DNA reveals the real killers that brought down Napoleon's army

The capital was better fortified and the French wanted food and loot. So softer target sounds nice, especially if you think this crushes morale immediately and don't believe the opposition will go scorched earth (but they did).

> If I would take S.P., I would hold Russia by the head. If I take Kiev, I will hold Russia by legs. If I take Moscow, I will reach right into its heart!"

https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/27588/why-did-na...

Your comment has me remember a great graph of his army disintegrating. It’s such a good visualisation.

https://brilliantmaps.com/napoleons-invasion-infograhic/

His goal was the Russian army, they retreated towards Moscow and he pursued.

A bunch of reasons.

1. Napoleon's goal was to pursue and defeat the Russian army in the field, not necessarily capture cities. Going north would have meant releasing the pressure on the main russian field armies and let them engage his main force at their discretion while exposing his flank.

2. St. Petersburg remained the political and economic capital of Russia; St. Petersburg never displaced Moscow in real world importance.

3. St. Petersburg was shielded from land and sea with prepared fortifications on both and Napoleon lacked a fleet to effectively blockade it.

4. Its in the middle of a very dense forest and swamp, not the the best logistics and ability to maintain a siege.

The Nazis made the same choice in WWII and even though they were able to control the Baltics and had Finland as an ally never seriously threatened to take the city.

One theory I've heard for this, and sorry I don't remember the source, is that Napoleon suspected if he truly did take down the Russian royalty then he expected the rest of European royalty to unite and attack attack him.

Because Napoleon didn't want to depose the Tsar, much less to conquer Russia, he just wanted to impose his (Napoleon's) will on the Tsar and on Russia as a whole when it came to strictly imposing the Continental Blockade against the British. A heavily defeated Russia wouldn't have helped him into achieving that.

It's a lot less interesting once you look trough the names of senior Russian officers - de Tolly, Bagration, von Benningsen, Wittgenstein, Osterman-Tolstoy.

One begins to suspect that the reason Kutuzov replaced Barkley was for a sort of reverse-DEI reasons.

We’re talking about a foot soldier on Napoleon’s army, easy to keep a good set considering he could be 18-25.

1. The soldier probably died young

2. Good dental health has always been part of the screening to join a professional army

They were looking to analyze teeth. This might be selection bias.

Due to "softer" diets and all the sugar, right?

Note that the actual paper does not make the claim from the title, and that they "recovered and sequenced ancient DNA from the teeth of 13 soldiers" (one molar each) from one site only, which means other origins cannot be discarded, especially since these pathogens could only be found in 5 of 13.

How did you save me a click? Those bits were in this article. The guy that located the original report saved me some time.

You could only save somebody time if they skipped the content and started doing comments on HN anyhow, but that’s not all the information either, just a couple key points.

From https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/decimate

Decimate is a word that often raises hackles, at least those belonging to a small but committed group of logophiles who feel that it is commonly misused. The issue that they have with the decline and fall of the word decimate is that once upon a time in ancient Rome it had a very singular meaning: “to select by lot and kill every tenth man of a military unit.” However, many words in English descended from Latin have changed and/or expanded their meanings in their travels. For example, we no longer think of sinister as meaning “on the left side,” and delicious can describe things both tasty and delightful. Was the “to kill every tenth man” meaning the original use of decimate in English? Yes, but not by much. It took only a few decades for decimate to acquire its broader, familiar meaning of “to severely damage or destroy,” which has been employed steadily since the 17th century.

You are figuratively killing me with your literalism.

Look in any dictionary and you'll find that that decimate means to devastate aswell.

Language is what people speak not what people proscribe in books or the internet.

Yes, that phrase stuck out to me also.

Apologists for language attrition will assert that converging language into a handful of very simple words is doubleplusgood, and we should embrace the dumbification because that's 'just how languages work'.

But for a historical article, I did expect a slightly more nuanced take.

It seems that computer translation is not good enough to parse Pushkin's poems yet. I tried ChatGPT, the translation is at least readable, but written in a dumbed down language. Yours is not even readable.