The most dangerous jobs of our ancestors

Living through certain periods of history would often be nothing short of a nightmare. If you were lucky or rich enough you’d be looked after by someone else, but for the vast majority of people who existed in our past, life would have been very hard indeed.

If the average person grew enough crops and was lucky enough not to be hit by a crop disease or have half of them stolen as “taxes” to whoever claimed they owned the land, then they may just be able to feed themselves on a very limited diet. We will never truly understand just how hard people had it through our history, but for a glimpse into the hardships they had to endure just to survive here are a few of the most dangerous jobs of our ancestors that paid little to nothing that people were often forced to do.

Stone age hunter

Today people hunt game with high-powered rifles from a safe distance, making it nothing more than being a good shot. Even in countries like Africa where people still hunt with bows and spears, most of the game are harmless deer or something else that doesn’t usually fight back, and even the bigger game is no match for a dozen hungry tribesmen with steel spears.

Before metal was discovered, people would arm themselves with stone spears and arrows which didn’t even come close to packing the same punch as their steel counterparts. Using poor-quality hunting gear and going after something like a woolly rhino or giant cave bear was dangerous, to say the least. The other thing that made it so risky was that getting a single open wound could be a death sentence, with nothing that could be classed as actual medicine at the time, an infection for a claw scratch could see you die a nasty death.

Limekiln worker

If you’ve ever been to a castle or stone building at least 400 years old, then the mortar used to stick the blocks together was most likely made from limestone. The rock has to be crushed and burned in a kiln to produce a powder that can be mixed with water to make an early version of what most people know as cement.

The problem is that when you heat limestone rock to over 900°C it turns into something called quicklime. This is a very strong alkaline that works similarly to a weak acid and is considered very dangerous. After the rock is heated it would be dragged out the kiln and water would be poured over it to rapidly cool it, making it much easier to smash into a powder. The biggest risk would be from the smoke which would contain particles of quicklime because when burning quicklime gets into someone’s eyes it can blind them. The poor guy shoveling coal into the top could lose his eyesight from nothing more than a change in wind direction at the wrong time.

Plague doctor

Between 1347 and 1351 the continent of Europe was devastated by a disease known as the Black Death. This disease, often referred to simply as “the plague” was responsible for the deaths of between 75 and 200 million people, around half the population of the continent.

The “doctors”, and I use that word very loosely, were responsible for going to the worst-hit areas and administering what they thought was medicine. The strange bird-like appearance of the plague doctors was to protect them from getting infected, with the long beak-like mask containing cloth filters and the long robes designed to stop fleas from biting them. One especially disgusting thing people would try to make themselves immune to the disease was to introduce it into their system in minor amounts.

People had worked out by now that getting an illness once meant that you were much less likely to get it as bad a second time, so people would try to infect themselves with just a little of the disease. To do this they would rub pus from an infected person into a small cut on their arm, or grind up an infected scab and snort it up their nose.

Colonial line infantry

Being a soldier is a dangerous job no matter when you do it, but at least throughout most of history to modern times, most armies have at least tried to protect their soldiers from injury. As soon as people discovered metal they used it to protect themselves, from steel hats to the full plate armor of a knight, warriors of the past have been as protected as possible.

This idea of wearing armor disappeared for the common soldier during the 17th and 18th centuries, mostly due to it being next to useless. After gunpowder weapons were invented the idea was to stop anything from getting close to you and avoid hand-to-hand combat, and since it was so good as this it didn’t take long for gunpowder to dominate warfare. The shots were often powerful enough to penetrate plate armor and so armies simply didn’t bother wearing any.

Being on the front lines of a colonial-era army would mean marching directly towards a wall of muskets pointed at you, only to stand there with your musket in marching position to be ordered to stand your ground. The British army would often march close to their enemies before firing, and this meant walking towards hundreds of people trying to shoot you before waiting for the order to shoot back. If you ran you would be shot by your own officer, so the only chance to survive was down to pure luck.