cellars will work for some things, and you'd need to know what, and how to monitor the foods and when and how to purge spoiling food, How to make pots, baskets, and other wooden structures by hand as storage vessels, how to smoke and cure meat, fish and birds. You'd need to gather nuts and seed, trap migrating birds and small animals like squirrels, rabbits, and other rodents for regular food use. How to brew mead, beer and cider so as to preserve your harvests of grain, honey and apples. Beekeeping without modern hives too.
Plus cooking over an open fire with spits and very basic pots. A lot of outdoor cookery does happen today but, I see a LOT of pretty advanced cast iron pots and pans. The average medieval person would have some crockery, a few plates, and few mugs, knives for each person and perhaps a big pot, a poker and a pan. Someone in the village would need to be a smith or you'd be looking at just having pottery of your own manufacture to cook in over an open fire. So there would be lots of soup, beans and porridge in a corner of an ashy bed of coals. All the wood for the home, the cooking, building and smoking would have to be done with very basic hand tools and the average family in the middle ages might have an axe and hatchet to get the job done. If the village had a sawyer, you might be able to get logs sawn, but most likely the splitting, planing and mortise & tenoning would be done by you. And you or a neighbor would need to understand the basic principles timber frame architecture.
Since there were frequent famines and crop failures and no social services other than limited charity; begging, pleading for aid from the clergy, unless you could make and preserve every last scrap of food you might very well starve. Many did. Snares and hand made bows and arrows, and fletching and string making and rope making all would be done by you. Learn how to make soap and launder in a stream, cut hair and fabric with a knife, sew by hand and possibly make your own needles with thorns or wood. Metal needles would be prized implements and used until they literally wore away to nothing. Pins are expensive too. Make you own buttons and fasteners for clothes, as well as likely making your own shoes. Others have mentioned sewing and fabric, textile production already.
Oh, as well as skinning, butchering and tanning your catch. Rendering fat for use in cooking, oil lamps and medicines (which had already been addressed). You'd need to learn to live without proper beds, as we know them and make do with the floor and perhaps a "mattress" of rushes, leaves or hay and blankets. You might have a canvas or heavy cloth sheet between you and the bedding, as Henry the VII did, but very likely not. If you kept geese or ducks and were able to accumulate the down and feathers, you'd need to know how to clean and prepare them for use in pillows and beds. But, since these were so valuable, most likely you'd sell them for extremely rare cash and continue to make do with hay or leaves. Apparently beech leaves are very nice and sweet smelling. Oh I forgot, learn to live with lice and bugs in your day to day world. Lice grooming and cleaning were extremely important.
Don't forget, the land (game, trees, fish in the streams) belonged to the nobles or the church. Unless you were a craftsman or tradesman you were probably a serf, so a percentage of everything you produced belonged to the lord. You couldn't hunt freely, there was very little public land beyond the greens or commons, and you spend an enormous amount of your life engaged in the process of finding food and fuel.
Finally, you'd need to learn how to barter and bargain; knowing the relative value of what you can produce and what you couldn't produce so as to negotiate fair deals. There was some regulation of fair weights and measures and prohibitions against adulterated foods, but nothing like the USDA or FDA so caveat emptor.
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Chris Bast
Chris Bast
Written Mar 22, 2015
I'm not really sure there is anything. Richard Feenstra cites low-tech or no-tech navigation, but survival experts and outdoorsmen actually use those skills all the time. I personally know an avid hunter who knows all sorts of no-tech navigation skills and swears by them. He can find north using the North Star and even guesstimate the time of day by the distance between the sun and the horizon. His wife insists he take a compass with him when he goes hunting but he says he never uses it.
I don't think there is any skill once practiced in the Middle Ages that isn't still practiced today. Perhaps not as widely practiced, but still done.
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Otto Hahn
Otto Hahn, Chemist, programmer, freelancer and entrepreneur
Written Apr 4, 2015
The bankers , traders and priests used roman numerals to do arithmetic in a checker board called the exchecker. It is a really complicated method no one uses today.
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Richard Feenstra
Richard Feenstra, Doctor of educational psychology
Written Mar 22, 2015
Navigation skills. Over several hundred years technology to help navigate the globe and our local environments has steadily improved and in the last few decades the Internet and GPS has all but replaced the useful skill of being able to figure out East from West or distance traveled without the use of technology.
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Daniel Montano
Daniel Montano, I can read English.
Written Apr 17, 2015
I'm going to keep it to things that would still be useful to a modern person. Cooking over an open fire is definitely a lost art to many but also one not much needed in modern life. So:
-Navigating a city.
-Haggling and bartering.
-Telling stories.
-Handling animals, wild or stray.
-Walking long distances economically.
-Enduring odors.
Mind you that these are all still very present in many regions and cultures. They may be lost to the average USA city dweller but precisely because they are still useful, they are still used.
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Cesar Contreras
Cesar Contreras
Updated May 22, 2015
Many excellent answers! I'd add a few courtesy of my grandfather, a man born and raised in an old rustic Spanish town and who became a sailor when he was 11:
Sail with mechanical tools. Know the stars and the passage of time.
Weave rope
Grow and care for livestock and then properly butcher them for human consumption
Build the machines and everything else needed to process said animal food for better taste and preservation (make sausages for example and dry meats and salted meats, which endure time way better without spoiling)
Plant and grow most common grains and vegetables.
Treat simple wounds and aches
Those are some I can think of that I, as an engineer working in a tech company, would have very little chance of being successful at
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Tom Weidig
Tom Weidig, PHD theoretical physics and financial/risk analyst
Written Apr 5, 2015
The most useful skill has to be riding and caring for a horse. Virtually no-one can ride any more, but in the Middle Ages it was the only way to travel distances.
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Joe G Kearns
Joe G Kearns
Written Apr 4, 2015
Walking. Most people in those days could walk almost any distance. This in turn kept them very fit. This in turn probably helped them fight off diseases that would have otherwise killed them. However the list of diseases that could kill you was pretty long so that fitness was only giving you a small edge.
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Dorothy Clark
Dorothy Clark, works at Entrepreneurs
Written Apr 3, 2015
Women controlled contraception and fertility using the herbs they grew in their gardens or found in the forest.
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Andrew Fe
Andrew Fe, Majored in history; minored in English (avid reader of sci-fi and history)
Written May 22, 2015
Fighting.
The average medieval person of any rank and either gender knew how to wrestle and knife/club fight from an early age.
They had a frightening grasp of casual violence.
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Raymond Davis
Raymond Davis
Written Mar 23, 2015
I think the average medieval commoner was forced to be more self sufficient just to survive. Despite a lot of ignorance about the wider world, native intelligence may actually have been higher.
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Michael Elijah
Michael Elijah, Scientist
Written May 18, 2015
Forming operative clans. How many modern men can come together with no ego and build a colony? Most modern humans don't. I used to teach in the military with lessons from my grandfather how to build and run an army to build an operative unit from the scratch, from knowing no one. The ancients knew they cannot work alone and they have to know how to heighten their chance of survival of their group with as minimal ego as possible to maximize their operatives. To repeat, most modern humans can't.
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Keith Allpress
Keith Allpress
Written Apr 5, 2015
Making mead. Water quality in Europe was poor so for thousands of years Europeans have brewed liquids to drink. So much so that we have evolved an enzyme to break down alcohol.
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Rich Canino
Rich Canino, worked at Redaction
Written Apr 17, 2015
Farming. We have relatively few farmers. Almost everyone in the medieval period were farmers.
Dying of Cholera. We're not as good at that now, having sanitation.