Donald Oddy
:Assuming this split between married and unmarried women and 30
:years of fertility it means that the average age for marriage
:is around 20. Rather later than in similar RW societies and much
:later than has been implied in previous discussions.
:
:I think this later marriage makes sense in that it gives time
:for the young woman to learn adult skills so she is less of an
:unknown quantity in the marriage negotiations. It also occurs
:to me that they may tend to marry younger men - the idea being
:that marriage gets the men to settle down.
In my university, here in Turku, the people of our biology department have
made a population study of a few groups of laplanders (up north here in
Finland) in the early 1800:s. These people were still living pretty much
like they had for a thousand years, but good records were being kept by
the local church men.
It turned out that the optimum age to start having children was about
thirty, and not twenty or under as some meight think. The optimum here
means that people (women) who had their children at that age produced the
most children (and grandchildren) that actually survived.
Conditions up there were pretty severe, so financial security, fitness and
experience all seem to have been important factors. The other interesting
thing was that a lot of the people also chose to have their children
pretty close to the optimum age of thirty, so the people in low-tech,
low-education enviroments do make sound tactical choises when it comes to
having children.
Hope this is of interest,
-Adept
Thinker, dreamer and adventurer
Received on Thu 08 Dec 2005 - 00:17:15 EET