None of this is really surprising, nor anything we would expect to be unique to one culture -- therefore they can all come about independently and when you think about what a society needs to do to survive it's no surprise that they did.

Housing: need places to live safely, need a place live securely, need strong and easy to find materials. Rocks are abundant and hard. Pyramids are the easiest shape to build tall things. Start with a big foundation and build on top of it, and add less as you go up so there's less and less weight to support. Look actually here at the earlier pyramids in Egypt for great examples of what didn't work, they didn't start with the Great Pyramid, there was a lot of trial and error.

Food: You need food and materials to provide for a civilisation, the jump to agriculture is an early one for civilisation and not that surprising. Finding out how to ensure a regularly and steady food supply rather than just relying on nature to provide it. It also means you can stay in one place instead of constantly moving around throughout the year, and therefore be close to your protective dwellings at all times (even more reason to have one then too).

Societal factors: Religion comes as a result of the unknown, so we can't both expect that things would be unknown, and that religion appeared. It's a universal experience across civilisations. "Why is this happening? Why does the sun move each day? Why does thunder exist? What the hell is causing this flooding and why is it happening to us?"

Social Structures also exist in animals. Humans didn't invent the concept of leaders, and leaders will form naturally if a gap is present. You could take 10 fry-cooks from Maccas and drop them on an island, if they're going to survive someone is going to try to take charge (whether efficient or not). But if someone is efficient, and even good, people will be more likely to continue following them. And there comes in warfare. What if someone doesn't like that group, what if rival factions split up, what if a new party shows up and decides that they already have a leader and won't respect the way of things done on the island -- or have arrived with supplies that would be greatly useful? etc.

With war comes loot, you can destroy everything they have, or you can take it and benefit off of that. That includes humans. Humans can farm, humans can build, humans can even teach. We have use. So it's no surprise slavery is common.

Want a stronger system? Create markets, create a central place where you can sell your goods, and people can get them. It benefits everyone.

And then bridges, boats, irrigation, is just a natural extension. River in the way, but there's some good hunting grounds just beyond it? Well, we gotta get over that river. Back to our island buddies, fish may be the best supply they have, need to get in the water to get them? Or maybe to another nearby island? Boats. It's overcoming obstacles, ones that would have been obvious to the people. It's very much "if there's a will, there's a way" we recognise we need to get past this natural wall, how do we do it? Well...

So yes for sure, those examples you give are accurate, much of history for a very long time was what we would now call Great Man History. Education was a luxury of the rich and powerful and they mostly saw history as a study concerning the great leaders of the past as a way to learn to emulate them.

Now what exactly these people were learning from is unclear to me, I suppose reading texts directly or listening to a lecture by someone who did read a text but the sourcing of this material or how exactly it was being taught or studied is unclear to me

I think if your name is Ethel you’re contractually obligated to be a great aunt or friend of someone’s great aunt. When my girlfriends nephew had a baby (gf was 40) I started calling her Ethel. That’s not her name.

You may have misunderstood me — Edward was my example of an Old English name that is NOT extinct. It’s cool and timeless, and Ed / Eddie is a fun nickname.

And people are still naming their kids Ethel? The only one I ever met was my Great Aunt’s friend who was ninety years old 25 years ago (she would be 115 today).

And it also took leading edge technology to figure out how to gently slide a pencil lead over indentations on paper to see what was written on the page before it?

Perhaps these scientists should have a look at pretty much every detective drama made from the late seventies until the early nineties for the technique!

How did some native American cultures (Mayas, Aztecs, Inkas,...) despite thousands years of completely separation from "old world" independently developed many similar fetatures, institutions, societial structures, habbits, etc. like in old world, for example agriculture, living in cities, organized religion, empires and kingdoms, waging wars, having "nobility", marriage, slavery, having markets for goods, building bridges, irrigation, boats and ships, stone houses, even pyramides? Or maybe better question, where these features really that similar or is it our simplified view?

What does eadburg mean? Bug-eater?

Classical studies during the Age of Enlightenment and Victorian era.

There are various reasons why people come up with different numbers:

The first question is what are you actually counting. The most usual approach seems to be soldiers killed in battle plus civilians killed either by direct impact of the war or indirectly by famine and disease caused by the war. Victims of the holocaust and other nazi mass murders are included, as are victims of German and Japanese war crimes. The timeframe is usually from the first act of war in Europe, Hitler's attack on Poland, to the Japanese surrender. There's a few points right there which may lead to different estimates, the most variance is probably in estimating which civilian casualties are war related. Civilian casualties of strategic bombings or people directly killed by the advancing Wehrmacht (or later the Red Army) are pretty obviously war casualties, but when it comes to disease and famine it's not always that easy to judge whether a death is war related or not. Was a death by disease just basically bad luck or was the disease only deadly because of malnourishment directly caused by the war? Do you count soldiers wounded in the war who die from their wounds after the war has ended? Do you include victims in the war between Japan and China before the war in Europe started? What percentage of missing people do you presume to have actually died?

Then there is the fact that a lot of the documentation and paperwork you would need for exact numbers was destroyed in the war, or possibly never existed in the first place. And during the war, gouvernments (especially in Germany and the Soviet Union) would not have been keen on making exact casualtiy numbers public (or, quite frankly, casualty numbers that were anywhere close to reality)

So it's not really surprising that the numbers diverge a lot. There's cases where you can pin down things pretty closely, like the number of US soldiers killed in action (you will still need to make estimated considering those missing in action, but you will get close to the actual number), and then there is cases like the Yellow River flood in 1938 when the Chinese Nationalist government intentionally destroyed the dykes to stop the Japanese advance, where you can only really say for certain that hundreds of thousands were killed directly (estimates vary fromm 400.000 to 900.000), and then you would still have to decide how many deaths in the aftermath of the flood you want to attribute to the war...

Well, since only the very wealthy were able to be educated, people like Alexander for example were tutored by famous historians/philosophers/mathematicians.

Everyone who wasn't the richest kid around would most likely have been tutored by students of these famous philosophers. (Pretty much anyone inclined in the scientific arts was a philosopher, as in the ancient eras all sciences were rooted in philosophy)

When I learned about WWII, figure stood at ~40 million, roughly 20 million in Asia and 20 in Europe (most dead being from China and the Soviet Union).

Estimating these things can be tricky. The perpetrators aren't keeping exact records of how many they kill. In places like China, which was racked by war before the Japanese invasion, the government might not be aware of the exact number of people living in a certain area before it was destroyed by the enemy.

It's also a matter of defining what counts as killed due to a war. Sometimes historians look at "excess deaths" during a period as causalities of war and sometimes they look at a drop average life expectancy as a measure. WWII devastated the economy of the Soviet Union, so maybe it is fair to measure people who died earlier due to not getting health care because of this as casualties of war.

Myths, ethnographies, travelogues, writers like Herodotos, stories handed down, royal and imperial archives.

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Its probably a couple of different factors, though I'm by no means an expert. 1. Exactly when do you start WW2? 1939 and the invasion of Poland? 1931 and the invasion of Manchuria? Somewhere in the middle? Adding 8 years and a hot war will change the numbers substantially. 2. China was also in the middle of a civil war; how many of those count? 3. The numbers are always squirrelly in wartime, especially civilian deaths in areas where the records were also destroyed. And there have been strong incentives to "adjust" casualty figures for political ends. Stalin and his successors would inflate casualty counts to show that the West were freeloading off of Soviet casualties or blame deaths they caused on the Nazis, China and Japan try to "out-victim" each other wrt to deaths in Nanjing and Hiroshima+Nagasaki, etc.

Usually the variations come from who they're counting. The 20 million range is direct military casualties. i.e. just the people that were in armies. The 50 million range includes all the soldiers plus the civilians that were killed by military operations. i.e. civilians killed in fire bombing of cities. The highest range, the 70 million range, includes everyone, the soldiers the civilians killed in battles, and everyone that was killed due to famines and disease outbreaks that were caused by the war.

Literal me when I try out a bunch of different signatutes lol.

50 million or 70 million loses during the Second World War. Why are there such big differences?

One thing that caught my attention is how big the distribution is between the losses during the Second World War. Sometimes, whether it's in documentaries or history books, I see 50 million, and in other cases, I see numbers as high as 70 million. 20 million is a lot, where do these big differences come from? Are 50 million those who died in Europe, and 70 million leave when the Asian front is counted, or something else entirely?

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How long did ink last on a page in that time period? Maybe the drawings predated the names by a wide margin. Like the person practicing their name was just using whatever space was left on the pages.

I assume someone was teaching her how to write her own name using a piece of paper on top of the surface that these markings were found on. Weird that they try to come up with something significant.

Isn't the western region more mountainous and the eastern region predominantly flat lowlands? I imagine the great difference in geography had a great impact on cultural diffusion/assimilation, with groups in the highlands more isolated from each other - hence maintaining more cultural/linguistic diversity.

I'm rereading "A History of the world in 100 objects" by Neil MacGregor, previously Director of the British Museum. The author is delightfully scholarly and funny. I had to stop in disbelief and consult history online when he described the Vale of York hoard. Although many will scoff at my entertaining the belief that King Arthur, the dux bellorum, threw out out Viking and German invaders around 500 AD Mr MacGregor shocked me with the news that around 900 AD was when a different warrior king accomplished this. And he was an Anglo Saxon - exactly the people that King Arthur worked to defeat. MacGregor says that "Kiev and York were both Viking cities." That "Vikings captured people to sell as slaves in the great market of Kiev. .. which explains why in so many European languages the words for slave and slav are still closely connected."

King Arthur still casts a lovely light in me, but that the invaders he worked so long to defeat wound up saving the nation is a sad adjustment.

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"Back in the 21st century there seems to have been a devastating plague, known as Ligma."