Science doesn’t care if some clever buggers tamed a wolf or three, it wants to know when the practice was established and dogs were behaviorally and morphologically modified.

Which we would look at remains to see if they showed bones too big or small, do estimates based on genetics, any depictions in art, etc.

And for 5000 years ago that’s really getting into agricultural civilization proper.

Indus River isn’t known to be Indo-European though. So any connection to the Vedas would likely be syncretic too.

Well the objection isn’t any size relation but that under current models a Jupiter-type planet that close to this type of star “should” have boiled away before properly forming.

Ergo begs the question is this some Goldilocks scenario that is astronomically rare… or are we going to start finding these by the dozens and need to update our models.

Headline still very clickbait but the actual naming tracks with science’s bad habit of bad names getting out into the public sphere minus context.

Nobody knows but it is not a guess. That would imply you could lob out almost any answer which would be very lazy (and indeed unscientific) scholarship.

Like we have references in multiple Gospels to him being born in the reign of Herod the Great so 1 AD is rather probably off because the man was already dead then. Though there is some dispute about when Herod died too. Ancient dates are hard and every nice pretty date you see comes from sorting out and connecting X year of so-n-so's reign or who was consul. And taking on faith your source remembered it right.

Meanwhile even discounting mentions of his birth Pontius Pilate was only governor of Judea for a limited period so one can work backwards from there as to what might be an appropriate age.

So Anno Domini is most likely late by a few years but probably still within a decade of whatever the real number is, which maybe isn't bad for work done in 525 on such a low key historical figure.

Reason based calendars! Up with Thermidor! Vive le Revolution!

At any rate yeah this supposed ‘common era’ is even less correct because it directly applies Eurocentrism to everyone with something that isn’t the least bit held in common around the world.

If using BC/AD is that much of an issue clearly we need to adopt a new calendar from zero, a universal century or some such.

A navy sails upon its stomach.

Every day underway appreciably depletes your stores. Once upon a time I could probably tell you how many weeks since we did UNREP by what sauces the galley had left. A1 was gone first and by like week three even the ketchup started disappearing. Somehow never the 57 sauce though.

Anyways point being no matter how much you build its got to sail across the Pacific to actually do any good. And the farther you have to go without a friendly harbor to drop into for resupply and repair the more problems you will have. It may not stop you completely but your logistical situation is always paramount.

Not for nothing did the US adopt the strategy of island hopping, instead of just building up a big force to sail into Tokyo Bay like our name was Perry.

I mean if they really took Hawaii I could see that stretching out to years because the Pacific is the biggest thing on Earth and ships only carried so much coal.

Yet for much the same reason I doubt Japan could have seriously taken and held Hawaii while doing all the other smashing and grabbing they needed to do. If they had the resources for that they wouldn’t have needed the war in the first place.

Once Julius got it started everyone with eyes on power in the Roman world would mint coins as propaganda tools. Brutus minted coins to commentate murdering Caesar with his face on one side and daggers on the reverse. And you could do this because the coins were struck… with a hammer. Anyone with reserves of metal could do it not just the emperor at some super secure mint.

Yet while being on denarii doesn’t make you emperor it is physical evidence you existed.

You hardly need massed lines of matchlock infantry to start taking precautions against all the new hotness that's been flying around the post-Crusades battlefields. Also consider that we're still in a period of history where having records at all suggests they were not all that rare. Or that this race for the beginning is a bit besides the point for technologies that would go on to exist and therefore continue developing side by side for another few centuries.

Also that this is all getting a far from the actual point since none of this leave much of a medieval castle period or getting anywhere near enough good metal production to start armoring a curtain wall.

I should probably have said something about crossbows and of course plate is great against a lot of other things on the battle field so clearly would be invented anyways. However while the timeline is not super clear we can find potential use of gunpowder in Europe as early as 1241 by the Mongols and guns by the 1320s. For plate armor, well technically it is ancient so gets into "define plate armor" with things like old Roman lorica to brigadines and coats of plates but I don't think I've ever seen the classic "full" plate sourced before 1400s.

To get a sense of the sort of resource/labor limits pre-industrial societies had to work around consider that it was by no means uncommon for the curtain walls of a castle to NOT be solid stone but a contain hollow space filled in with whatever debris and dirt was handy. An architectural 'trick' that goes back thousands of years to Egypt where the swap from solid stone is why there are only like six proper pyramids because the dozens made after the switch all collapsed over the millennia.

Next technologically speaking the heyday of castles didn't even have the technology to put plate on a man. Plate was developed in response to early firearms making earlier mail worthless. And never that common, what you'd spend armoring a single wall could outfit an sizable unit of troops instead.