Mmmkayyyyy...
Now, I'm the skeptical sort and I'm recently boning up on math (calculus, statistics, choice theory, etc) and I've got to ask what sort of mathematical model he was using to determine this. The recent "we are all one kind" sort of sounds like the 6,000 year creation population model where two parents beget 4 children and so on and so forth and everyone is equally distributed by sex and everyone marries and has children...
...and nobody...
* falls off cliffs into glaciers
* drowns in floods
* dies in plauges (Black Death, cholera)
* gets eaten by tigers
* gets run over by stampeding yaks or bison
* died from malaria before having offspring
* abandoned by family/tribe as an infant/child (twins, children whose teeth emerge in the wrong sequence (yes, really))
* gets stomped by mammoths
* is born with birth defects
* gets carried off by condors
* died in war before having offspring
* drowned in storm at sea
* gets buried alive by a pyroclastic ash flow (Pompeii/Herculaneum)
* is a victim of a culture where infanticide is an honor (Aztecs)
* is infertile
* is a victim of genocide
* is a castrati
* is a victim of child abuse
* dies of malnutrition due to tribal taboos (Polynesian taboos on diet)
* is assassinated along with family members (Imperial Rome)
* is a victim of mass murder/family violence
* dies in chidlbirth along with the first child
* is ritually virginal
* is homosexual/lesbian
* died in earthquakes/tsunamis
* starves to death along with their families
... and so forth.
Does the model adjust for the variations in age at death for riskier areas (hunter-gatherers versus city dwellers) and population density of these areas throughout time, adjusted by the type of climate that may have been present during that time?
Yes, I'm a picky thing, but Inquring Minds (that's mine) want to know. Besides, I'm studying mathematical modeling of systems like this and it'd be neat to know how these complex factors were accounted for. All the ones I've seen have been simplistic ("80% of the people live to childbearing age and have 3.7 adult children" sort of thing.)
Any idea how to find out how this was modeled?
