>According to the latest Greg Sez conditions just before the Dawn were
>somewhat akin to 'a nuclear winter' with isolated bands of survivors
>emerging from their shelters into a ruined and devastated world. This
>to me implies that outside of the handful of societies which had somehow
>managed to escape the worst effects of the Darkness, most of Glorantha
>was at a neolithic level of culture and that the population who were
>around to greet the Dawn cannot have been that much larger than that of
>the RW at the end of the last Ice Age.
He did on the other hand state in the same answer that there were several cultures who had weathered the Great Darkness better than others. These were: Brithos (and her colonies of Seshneg and Akem), the Heortlings, the East Islanders, the Doraddi, the Kralori and the Uz.
>the [...] population at the Dawn was at best in the low millions -
>say 1 million or so in Genertela.
I think this too low. The Kralori are virtually intact, the Uz are everywhere and the Heortlings are strong. The Kralori and the Heortlings are not neolithic. Furthermore the nomad populations of Prax and Pent are in good shape and Peloria has a mixed population of scattered humans in cities lorded it over by brutal nomads.
>Now IIRC by 1620 according to GCotHW the population of Genertela was
>roughly 50 million despite there having been the following catastrophes
>in the interval: The Gbaji Wars, the sinking of Large parts of Sehnela,
>Jrustela and Slontos, the rise and fall of the Dark Empire, the MSE and
>EWF, the Dragonkill War, the rise of the Lunar Empire, the depredations
>of Sheng Seleris etc - all of which would have had major demographic
>consequences.
The Gbaji wars affected Ralios, Maniria and South Peloria. Sheng affected Kralorela and Peloria but left other regions unscathed. Seshnela, Jrustela and Slontos are irrelevant to calculations of the population of current Genertela. I fail to see how the God Learners, the EWF, the Dark Empire, and the Lunar Empire would be catastrophic in populations terms. It would be more likely given the long eras of internal peace that they enjoyed that they would be _beneficial_ to the growth of human populations.
>Now my maths may be at fault here, but a fifty-fold increase in
>population in 1620 years presumably means that on average the Genertelan
>population has doubled in size roughly every 33 years.
And if we arbitarily bump it up to 2 million, this translates to a doubling time of 65 years. If we assume a population of 5 million then we have have a population doubling time of 162 years. Methinks the assumption of neolithic population everywhere is flawed as the Heortlings and the Kralori are most certainly not.
>Now in the RW that sort of population growth rate can only be sustained
>by an industrialising society undergoing the demographic transition or
>revolution - That is to say a society where the birth rate is several
>times greater than the death rate due to radical improvements in public
>health on the one hand and a lack of any effective medical, social or
>economic limitations to fertility on the other.
A counterpoint.
China 1650 100 million. Population doubling time: 47 years.
1800 300 million.
1850 420 million.
This is with Manchu era technology and is not what most consider to be an industrialising society. The main improvements of this period were good government and internal peace. It went shit shortly afterwards but that's another matter.
There's also the impact of the common spud on Europe in the years after 1500.
>Frex, as we already *know* that disease functions differently in
>Glorantha let's make Glorantha a relatively disease-free world (as
>numerous parts of the world were before the arrival of Europeans and
>their diseases)
Where did syphillis and the Black death come from, I wonder?
>and in particular that both childbirth and the early
>yeara of childhood are far less risky than in the pre-industrial RW
Most childbirths are survivable by the mother. The situation reversed when mothers became hospitalized as a rule in the 19th century and before the medical doctors cottoned onto good hygenie.
End of The Glorantha Digest V6 #155
Powered by hypermail