Human remains from other parts of Europe show many people in this Era died violently.
17 percent of skulls in Denmark from this Era had signs of serious violence. Women and children were not given any mercy.
Foot powered drills reached 2,000 rpm and only dates to the mid 1800's. Early electric dental drills reached about 3000 rpm in 1914. Modern dental drills are 40,000 rpm - 800,000 rpm depending on type and use (with the highest rpm being mostly for precision work).
I shudder to think what the 2k-3k rpm ones would be like to be subjected to - I find the low rpm current drills used for high torque, low precision work bad enough.
But the hand drills that went before them were typically in the region of 15 rpm...
So as someone who has been through enough dental work that new dentists tends to marvel at all the exciting work they can see examples of when examining me, I absolutely share the terror when thinking of ancient dentistry. (On the other hand, I'd probably have died of complications in my 20's if I'd had the same dental damage back then)
E.g. I have no metal fillings left any more - I had many when I was younger - as whenever the old metal fillings came loose the were replaced by composite fillings or porcelain.
And I hardly have any plastic composite fillings left either, as they got replaced by porcelain as porcelain have gotten cheaper and faster to do. My teeth overall look better today at 46 than they did in my teens despite far more damage.
Today porcelain fillings are about as good as gold fillings used to be, but cheaper and better looking (no, I'm not the type to find gold teeth aesthetically pleasing).
Getting work done has gotten more comfortable too (so much so that during my last round of dental work my dentist had to use a bite block as I kept falling asleep in the chair and he got tired of waking me up; though admittedly that is probably at least partly because I'm so used to it)
But I fully agree that we absolutely badly need a revolution in preventing decay and/or fully restoring teeth rather than repairing or replacing them, though.
Main downside is aesthetic: the amoeba colonization apparently turns your teeth grey or so.
1000 BC is already Iron Age, we had had entire civilizations with literature, fine metalwork and gigantic monuments all over the place at that point.
The iron age didn't arrive simultaneously everywhere.
(No clue about this specific place in the Alps, though.)
Working round the clock, fighting with other tribes, being eaten by parasites, having all kinds of diseases, I could go on and on. Sounds like "pretty nice life".
?
I’m sure our lives are more comfortable now but I’m not sure everyone is happier.
Happiness is a combination of too many different factors - you can't really optimize for it.
Maybe I'm a naive futurist, but I think the best time for a person to be alive is right now, if you're fortunate enough to be born in a developed country. And also maybe even if you weren't, as long as you weren't born somewhere awful like North Korea.
That very much depends where you were. We have lots of surviving letters from that time period.
The world has less war than ever.
This actually makes a lot of sense if you think about it - Only with the advent of agriculture did war make any sense, as before it would always be advantageous to just move to a different area rather than risk the few members of your family/tribe in a fight with another family/tribe, especially in the endless forests that populated much of the environment where humans lived.
Its not because it did not leave any trace that it did not exist
> About 90-95% of known societies engage in war. Those that did not are almost universally either isolated nomadic groups (for whom flight is an option)
This perfectly describes hunter-gatherer societies. All of the other examples cited in the wikipedia summary, going back as far as the Mesolithic, are settled agricultural societies.
See perhaps https://books.google.com.sg/books/about/Violence_and_Warfare...