Quote:Settled sometime in the 1200s, IIRC. Either way, please refer to Deadpan's posted link - the number of people coming into or out of the Americas is actually irrelevant, since they didn't produce any serious contribution to the landmass's gene pool. AFAIK, genetic speciation can occur as quickly as you're suggesting, but only under the most extreme pressures. Which humans were in a good position to beat even before we got all smart and stuff.
Wrong. We got desiccation mummified white people showing up before the Asians showed up and killed them off (It was in a Discover magazine article in the '90s) and most of the large fauna. North America was a lot more than like Africa species wise before the Indians started hunting by running entire herds of cliffs for the meat from 5 or 6 animals. Every once in a while a new boat load of people randomly came to America from some where. One of the theories is Atlantis was South America and those pyramids in South America did show up about the same time as in Egypt. If you want isolated there is Earth's official middle of Nowhere, Easter Island.
I don't see how other species or human effects thereon are relevant to the impact of genetic drift on the human population of the Americas between initial settlement and the beginning of extensive contact with the Eurasian populations.
Quote:Well, the real problem would be that the attitude of pretty much everybody with any learning was, 'why build machines when you've got slaves', so a tremendous amount of time was wasted both before and after.
The first steam engine we have recorded of is from ancient Greeks... hell one of them literally was using a tower mounted solar, mirror based laser to set enemy ships on fire. The problem was he wrote everything on trays of sand (and we all know how good etch-a-sketch are for long term preservation of data). That guy and his small group of students literally double or tripled the siege length for a city of those resources. Some inpatient Roman grunt ran him through for not respecting his authoritay. The inventor was deep in a math problem on the beach and was ignoring thee actual wall breaching invasion. The grunt had specific orders to take the guy alive to (after over a hundred pieces of Mad SCIENCE that the Romans had had sicked on them that guy was the point of taking that city), but apparent said grunt didn't know who it was. If he didn't kill that guy we would be far more advanced then we are today.
Actually, the rate of technological advancement has been a shockingly smooth exponential curve for as far back as I've heard any suggestion of measuring it. I don't think projecting a similar technical level for several other societies is nearly as problematic as you're suggesting, especially if, as already stated, they're merely the most advanced of some larger selection.
Quote:No. There is an isolated incident of a single population making certain changes to themselves without going so far as to reduce fertility between modified and unmodified individuals, and even then occured within historical times. The Precursors are gone, and there has been no constant deliberate influence on human genetics, preplaced or otherwise. Allotropic drift isn't fast enough to cause problems, at least in a species with generations as long as humans', and it's very hard to puncture the equilibrium of a critter that keeps changing its environment to suit its whims.
SO there is the constant tinkering I mentioned before... or at least an 'intelligent' version of universal DNA.
ETA:
Quote:Eight. And that's a perfectly ordinary number for a star to have - K or better stars within five parsecs of each other = jump connection. Quite simple - the only reason I haven't gone farther in my mapping is that, frankly, I have no idea how to start looking for or calculating distance data centered on stars other than Sol. The positions of every system within I think at least a hundred parsecs is known fairly closely, IIRC, so the data's there, it just needs processing.
You'll also want to have races that races other than Earthlings have to deal with, unless Earth is in the geographical center of the races. You also never mentioned if the 18(?) jump points in the Sol system was a large, small, or average number.
Ja, -n
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