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His dentures were made of lead, gold, hippopotamus ivory, the teeth of various animals, including horse and donkey teeth, [53] [54] and human teeth, possibly bought from slaves or poor people. [ 55 ] [ 56 ] Because ivory teeth quickly became stained, they may have had the appearance of wood to observers.
Some events or short periods of change have such a drastic effect on the cultures they affect that they form a natural break in history. These are often marked by the widespread use of both pre-and post-phrases centered on the event, as in pre-Reformation and post-Reformation, or pre-colonial and post-colonial.
Today, history has a broader scope as one of the disciplines interested in human history before the invention of writing. [8] [c] It is controversial whether history is a social science or forms part of the humanities. Like social scientists, historians formulate hypotheses, gather objective evidence, and present arguments based on this evidence.
[23] [24] Conventional history typically begins with the invention of writing, and is limited to past events relating directly to the human race. Big Historians point out that this limits study to the past 5,000 years and neglects the much longer time when humans existed on Earth.
In the field of military history, historians sometimes use what is known as the "fog of war technique" in hopes of avoiding the historian's fallacy. In this approach, the actions and decisions of the historical subject (such as a military commander) are evaluated primarily on the basis of what that person knew at the time, and not on future ...
The fundamental problem of chronology is to synchronize events. By synchronizing an event it becomes possible to relate it to the current time and to compare the event to other events. Among historians, a typical need is to synchronize the reigns of kings and leaders in order to relate the history of one country or region to that of another.
Historic recurrence is the repetition of similar events in history. [a] [b] The concept of historic recurrence has variously been applied to overall human history (e.g., to the rises and falls of empires), to repetitive patterns in the history of a given polity, and to any two specific events which bear a striking similarity. [4]
Historical determinism is the belief that events in history are entirely determined or constrained by various prior forces and, therefore, in a certain sense, inevitable. It is the philosophical view of determinism applied to the process or direction by which history unfolds. Historical determinism places the cause of the event behind it.