[muawiyah]

If you simply ignore the appetites of the tetse fly, tigers, lions and angered aurochs, you can screw around with statistics just about anyway you want.

I'm putting my money on there having been many instances of higher death rates than birthrates ~

[patton]

Black plague, anyone?

[koinonia]

He doesn’t deny that possibility that there were years of stagnancy or higher death rates. But the fact is that from 1900 to the present, even with World Wars, abortion, etc. the growth rate has always been consistently over 1% and we can presume that that has generally been the case even before the 1900’s.

His point is to be reckoned with: you simply can’t say that man dates back hundreds of thousands of years if, in general, population is simply growing.

[meatloaf]

I guess the bottleneck in human DNA means something other than the almost total extinction of mankind about 5,000 years ago.