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From: petrich@netcom.com (Loren Petrich)
Subject: Re: Proto-World a red herring.
Message-ID: <petrichE547ss.JF9@netcom.com>
Organization: Netcom
References: <5d7qne$323@omnifest.uwm.edu>
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Date: Wed, 5 Feb 1997 05:41:16 GMT
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In article <5d7qne$323@omnifest.uwm.edu>,
Mark Hopkins <mark@omnifest.uwm.edu> wrote:

	[Argument that the glaciation that had ended 10,000 years ago had 
produced some sort of bottleneck into the human population...]

	I think that that's far from convincing, because there were still 
all the tropical and warm-temperate regions to live in.

	J.P. Mallory, in _In Search of the Indo-Europeans_, discusses at 
one point how much area a human population can cover and not have any 
serious linguistic divergence between subareas, referring of course to 
premodern technology, and he finds something like a few hundred thousand 
kilometers^2, or a linear dimension of a few hundred km.

	If that analysis is sound, then the last Ice Age had presented no 
linguistic bottleneck for our species.

	Furthermore, such a bottleneck would have genetic side effects, 
but none have been found.
-- 
Loren Petrich				Happiness is a fast Macintosh
petrich@netcom.com			And a fast train
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