Well, another nail in the Terra Nullis coffin

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So I might have to go check. But I'm pretty sure the Roman state was providing gear to the army prior to the reforms around the time of Marius. Or at least paying them expenses towards getting their gear in. We have records for orders of supplies from Publicani merchants I think.

Don't quote me yet, I'll come back when I double check.

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It’s amazing walking around out there. When you walk up the tallest pyramid and look out among the jungle, gives you a vibe that your standing over a lot more than a bunch of howler monkeys.

Didn’t they find a Mayan settlement in Georgia also? Or was that fake?

About six hands.

>2 foot long

how long was it in normal units?

True, but they are grouped together in the pre-colombian era, like the Med is for all 0AD info outside of China/East, or like Medieval tends to mean Europe not Africa or Asia

I'm trying to evaluate the weight of certain historical events and their impact on our lives as we know it today...

Is it fair to say that, if for example, had William the Conqueror not conquered Britain in 1066, then many Brits alive today would not have come into existence? In other words, it disrupted life to such an extent that if it had not happened, our ancestral parents would never have met, and we'd have a completely different set of "people" in existence today.

*Whispers. I'm tapping out. My knowledge isn't enough

But I did hear that maybe Satellite X-Ray scanning has shown an even more ancient civilisation/Stonehenge-like religious place along the Amazon, which makes more sense as long river like the Nile. Might have been more a seasonal giant religious/trade gathering though

BUT, I'll trust you. Maybe Guatemala would have been the Silk Road/Constantinople analogue between North and South America, like Constantinople/Istanbul/Byzantium was for the other giant continent

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Central American or Mezo-American. The South American cultures are/were very different and unrelated culturally.

If you can remember link it, it sounds like interesting reading.

The Yucatan is a completely different region though, just FYI. They're talking here about the Peten which has a pretty different topology and climate.

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It's worth investigating. I think the main reason he hasn't just said it is because it's a highly speculative thing with his current data set. El Mirador is where most of his work is but El Mirador is not as old as Highland sites like Kaminaljuyu.

It would be a bit frowned on for him to make that speculative a claim without more data. Issue is collecting data in this field is very time consuming and very expensive.

EDIT: He also apparently did say it and has been frowned on outside my knowledge.

Loot and plunder went a long way through the bronze age

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That’s pretty much what it comes down to. Roman soldiers effectively had their gear subsidized or provided by the state, whereas in the Middle Ages a knight had to equip himself with weapons, armor, and horses, and as you pointed out, good longswords were very expensive because they take much more metal than a Gladius, and require more artisanship to make. Even peasant levies had to provide their own gear, which was why most of them showed up to war with various pieces of farm equipment as weapons.

This is not dissimilar to the Roman system prior to the Marian reforms. After Marius, Rome’s army was state funded, or at least funded by the general/politician who was in charge of it, whereas pre-Marius Roman soldiers had to equip themselves and were actually distinguished by their types of gear, (hastati, principes, triarii) which was based effectively on what the individual could afford to equip himself with.

Not at the height of the Empire. They had two javelins for throwing and the gladius. The late-Republic/early-Empire legions were a weird ancient army in that way. They set aside about 2000 years of pike warfare supremacy for more maneuverable short swords. By the later Empire, they had incorporated more pike-based auxiliaries and shifted back to longer swords and pikes as cavalry became a bigger component on all sides of their battlefields.

Your assumptions make a questionable shortcut. The spear was the weapon of choice not solely because it was cheaper to produce - it was also flat-out better in a wide variety of circumstances.

The cost difference between a spear and a short sword do not have to be very significant for the spear to become the de facto primary weapon.

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I'm not a historian.

Rome had standing armies. The very large number (the majority) of the participants in much of Medieval warfare were militia. It's much more economically feasible to buy expensive equipment for a recruit you expect to still be around 5, 10 or 20 years from now, versus a recruit you expect to go back to his farm in a few months.