1. Thomas Malthus2. Marija Gimbutas3. Colin Renfrew

Thomas Malthus

Early Life and Influences• Born in Surrey, England. The 6th of 7

children. • Attended Warrington Academy 1782-

3, then privately tutored by Gilbert Wakfield (English controversialist)– His father was friends with David Hume

and Jean-Jacques Rousseau • Attended Jesus College, Cambridge

in 1784– Undergraduate degree in mathematics

(highest honors)– MA degree in 1791 and elected a fellow

two years later• Became a parish priest in 1789

Thomas Malthus 1766-1834

Population TheoryAn Essay on the Principle of Population 1798

• The Iron Law of Population– basses on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s

idea of ‘great, eternal iron laws’– Named retroactively after the iron law of

wages (which is actually based on Mathus’ work)• real wages always tend towards the minimum

wage necessary to sustain life of worker (Ferdinand Lassalle)

• Huge Impact on a number of fields – Economics, Demography, Biology…

Independently cited as a key influence by both Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in developing the theory of natural selection.

Malthusian Theory = The world’s rate of population increase outruns the development of the world’s food

supply

Reasoning • Food supply increases

arithmetically and population increases geometrically

• Time period written in – England was the 1st country to enter the Industrial Revolution and was seeing unprecedented population growth (see stage 2 demographic transition model)

Population vs. Food• Population

– 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128• Food Supply (resources)

– 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7…

Examples: the U.S. population, he noticed, doubled every 25 yrs

Conclusion… The End is Nigh or Not?

The red line shows geometric growth. No matter how much you start off with, the red line will always end up crossing the blue line.

At any rate, after the curves intersect, the needs of the population exceeds how much it can produce; this is the point of Malthusian catastrophe.

Catastrophe! Unless…

Something’s got to give• Population will pass

available resources unless– ‘moral restraint’

produce lower Crude Birth Rates

Or– Disease, Famine,

War = Higher Crude Death Rates

• The observation is, indeed, so stark that it is still easy to lose sight of Malthus’s actual conclusion: that because humans have not all starved, economic choices must be at work, and it is the job of an economist to study those choices.

• – Landsburg (2008): Thomas Robert Malthus from The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.

Failures in Malthus’ Theory

Malthus Failed to consider…• Birth Control• Technological advances

– More food produced with new machines

– Genetically modified foods• The Green Revolution (last

30yrs)– Goals of this movement include:

eliminate hunger, increase yields, increase technological knowledge, rise incomes and standards of living… Or was it a Failure….

Contemporary Views on MalthusNeo-Malthusians:He may have been right because…• Malthus did not anticipate that

the majority of world population increase would occur in poorer regions (LDCs), b/c of medical technology from MDCs– Result = uneven development wider

than anticipated• World population is outstripping a

number of resources not just food– Oil….

Critics

Unrealistically Pessimistic• Treats Resources as fixed rather

than expanding– New Technology = use resources

more efficiently • Elements of Possibilism = humans

have some ability to impact food supply

• Population Growth could be a good thing– Bosenup & Kuznets – larger pop

could stimulate economic growth, more consumers, more tech…• Europe is more prosperous with

millions of people

Political/ Social Views• Marxists

– No cause-effect between population growth and economic development.

– Poverty/ social problems comes from unjust institutions

– Enough resources if shared equally.

• African Political Leaders– High population good b/c

more people = more power (armed forces)

Theory vs. RealityCurrent Conditions do not support Malthus

Why?• Food Production has grown

faster than the Natural Increase Rate since 1950

• Problems of Distribution rather than production

• Population growth is not as fast as Malthus Model – His data based on population

boom of Ind. Rev. England

Pre- knowledge • Indo-European

languages include: Celtic, Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Baltic, Albanian, Greek, Armenian…

Marija Gimbutas

Early life and Influences• Born in Vilnius, Lithuania

– Parents part of the intelligentsia• 1908 her mother earned a doctorate in

ophthalmology, & became the 1st female physician in Lithuania

• Attended Vytautas Magnus University and University of Vilnius for degrees in linguistics, ethnology, archaeology, folklore and literature

• Doctorate in archaeology with minors in ethnology and history of religion from Tubingen University (Germany)

• Moved to US and worked at Harvard University

January 23, 1921 – February 2, 1994

***Very interdisciplinaryBackground

Theory = Kurgan Hypothesis (1956)

• 1.Gimbutas Indo-European Origins theory-The theory states that the first Proto-Indo-European speakers were the Kurgan people, whose homeland was in the steppes near the border between modern day Russia and Kazakhstan.

This theory is now defended by the American archaeologist James Mallory (Mallory 1989), who states that the Proto-Indo-Europeans were the warrior pastoralists who built kurgan, that is burial mounds, in the steppe area of Ukraine

Theory = Kurgan Hypothesis

• This theory states that the Proto-Indo-European language diffused from modern day Ukraine through conquest.

warlike invasion by Proto-Indo-Europeans as pastoral nomads (kurgan)

1. the Proto-IE kurgan people would have then first invaded Southern Eastern Europe,

2. then after having evolved into the so called Battle Axe people (the black area on the map) would have brought IE languages all over Europe, in a series of conquering waves (white arrows on the map)

Explanation and Impact• Explanation-

The theory was used to explain from where Indo-European languages first developed– it states that the people

first started to migrate and spread ideas from this location.

– It also gave a location from where one of the major religions of today developed.

• Impact - • With this theory, she was the first

scholar to bring together linguistic and archaeological knowledge to solve the problem of the origins of Proto-Indo-European speaking peoples and to trace their migrations into Europe. – (she named "Kurgans" after their

distinctive burial mounds)• This hypothesis, and the act of

bridging the disciplines, has had a significant impact on Indo-European research.

Evidence

• The Kurgan tombs were filled with sculptures, precious metals, bronze weapons, and the skeletons of both warriors and horses.

• Horses were common in the area, and the archeologist David Anthony has recently shown that they were probably domesticated in the vicinity of this Kurgan culture,

Problems….• Without written

documents, it is very difficult for archaeologists to say what language was spoken in this region at the time

Colin Renfrew

July 25th 1937 - Early life and Influences• Born in Stockton-on-Tees,

United Kingdom• Educated at St. Albans School,

Hertfordshire. Served in the Royal Air Force 1956-8

• St. John’s College, Cambridge studying Archaeology and Anthropology, earning a PhD in Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures in 1965

The Renfrew Hypothesis• AKA: The Anatolian Hypothesis (1987) states the P-I-E language

spread around 7000 BC through the innovation of agriculture rather peacefully with Anatolia (modern day Turkey) as the hearth.

Evidence

• agriculture was spread by farmers, not culturally, and farmers would have had to bring their own language with them.

• Links to archeologically know events (spread of farming) that is often assumed as involving significant population shifts

• DNA evidence… maybe• A Phylogeography (study of

historical processes based on gene genealogy) may support this

Renfrew Vs. Gimbutas • States that the Proto-Indo-

European people lived 2,000 years before the Kurgan Population in eastern Anatolia in which is what today we call Turkey.

• Explanation-Renfrew believed that the population which spread the Indo-European branch began somewhere in what would be in the central area of Turkey.

• Spread is caused by growth of Agriculture…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sDobCiqbjY

Who is Right?