What If: Romans Invent Fingerprints

What if the Romans invented
>gunpowder
>synthetic insulin
>manga
>flying buttresses
>portable bic lighters
>the company IBM
>petroleum jelly
>ballpoint pens
>the theory of relativity
>pesticides
And how would it have changed the empire? Would it still be around today?

>>2706128
>what if
>>>/x/
>>>/b/
>>>/int/

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>>2706196

LOL, no.

A historical "what if" thread is not appropriate for any of those boards, /his/ is where it belongs.

>>2706265
historical "what if" threads aren't about history, only your fantasy. they shouldn't be tolerated on /his/ especially if the "what if" is stupid shit related to technology

Noone invented fingerprints you retard.

what if the Romans knew about the health benefits of washing your hands?

>>2706128
>what if
>>>/tg/

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>>2706281
>historical "what if" threads aren't about history

It's alternate HISTORY and as long as it doesn't involve magical aliens, it's on-topic for /his/.

>>2706389
"what if" they had such and such technology might as well be ancient aliens because of how off-course it gets from any serious discussion of history.

>>2706288
He clearly states discovers the uniqueness about them and then using them in a administrative sense

>>2706128
That being said it would do nothing and it falls at the same time.

>>2706188
With guns they would blow the fuck out of Persians and conquer the middle east, it would take them centuries to find a reason to enter the jungle sections of Africa.

>>2706424
Sure, but manga would cut the roman birth rate in half, counteracting the effect of gunpowder

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>>2706128
A lot of ancient people actually signed documents with Fingerprints.

Romans not among them.
>Fingerprints were used as signatures in ancient Babylon in the second millennium BCE.[57] In order to protect against forgery, parties to a legal contract would impress their fingerprints into a clay tablet on which the contract had been written. By 246 BCE, Chinese officials were impressing their fingerprints into the clay seals used to seal documents. With the advent of silk and paper in China, parties to a legal contract impressed their handprints on the document. Sometime before 851 CE, an Arab merchant in China, Abu Zayd Hasan, witnessed Chinese merchants using fingerprints to authenticate loans.[58] By 702, Japan allowed illiterate petitioners seeking a divorce to "sign" their petitions with a fingerprint.
>Although ancient peoples probably did not realize that fingerprints could uniquely identify individuals,[61] references from the age of the Babylonian king Hammurabi (reigned 1792-1750 BCE) indicate that law officials would take the fingerprints of people who had been arrested.[62] During China's Qin Dynasty, records have shown that officials took hand prints, foot prints as well as finger prints as evidence from a crime scene.[63] In China, around 300 CE, handprints were used as evidence in a trial for theft. By 650, the Chinese historian Kia Kung-Yen remarked that fingerprints could be used as a means of authentication.[64] In his Jami al-Tawarikh (Universal History), the Persian physician Rashid-al-Din Hamadani (also known as "Rashideddin", 1247–1318) refers to the Chinese practice of identifying people via their fingerprints, commenting: "Experience shows that no two individuals have fingers exactly alike."[65]

>>2706128
>That is, what if the Romans figured out that every individual’s fingerprints were unique to that person and could be used as foolproof identification?

Fingerprints have never been proven to be foolproof for identification and in fact many convictions based on fingerprint identification have been overturned.

This is because even if they were all unique (which has never been proven but is mathematically possible), samples are often damaged and people often disagree on whether or not prints are a match with fingermarks found at crime scenes (they are not actually called fingerprints in that context).

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>>2706397

Nonsense, there is nothing magical or sci-fi about some Roman figuring out that everybody’s fingerprints are unique.