"Basener will next use his formula to analyze the collapse of the Mayan and Viking populations."
I can't address Mayans, but I would hardly say the Vikings "collapsed."
Vikings named "Russia"; conquered France, Italy, and England.
In north America, they retreated rather than engage in battle when outnumbered (by Skraelings).
They now have some of the highest measured "standards of living."
Maybe he means the Greenland Colony.
I thought they determined that Vikings conquered and then colonized with their families, so that they didn't really collapse but instead simply spread out.
I dunno...looked sure'nuff like the Vikings collapsed to me..this last Sunday.
well said, indeed re: the Vikings.
I have a hard time reducing the investigating of ancient civilizations to a mathematical equation, seems so cold...but then again, I'm no scientist, just an amateur interested in these things.
Then there was a famine in 1811/12 in the far North, and that population crashed ~ thousands of people moved South or to America. Later on there were more widespread droughts that affected most or all of Europe, and more tens of thousands of people moved out, or died.
The 19th Century saw several serious depopulation events in Europe.
In the end we find 90% of the descendants of the populations located in the Celtic Fringe in America, Canada, South America or Australia. Half the people of Swedish ancestry live in the United States, mostly in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois and Washington The Danes moved to Ohio, Indiana and Illinois (to raise pigs). Probably a full third of the Germans in this world reside in the American Midwest and Pennsylvania.
This fellow's mathematics will probably prove useful in determining what percentages of a population have to be under stress from inadequate food to decide to emigrate.
The Vikings colonized the Faeroe Islands, Iceland, and Greenland, founded Dublin, and conquered the Isle of Man and the Hebrides and Orkneys. They didn't conquer all of France or Italy, but they did rule Normandy and southern Italy and Sicily. The settlements on Greenland eventually died out, about 500 years after they were started (longer than any English-speaking communities have existed in North America). And they did this all without coffee or chocolate.