Shattered skeleton is first confirmed death from trebuchet
science.org
science.org
I would link a video but I don't think that is a wise idea for legal reasons. There were so many parties in that war and I'm not sure which ones were declared terrorist organizations.
I would like to see a video of a trebuchet. Modern or not.
Enjoy your “free speech” but be prepared to defend it with your life.
While this death may be the first confirmed from a trebuchet, is that really the first death by a trebuchet? Plus, I'd say catapults are almost identical to a trebuchet in workings, for the most part. I don't quite believe that this was really the first death by catapult.
We can rule out Warwolf [1] my favorite trebuchet, which never killed anyone.
Can we? That Wikipedia page is inconclusive, and thus article says:
During Edward I’s 1304 siege of the castle, English forces deployed the recently invented trebuchet, a weapon first documented in the 12th century. A cousin to the catapult, trebuchets were capable of hurling boulders weighing more than 100 kilograms hundreds of meters. One at Stirling, dubbed “War Wolf,” “was the biggest trebuchet ever built at that point,” Buckberry says. Eyewitness accounts confirm the giant siege engine was used during the 1304 battle, tearing through two stone walls “as an arrow would fly through a piece of cloth.”
Accounts of the battle don’t mention any trebuchet casualties. But Buckberry says Skeleton 150’s injuries strongly suggest at least one defender was hit from behind by a flying boulder, launched by War Wolf or one of the other siege engines arrayed outside Stirling Castle’s walls. “It’s a huge amount of energy delivered in milliseconds,” Waltenberger says. “In skeletons from past times you rarely see this.”
Trebuchets were certainly used by Richard the Lionheart and Phillip II - God's Own Sling and Bad Neighbour (Malvoisin) respectively.
I'm pretty sure Frederick Barbarossa used a custom-made Shelby Cobra outfitted with rapid-firing machine guns. He might have had a hard time turning it on though.
We have a picture of a counterweight trebuchet from around 1187, though. That’s (late) 12th century.
Wikipedia also mentions various variants on counterweight trebuchets: “Sometimes counterweight trebuchets are separated into two or three different categories based on how their counterweights are attached. These being fixed, hanging, and hinged counterweights. A fixed counterweight is an intrinsic part of the swinging arm and its trajectory is circular. Hanging counterweights hang below the arm and drop vertically. Hinged counterweights are attached to the arm by a swinging joint. Some fixed counterweights also had a hinged component. The type described by al-Tarsusi was a hanging counterweight. Writing in 1280, Giles of Rome claimed that hinged counterweight trebuchets had a greater range than fixed counterweight types”
Could be that some variant was new around 1300, or new in Europe.
That seems like a contradiction.
As in, the grave itself was dated, and 5 of the 9 skeletons found inside were also individually dated to roughly the same century. Maybe the other 4 were not tested, or turned out to have been buried at a later date.
So it’s likely, which means it’s not confirmed as the headline implies.
The probability regimes in which science is dealing often only leave marginal room for alternative explanations.
If I go, I would like to go from massive blunt trauma from behind that renders me instantly unconscious.
Actually, you know what, I think you might have a point there. I take back ky harsh words.
In the Battle of Agincourt, made famous by Henry V, the Welsh archers were supposed to be suffering from dysentery, as they destroyed the French knights.
What an embarrassment. Destroyed by guys with their pants around their ankles.
from the article: “skull broken in 61 places”
Doubt you’d stay conscious long enough to notice
It went on to tell how a man had committed suicide by drilling 23 holes in his head.
Breaking a skull into 61 pieces by a single blunt weapon would be instantly mortal, I think, but that’s not what I read in the article. It says (emphasis added) “including a skull smashed in 61 PLACES”.
Also, https://cfp.dainst.org/25th-european-ppa-meeting/talk/GHF9V8... says: “Patterning of fractures indicates that the focus of impact was around the right shoulder and the back of the cranium, with higher fragmentation in this area”.
I’m not a expert on blunt trauma, but I think that, if the victim got trapped below the projectile, preventing rapid blood loss a bit, unconsciousness due to loss of blood pressure may have taken long enough for the victim to realize they were hit. Still unlikely in my book, though.
From 1935. And he was not the first one to point that out either.
I actually think that thanks to the internet, we expose many more criminal build ups towards warfare nowadays than before.
[1] - https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/eisenhower001.asp
That strikes me as a wildly incorrect interpretation of the situation in the meme.
My reading is closer to a man on a parapet shouting "neener neener you can't touch me" moments before being touched by a rock at high velocity