The Inca Empire was prosperous from the mid-1430s to 1572 when Spain’s Francisco Pizarro conquered them. This civilization spread from most of Peru, Chile, Ecuador, and part of Southern Colombia. If you were lucky enough not to be part of the 25 percent of kids who died before age five, you would have had a tough upbringing. That doesn’t include all the strange and downright unsanitary things you’d have to endure.

10 The Ceremony That Killed Children

Yes, Incas sacrificed their kids! This may be more of how a kid died instead of lived in the Inca Empire. It’s crazy to think about, but this ritual (called capacocha) was used for special events like a ruler’s death or victory in a battle. It was actually an honor for the chosen child’s family to have their kid sacrificed on the highest mountaintop in Peru. Incas would also sacrifice children to the gods to prevent droughts, widespread illness, etc.

Before the ceremony began, the chosen children were brought to the city’s capital, Cuzco. Tons of citizens gathered to feast there before taking the child up the mountain to sacrifice him or her. Although they didn’t discriminate based on gender, most of the children’s mummies found by archaeologists have been girls.

The kid was given alcohol and poison to drink. This caused the child to vomit and slowly die on the mountain—which could have taken weeks or months to travel to. The child was left to freeze to death if extreme dehydration didn’t take her first. Sometimes, a child was suffocated or died from a massive blow to the head.

9 The Incas Were Ageists

The quipu (pictured above) was the Inca’s way of recording and keeping data. Although we still don’t know how to read a quipu, we do know that the Incas were kind of ageist. About twice a year, they took a census to record the number of people in the empire and to put each individual into one of 10 classes.

The Incas divided their citizens into groups based on age, with those 25–50 years old considered the most prosperous and important to the empire’s economy. The Incas counted them first and considered them higher in class. Next came those who were 60–70 years old, followed by 18- to 20-year-olds, then 10- to 17-year-olds, 5- to 9-year-olds, toddlers, and finally, babies.

This shows that young kids were not seen as beneficial to the Incas. It sounds terrible because the Incas did rely on sacrificing children. Their elders reportedly beat kids often until the children surpassed age nine—probably because kids really needed discipline in this empire.

8 Learning Advanced Skills As A Little Kid

Inca children, especially girls younger than nine, knew how to spin yarn made from llama and alpaca fur. Spanish drawings of the civilization show representations of Inca girls doing household chores at around five years old. They also knew how to brew beer.

Still, kids could not drink beer or eat certain foods like sugary, fatty types. They needed to be as healthy as possible for marriage. Teen boys were like shepherds to their llamas while the younger boys started learning how to trap birds and guinea pigs. Incas ate guinea pigs as a common dish.

Unsurprisingly, young girls were expected to be submissive and had to stay away from men until they were put in arranged marriages. They probably didn’t appear to be very feminine at first to the Spanish conquistadors because these girls had to keep their hair cut short and didn’t wear shoes. Their entire lives were spent in preparation for marriage and taking care of a family.

7 Sick Kids Had To Sit In Pee

If a child was very ill, the Incas believed that he could suck on the umbilical cord (that the parents had preserved) since the umbilical cord soaked up any evil from within the child. It’s unclear how they kept the umbilical cords. However, like the Egyptians, the Incas probably preserved body parts like this by keeping them cold in freezing mountain streams.

Getting a fever, like all kids do at one point or another, was a dreaded thing. At least, it probably would be for us now. This is because soaking in a huge tub filled entirely with the family’s urine supposedly healed kids who had a fever.

6 The Babies And Toddlers Were Treated More Like Things

A Spanish priest recorded how mothers took care of their babies. For fear of giving the babies too much attention or causing them to be constantly needy, the mothers would take the babies to a cold stream in the mountains and bathe them for days.

It wasn’t until the toddlers were two that they earned a name and official place in the family. This was probably because so many newborns and toddlers died in 15th-century Peru. The baby would continue to be taken to these “freezing baths” until they were about two years old. The mother would refrain from even hugging the baby in these early years of the baby’s life.

Of course, a mother would make a pouch sling that wrapped around her back. The baby would sit in the sling while the mother gathered herbs and did other outdoor chores. Once the baby turned two, he or she had a ceremony called rutuchicoy where family members and neighbors gathered to watch the child’s hair be cut for the first time.

5 Schooling Was Surprisingly Not Sexist (Sort Of)

Inca children between the ages of about eight or nine were taken from their homes to attend different schools. The girls and boys may have had different and separate learning to do, but they were fairly equal in their training.

Boys learned Quechua, the language spoken by the Incas. Meanwhile, the girls learned about brewing beer, Inca religion, cooking, and other special skills they would have to use every day.

Of course, only the prettiest girls were selected to go to these special houses for the aqllakuna, which is the word for these chosen women. The boys were also taught about their religion and history at these four-year schools in Cuzco.

It’s not uncommon for some cultures now to separate their females and males. The Incas seemed to be all about class status. Those pretty aqllakuna either became priestesses or wives to men in higher stations. The Sapa Inca, who was their leader, had hundreds of wives.

Noble or not, boys had to go to school to become warriors or husbands and trappers. It was common for boys to know how to farm. It should be noted that only the richer families could send their kids to school.

4 Changing Clothes Was Important If You Were A Kid

At about age 14, boys changed out of their rags (if they were poor) and wore loincloths to symbolize that they had become men. This is largely because children could marry by the time they were in their teens.

At this age, boys also started putting large plugs in their earlobes. As the years went on, they continued to slowly increase the size of the plug earrings so as to stretch out their ears.

As boys continued to grow into men, they carried around pouches that were like purses. There, they kept coca leaves to chew on. The leaves were also good luck charms that were held close to their persons.

This shows that the girls were not given as much in terms of accessories or clothing. Nowadays, women are the ones who wear earrings and carry purses. Of course, young women wore dresses longer than the men’s tunics.

Fun fact: The Sapa Inca only wore a new outfit once. Then it was burned. Some nobility (such as the wives and sons of the Sapa Inca) wore clothing more than once but still wore many outfits. The Incas were masters in textiles and clothing, so they had many tunics and dresses along with blankets.

3 Kids Wouldn’t Have Normal-Shaped Skulls

From the time that Incas were babies, their parents would wrap their heads to deform them to look like cones. Since younglings have soft skulls, it is easy to transform them into any shape.

It’s believed that the Incas did this out of the belief that the higher the head, the higher the mind and the closer to their gods. In some cultures, this practice is still in use today. It was very common among the Maya and other ancient civilizations.

Archaeologists found holes in some of the Incas’ skulls due to head injuries. Carving out a hole helped with the swelling if the Incas fought each other too violently with clubs. Surprisingly, this was a common practice.

2 Kids Were Probably Introduced To Sex And Marriage Too Young

The discovery of pots and statues of people in sexual positions shows that the Incas were accepting of all sexual activity. It was a cultural understanding that the Incas would have sex before marriage with their prospective spouses. It was also expected that young Incas would have a few lovers before marriage. Homosexual sex was also depicted on pottery.

Although it may seem that the Incas were more progressive in the areas of marriage and sex than some of today’s cultures, chastity was still expected of those chosen women (aqllakuna) until they were married. Knowing that girls were married between the ages of 12 and 14, this means that most of them must have been sexually active before then.

In fact, the Incas separated genders into three groups without much evidence of discrimination. There were straight men, straight women, and a third gender group that included transgender and homosexual individuals. This group was called Tinkuy. So it was possible to be a young homosexual child without feeling the need to hide from society.

1 Marriage Was More Of A Business Trial

Men married at a reasonable age (around 20–25 or in their late teens), but women were often married before ages 14–15. The marriage ceremony was more of a business agreement between the two families. There was a feast, though, and a bit of a celebration. It’s believed that this ceremony was fast and not necessarily happy.

Every year, the leader of each village in the empire would line up all the available boys and girls and pair them off in arranged marriages. If two men wanted to marry the same woman, the parents would have to present reasons to the leader why their son should win her hand. The leader made the final decision, though.

Men of a lower status could only marry one woman. Luckily, the spouses were given a trial period of a few years. If the girl was not happy, she could return home. If the husband wasn’t happy with his wife, he could send her back to her home. It was the custom for the girls to move in with the husband after the husband’s family built them a home.

After studying anthropology at Purdue University along with video production and creative writing, Kate decided to go to LA to earn a graduate degree in writing and producing for television. She strongly believes that everyone can learn a lot from informational television, especially from those programs that focus on history.

Many things people use every day contain technology first developed for military use. Over human history, warfare has proven to be a primary driver for innovation. It’s a shame killing other people provides the necessity to play mother to humanity’s best inventions. But multiple technologies originally developed to help destroy enemies and protect allies have shaped modern society in unmistakable ways.

The following is a list of ten everyday items born from the battlefield.

Related: 10 More Incredible Ways Nature Beat Us In Technology

10 Duct Tape

Much like every toolbox, broken car window, and down-home first aid kit, no list of military breakthroughs is complete without duct tape. Originally imagined by a factory worker to seal and waterproof ammunition boxes, duct tape quickly became a handy solution to all sorts of problems encountered on the battlefield and far beyond.

That worker, Vesta Stout, nearly failed to get her world-shaking invention into the hands of interested parties. After not receiving enough attention for her tape from those in charge around her, Stout pulled a boss move and wrote directly to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Within a few weeks of her letter, Stout was informed that Johnson & Johnson would immediately begin manufacturing duct tape for military uses.

From 1942 to today, duct tape remains a mainstay for rapid repair, impromptu bandaging, and, for a bit in the early 2000s, making shiny wallets for eighth graders to sell to each other.^[1]

9 Microwave Oven

Somewhere right now, a college student is preparing a cup-o-noodle for lunch in three minutes, a writer is heating up their coffee for the fourth time in two hours, and a kid is creating a destructive laser light show using old CDs. What makes all of these modern tasks possible? The microwave.

In 1940, while Nazi Germany’s aircraft terrorized Great Britain, a team of British physicists arrived in the U.S. bearing top-secret cargo that significantly increased the capabilities of contemporary radar. The British team’s research advanced the usefulness of radar throughout WWII. Then, in 1946, an American engineer named Percy Spencer filed patents that used a primary component from the British radar designs, the cavity magnetron, to rapidly heat food. Spencer allegedly got his idea when a peanut bar melted in his pocket while working around radar equipment.

By 1955, the first commercial microwaves made their way onto the market for over $1,200 (around $12,000 in 2021 dollars). Thankfully for later generations of frozen food and ramen connoisseurs, the microwave gradually became affordable. Now, even the dingiest motel room is incomplete without a little piece of WWII tech.^[2]

8 Super Glue

True to its name, super glue sticks all kinds of surprising things together with serious gusto. A short internet search shows many uses of the glue; most are impressive, and some are downright hilarious. Like so many of the world’s best inventions, this extraordinary adhesive was discovered by accident in the pursuit of more efficient weaponry.

In 1945, a group of scientists, including Dr. Harry Coover, worked with chemicals called cyanoacrylates to create clear gun sights for use in WWII. The sights never materialized from their initial experiments, but six years later, Coover began researching the chemicals again. He later released his “Super Glue” to the market in 1958. Even after the glue went public, the military continued to find new uses for the product, including sealing aircraft canopies and closing flesh wounds.

From its roots as a failed way to help soldiers shoot better, to an incredibly adherent research chemical, and finally, to the recognizable and sensationally sticky household item of today, super glue is a case of truth in advertising and a textbook example of military R&D spilling into everyday life.^[3]

7 Global Positioning System

Long, long ago, GPS did not exist as an acronym nor a technology, and the idea that a person could be directed to a destination of their choosing by a talking computer remained a concept buried deep in science fiction. Little did anyone know that one day the technology would arrive that placed fairly accurate directions in the palm of every distracted driver’s hand.

The glorious directional revolution humbly began as a way to track submarines during the Cold War. By the 1970s, the rest of the DoD joined the effort, sending up the first NAVSTAR unit in 1978, with the final satellite entering orbit in 1993. The project proved its worth definitively in 1991 during Operation Desert Storm. Even though the system was incomplete with only 19 of the 24 satellites operational, the limited coverage of the unproven technology allowed U.S.-led Coalition forces to outmaneuver Iraqi units over a trackless desert devoid of landmarks.

The original uses of the technology increase in relevance even today, and the military is only a slice of the expanding GPS pie chart. Everyone with a cell phone uses this technology in the modern world without even having to think about it. GPS is used across the globe, on most internet-connected devices, and for all sorts of tasks the inventors of the tech could not have imagined: see “location-based marketing,” “ridesharing,” and “on-demand restaurant delivery.”^[4]

6 The Internet

The impact of the internet on human society is impossible to quantify, but it has undoubtedly altered civilization. Loved and hated by so many in equal measure, the modern internet is an accessible web of useful applications, great information, meaningful connections, echo-chamber politics, cyberbullying, and so much pornography. The cursed blessing that is the internet started as a much simpler concept to connect computers and share scientific data.

In the 1960s, the DoD Advanced Research Projects Agency received a proposal from computer scientist J.C.R. Licklider for a globally-connected computer network for sharing data. From there, new programming languages sprang up from universities and labs across the world, the network became more uniform, and the web of connectivity extended into the private sector. A computer manufacturer registered the first domain in 1985, opening the internet to the wider world of consumers, and from that point through today, the internet has grown at incredible speeds.

The internet must be considered for the “most impactful military tech” list for how much it has altered humanity. The deceptively simple concept of sharing data across multiple connected systems is now embedded into life so deeply that to lose internet access is less of an inconvenience and more of a crisis for modern Homo sapiens.^[5]

5 Canned Food

Today, many foods can be found in some shape or form in a can. Corn, tuna, pig’s feet, tamales, and so much more pack the canned food section of the grocery store. Middle-class pantries fill with canned foods year after year until it’s all thrown out one spring cleaning. This modern preservation method, which helps feed so many, developed from that pesky, crucial requirement that soldiers have to eat too.

The well-known idiom, “an army marches on its stomach,” explains the absolute necessity for food to accompany soldiers on a campaign. Food, however, spoils, causing a major problem for anyone planning to eat it after a certain amount of time. The French army showed great interest in extending the shelf life of their soldiers’ rations after seeing more men die from eating rotten food than succumbing to combat injuries. In 1806, Nicolas Appert sought a sizeable monetary prize from the French government in exchange for developing a way to preserve food long-term. With his invention, he became “the father of canning,” and military rations were forever changed. Quickly following their development for the military, canned foods entered the private market and proved to be an effective, sanitary way to store food for extended periods of time.

Modern canning and preservation are direct contributors to human population growth. Vienna sausages, Spam, and corned beef hash may not be considered gourmet, but the same process that seals those sweaty meat products lets armies march across nations and, more importantly, feeds those that otherwise might starve.^[6]

4 Bagged Salad

Another slightly less salty military technology that translated seamlessly into everyday life is bagged salad. Though short on taste, nothing says freshness like a crispy piece of iceberg lettuce on a flash-fried chalupa.

A German man named Karl Busch invented the first vacuum sealer machine during WWII, intent on preserving food for military families and soldiers heading to war. In the 1950s, cutting-edge vacuum technology repurposed from the military helped end the need for vast quantities of ice to ship vegetables. The method more effectively cooled and preserved leafy greens, especially by removing air and slowing spoilage. This allowed fresh lettuce and other greens to be transported long distances to places far from the farm. In 1963, Busch’s redesign for an industrial-sized machine eventually led to the technology making its way to private homes, with the first modern home sealer invented in 1984.

Without vacuum technology from WWII, salads from fast-food restaurants would cost way too much for people to buy, a bit like now, but the consumer’s option to go home and make their own chicken Caesar salad would be impossible.^[7]

3 Synthetic Rubber

Synthetic rubber is nearly everywhere in modern life. Cars, electronics, furniture, skateboards, footwear, dog toys, and so much more owe their current existence to the invention of synthetic rubber. The world of rubber surrounding people today may be much different if not for military-funded research. The necessity for rubber during WWII led directly to the invention of the modern wonder material.

When the Japanese took over their Pacific empire, much of the world’s supply of natural rubber was cut off. This left the United States scrambling for a way to produce rubber synthetically. With consumption rates already around 600,000 tons per year leading up to the war and little supply to match, President Roosevelt appointed a committee in 1942 to solve the rubber supply crisis. By April of that year, the first bale of synthetic rubber rolled off the manufacturing line at Firestone.

The rapid invention of synthetic rubber to fill wartime demand directly led to all of the various uses of rubber in the world today. Synthetic rubber is another example of technology developed to meet a military need that became a staple and growth multiplier in the civilian market.^[8]

2 Virtual Reality

Countless games and multimedia experiences allow consumers to lose themselves in today’s virtual world, but all of these interactive programs trace their lineage back to military training systems first employed in the 1980s.

It begins with the construction of advanced flight training simulators and extends through modern simulated combat environments, vehicle trainers, team-building exercises, and mental health therapy. Modern military VR exists to support the training of personnel and is not intended to replace actual training; much in the way that a player’s skill on a VR surgery simulator does not mean they should try to remove an appendix.

The military likely does not train soldiers to walk across a beam 20 stories high, escape a virtual prison cell, or shoot aliens with giant lasers, but the training technology introduced in the 1980s helped bring about the growing virtual world.^[9]

1 Roomba

Skynet has been slacking. The company iRobot kicked off the machine revolution nearly 20 years ago. Their robots are already among us: in our cities, on our streets, and in our homes. The short, mobile discs roaming floors while devouring Cheeto crumbs, dog hair, and cat litter are not only simple autonomous vacuums; Roombas contain the programming DNA of a bona fide warfighter.

According to iRobot co-founder Colin Angle, the technology that enables Roombas to thoroughly vacuum floors uses the same programming employed by military robotic minesweepers. The same breakthroughs that allow Roomba to navigate its way around furniture without getting stuck (usually) also help soldiers clear dangerous minefields using robotic minesweepers.

While civilian Roombas patrol kitchen floors for enemy crumbs and the occasional penny, their military cousins help human allies defeat hazardous explosives. It’s only a matter of time before the vacuums join with the voice assistants to film another Terminator sequel.^[10]