katiemac said:
That's interesting Zane. There's a whole phenomenon out there like this, going so far as to relate to genius animals.
There was one instance, can't remember when or the horse's name now, but this horse could do math. The owner would ask a question, and he'd tap out the answer. Two plus two equals four, he'd tap four times with his hoof.
Turns out, the horse was just really tuned in to his owner's subconscious encouragement to the horse - body language, facial expression - and just knew when the owner wanted him to stop.
Actually, I read about this in my Psychology class, where some farmer claimed that their horse could count (via the tapping the foot). I think it was in Germany in the late 1800's or early 1900's when this took place.
What happened was, someone would ask the horse a math question, then look down on his foot to see him tapping. Then they would look back at the horse when it tapped the right number of times.
The reason why this worked is because the horse eventually caught on that anytime people looked at his hooves, he would tap, and then as soon as he tapped the right number, the people would look back up at him. He would then stop tapping. It was an unconcious thing that happened, whether the people knew it or not (there were skeptics, and they probably didn't know this either).
Regarding the medicine man in Africa with the hot knife test, they did similiar things back in the middle ages (and earlier, around the time of the Romans, but it was the Germanic tribes that did it if I recall my history class).
What they would do, in a case similiar to say, someone killing a cow, is they would do a test on them. Perhaps they'd have the suspects hold onto a hot iron bar, or they'd dunk them in water.
For the iron bar test, if they were innocent, after 3 days, their bandages would be removed and the wounds would be healing properly. But if they were guilty, the wound would be infected and nasty looking.
For the water test, if they were innocent, the body of water would let them sink, to "accept their innocence". If they were guilty, they'd float, meaning that the water "rejected" them (keep in mind this was way back when people didn't have a better justice system).
If you study history, you can see people sure did do crazy things back then (although maybe not as weird as today's stuff).