Evergreen Dazed wrote: tiompan wrote: nigelswift wrote: Not to get too political but ....
1899 upper class Liverpool = 136 newborns out of 1000 would die before the age of 1
Working class = 274 infant deaths per 1000 births
Impoverished slums = 509 infant deaths per 1000 births
Alexander Finlaison reported = 1/2 of all children of farmers, laborers, artisans, & servants died before 5th birthday compared to 1 in 11 children of the land owning gentry
So I personally would take some convincing things in the Neolithic were better than that.
Not much to do with the Neolithic but keeping with the political(ish) :
UN data for contemporary infant mortality per 1000 .UK= 4.19 ,
US =5.97 . Africa has the bottom ten countries at 70 - 90 .
60 years ago only six countries in Africa were in the bottom ten , but the rates were 250 per 1,000 .
Yes, but as you've hinted at, my question would be why assume a high infant mortality in the Neolithic? (I am assuming that is the case in any published figures.)
As Tiompan says infants are likely to be under-represented in the archaeological record but they are still quite common. A more specific reason is the swift and pretty much complete replacement of lactose intolerance in adults with lactose tolerance during the Neolithic in Western Europe. This would have required a very strong selection pressure at the earliest stages in life where being able to tolerate milk longer than other infants was a very big life or death advantage.
|