Talk:Prehistoric demography

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Hominid population estimates

This section looks very rough and contains obvious errors. E.g. if the life expectancy was 20 it doesn't follow that there were 5 generations per century! (Which would only be the case if the average age at which women gave birth was 20.) 93.96.236.8 (talk) 21:27, 10 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The reasoning is sound, it's just a vocabulary error. Instead "5 generations per century", replace by "the population is completely renewed 5 times per century", which is actually what the computation is based on, and voila. Alestane (talk) 06:18, 30 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The text may be just great, but the formula should be n^x where n is 2 or more (number of people who survive to give birth per family per generation on average) and x is the number of "renewals/generations". Total. Right? Student7 (talk) 22:34, 5 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

What about all the hominids who died in infancy? Infant mortality was very high until the late 20th century. Where's the cutoff? Do hominids who died a few days after their birth count in this calculation? Obviously, hominids who don't survive their childhood can't reproduce, which needs to be accounted for in these calculations. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 12:14, 13 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

That should be accounted for in the "people who survive to give birth." BTW, disease wasn't spread as easily before the founding of cities. Hunger was most likely a leading cause of death before 10,000 years ago. Student7 (talk) 12:55, 18 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Can't this refer to any demography of any nonliterate culture?

As it is we have articles here and in classical demography leaving a long gap in the neolithic, bronze age, and early iron age before the relatively restricted classical demography. We probably need something to cover the gap, the neolithic revolution, the urban revolution, etc. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.66.211.53 (talk) 02:49, 15 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed merge of Paleodemography with Prehistoric demography

There appears to be a slight difference in meaning between 'prehistoric demography' or 'archaeological demography' and 'paleodemography',^[1] but not enough to justify two separate articles. Essentially they both refer to the study of demography in prehistory. – Joe (talk) 13:22, 16 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Since there are no objections, I will go ahead and do the merge. – Joe (talk) 08:57, 28 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

References

^ "In many respects archaeological demography can be considered synonymous with paleodemography, although perhaps with a subtle emphasis on the cultural (as opposed to biological) implications of modeling past human populations."[1]

[1] "In many respects archaeological demography can be considered synonymous with paleodemography, although perhaps with a subtle emphasis on the cultural (as opposed to biological) implications of modeling past human populations."[1]

[1]