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Mostly because Bret is a good historian and it's going to be difficult for non-specialists to credibly nitpick it. Also it's quite a long read. And he's not go
by pjc50 1y ago
Mostly because Bret is a good historian and it's going to be difficult for non-specialists to credibly nitpick it. Also it's quite a long read.
And he's not got to that question yet: "So this week we’re going to look at marriage patterns, particularly the question of age at first marriage. Then next week, we’re going to turn to the implications those patterns have for child-bearing and child-rearing"
But I think you're missing the other aspect of the population pyramid, extremely high child and maternal mortality. It's more that everyone, especially women, was a conscript in the War on Death. And even then people are generally having fewer children than humanly possible, because they're also starvation-constrained. From the article:
"We’ll be coming back to some of these points when we talk about fertility next week, but the mortality rate for pre-modern societies is very high, thus necessitating a lot of births, but it is not so high that societies need to approach a maximum ‘natural fertility’ (the birth rate using absolutely no means of birth control) to hit replacement and slow growth. But these are also peasant households with significantly constrained resources. So the question becomes how to restrain fertility to a high, but not maximum level."
- vintermann 1y agoI trust his judgment of the time and places he studies. It's also easy to trust, since it's more or less what I believed already. However, I'm wary about the generalization to pre-modern societies in general. Not just because of the countless counterexamples of anthropology to everything you can think of in human affairs, but also because when I started digging into the church books for my own genealogy, I found far more even-aged or women-older marriages than I'd expected. Maybe not a majority, sure, and maybe not on average (and also, we're way out of both the time and the geography Bret studies). The past is never quite as I imagined.
- namenotrequired 1y agoI agree with you, but a few slight caveats to your point that I think are worth noting. > Not just because of the countless counterexamples of anthropology to everything you can think of in human affairs A lot of anthropological research is done on non-agrarian societies. The author limited himself to peasants here, so that limits some (far from all) of the variation. > I found far more even-aged or women-older marriages than I'd expected The author also limits himself to age at _first_ marriage; I’d expect a lot more variation in age at remarriage. And even if divorce was rare compared to today, death of a spouse was much more common. So you’d expect to see quite some remarriages in the family tree
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dmichulke 1y agoFYI: IIRC, he estimated mortality at - 10% after the age of 20 (women due to childbirth, men due to war) and - 50% before in one of the earlier essays of this series.