169
Archaeologists Keep Finding Massive Shoes at an Ancient Roman Fort—and They Have No Idea Why They're So Big (www.smithsonianmag.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world
65 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 22 points 1 year ago (9 children)

That shoe’s sole was 12.6 inches long, which is roughly the same size as a men’s 14 in the United States, reports Live Science’s Kristina Killgrove.

That is smaller than my shoe size, those scientists have a dumb frame of reference.

Not my fault everyone else has weird and tiny feet.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 9 child comments
    •
  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Considering 6' people were rare 150 years ago, I'd imagine a size 14 would have been crazy 2,000 years ago.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    Kind of rare, but not exactly unheard of. Kinda like anyone taller than 6' 8" these days. If you saw them, you might think "Wow, they're tall" but you wouldnt think of them as freakish.

    Combine that with this being a Roman fort, and the fact that being a soldier was probably a pretty common job for big/strong men, and it's really not that surprising. Kind of a nothing story really. Imagine a bunch of future archeologists scratching their heads over finding a bunch of large shoes in an NBA locker room.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)
  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    They also lived shorter on average. Some of them still reached a very old age. The average really doesn‘t tell us that much about the extremes that existed.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    That's because of high infant/childhood mortality rates skewing the average. If you take away anyone who died before age 5, the average age shoots up to like 70+ in most places. Not too different from today.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Yes, I know. The problem is that most people see an average stat and think it‘s a universal law. That goes for life expectancy, height and even GDP per capita among other things. In reality no one is perfectly average and extremes exist everywhere.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [+] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)
    [deleted]
  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    One of my sons wears size 14, despite not being freakishly tall (he's 6'2" and strongly buit). He usually has to put in a special order. His hands are also massive. We've never had a conversation about cock size, though I'm somewhere in the normal range, whereas my wife's dad was reputed to be a tripod, so it could go either way, or somewhere in-between.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent