From: Mark Odegard
Message: 2822
Date: 2000-07-10
From: Piotr GasiorowskiThe way I see it, it was mainly the recent "great expansions" of the major modern families that obliterated the original diversity of some of the continents. In the Pre-Neolithic world natural equilibrium favoured the existence of tiny families (as in New Guinea, which has about sixty of them), with a lot of lateral diffusion and creolisation to make sure that the bush was really tangled. But even those small-sized units were the "lucky drawers" in the evolutionary lottery -- most of their cousins had been weeded out. The more recently acquired technological and cultural advantages had the effect of increasing the size of the winners -- they enabled some of the successful families to become middle-sized (by our standards) or even huge
Indeed. Technological advantages generally mean you eat better than those without them. The better your diet, the more babies you women have, the more children you have who survive into adulthood. However it was, the IEs seem to have had better technology, a better method of keeping themselves fed, than did the other peoples in northern Europe and on the Steppe. This part of the world was either thinly populated, or virtually unpopulated (as with the case of the grasslands between river valleys on the Steppe). Natural increase alone would have inevitably swamped earlier autochthons.Mark.