On Jul 31, 2006, at 9:23 AM, Horn, John wrote:
On Behalf Of Nick Arnett
On 7/29/06, Brother John <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
We ourselves used to be
an enormously fertile and prolific people. Our ascendancy over
the
Native Americans who were here before us is as much a factor of
the
difference in our relative birthrates as anything else.
Cite, please. Seems to me that the death rate among the
indigenous people had a whole lot more to do with it.
Jared Diamond talks about this in _Guns, Germs and Steal_. A more
agricultural society can sustain a higher birthrate than a nomadic
one. Also, Western European crops had many more calories per pound
than those the Native Americans gathered/cultivated.
- jmh
One aside, not all natives were wandering hunters. Where I grew up in
the Northwest fishing along rivers was a permanent feature of the
landscape and I grew up learning about the fields locals had been
harvesting for generations untold - and this grooming and brush
clearing made the fertile Willamette Valley incredibly easy for my own
pioneering Scottish ancestors to convert to family farming.
And the local Nez Perce natives were much more eager to assist, adopt
and interbreed with strangers than was typical in the East and Midwest.
- Jonathan -
Jonathan Gibson
www.formandfunction.com/word
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