Showing posts with label humans. Show all posts
Showing posts with label humans. Show all posts

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Depopulation-- Philip Longman 2004

Philip Longman discusses the depopulation problem:

The current main driver of human population growth is not new births, but the cessation of "early" death. Almost all countries now have birth rates below replacement levels-- well below if one includes pandemic or disaster induced loss.

Note that environmental disease implies that many of these older people will be on disability.

The clear picture of the future is a world of elderly.

Japan's decades long recession correlates to its demographic aging and falling population.

Old societies trend to have high tax rates, needed to pay for public services to all the old people. But this induces high youth unemployment.

We have a pressing need to recreate or economy to incorporate childbirth and childrearing into the economy.

Raising a child is estimated to cost 200,000 dollars, before college. The lost income from the caregiver raises this to over one million. Yet the economic benefit is near nill. Contrast to an agricultural society where the children provide a net economic benefit  from their second decade.

Increased television viewing is strongly correlated with decreasing birth rates, both accross regions as tv is introduced and within families, comparing the number of hours watched with the number of children.

My rather grim prediction: society will cease to value and respect the elderly. In rural france 100 years ago they were also a burden, and were encouraged to starve so the rest would have enough food for the winter.

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Late Pleistocene Dispersal of Modern Humans in the Americas

By Ted Goebel, Science, 14 March 2008

A similar article featured on a recent podcast. Don't want to look it up right now.

Goebel writes that
The human skeletal evidence across the Americas shows that the NEw World was populated by Homo Sapiens. Although the crania of htese early people look different from modern Native Americans, modern and ancient DNA studies show that they were genetically related. The earliest inhabitants of hte Americas hailed form south Siberia (Between the Altai Mountains and Amur Valley).

Current molecular evidence implies that members of a single population (of less than 5000 individuals) left Siberia and headed east to the Americas approximately 16.6 ka.

Humans colonized the Americas around 15 ka, immediately after deglaciation o fthe Pacific coastal corridor. The first Americans used boats, and the coastal corridor would have been the likely route of passage since the interior corridor appears to have remained closed for at least another 1000 years.