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Old April 8th, 2008 #54
psychologicalshock
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Join Date: Jun 2007
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Itz_molecular View Post
Using your numbers , to achieve a 3.66% per generation growth .

Out of 19 children , 16.928 would die or fail to reproduce . Damn close to my 17 out of 19 .
Rate is deaths - births it could be any number of birth per 1000 and any number of deaths per 1000, its a proportion, my only point is that the births are somewhat higher than the deaths . It would be sort of like
103 births and 100 deaths. That tells us nothing about the survivability of the children.
Also, I kind of doubt that a woman would be reproducing 19 times and failing 17 times of those 19. Especially in a place like the Mediterranean which isn't cold, isn't packed with predators, doesn't have a food shortage and wasn't a center of disease. Id guess that most children lived, Roman and Greek culture didn't exactly put wives down as nonstop baby makers. (Albeit Socrates had a child at like 70)
I seriously doubt that women would be pregnant nonstop from 20 to 40 considering they often had other duties to attend to, that and what is there to die of in the Mediterranean? Birth complications aren't all that common, as I mentioned before food and shelter were quite plentiful and the life style was rather leisure. I have serious dobts that the death rate was so huge, if that was so its unlikely there would be any growth considering that most women probably cant birth that many times.

I don't have any historic documentation to use this proportion to prove how many lived and how many died. Do you have any definite figures?

Last edited by psychologicalshock; April 8th, 2008 at 12:48 AM.