News You Can Bruise for 2004 December 21 (entry 0)

(2) Tue Dec 21 2004 21:19 PST: Check out Medieval Demographics Made Easy for some fun facts and RPG-oriented tables. Among said fun facts is the surprising-to-me one that medieval villages were basically crammed as close together as possible. I guess FreeCiv is more historically accurate than I thought.

Comments:

Posted by Yoz at Wed Dec 22 2004 11:43

One of the outcomes of this was that civilisations with tightly-clustered populations become much more resistant to disease over time, which enabled those civilisations to accidentally-slaughter huge numbers of the others that they invaded. Such is the premise of Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" - the title being the three weapons that Northern European civilisations used to achieve dominance through most of the world, of which germs was the most powerful.

(Of course, I only got about a quarter of the way through that book. It's very long with a small font, and I have a terribly weak attenti

Posted by Leonard at Wed Dec 22 2004 11:57

I read the book all the way through and I didn't get that factoid, so I think you still got a better deal out of it than I did.