Population growth for trading villages

[zizroc]

Population growth for trading villages

[zizroc]

I was thinking about this some more:

1. Intrinsic growth. In modelling this for a population, it makes sense to do as I have suggested above. For the immediate future, to get population working, it makes sense for us to do, as well. But because one of our goals with this model is to track genealogies, and because the populations are pretty small, we will be working towards a population with a memory of its previousState; i.e., not just its total numbers, but its numbers of males and females by age cohort. In the future, we will match males and females by age cohort to reproduce children; and later, subdivide these reproducing populations by elite status. To do this, we will need to make several more assumptions that are buried in growth rate (net birth and death rates); and these assumptions will be complicated by changes we plan to make to the time-step length. So we will also always have a logistic model with few assumptions (as is given above) as a comparison for our cohorted details model.

2. Migration. In premodern societies with very high infant mortality and small populations, growth tended to be low in the absence of in-migration. Here, we include forcible migration due to raiding, including slavery. Presently, this is just treated as a population trade between paired villages to equalize populations in each village. In the future, we will add conditions that depend on the size of the cohort of young men in a village, male-female ratios, potential demand for slaves, and perhaps barriers to trade.

Q: Should we have any other considerations for population growth?

[ThomasThelen]

Since this is specific to our research model and not necessarily to all uses of the library I'm moving this issue over to the quetzalcoatl_jam so we can focus on it over there and chat about it on one of the Friday calls.