Where did the Egyptians come from ?

6 kids each and generations of 25 years gives about 19 million people. I'm (the wife actually) about to have my fourth child in 5 years and we use contraceptives (4 will do us I think)! Back in those days people didn't travel the world and sit in uni cafes drinking machiatos. They had families.

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[This message has been edited by Tranquility Base, 06-12-2002]

Assuming 25 year generations doesn't mean they all died at 25!! But it is quite likely they had had 6 kids by 25 - these were not bohemian uni students! I don't know enough about reproduction but there is a breast feeding pill to stop pregnancies during this period so there must be a chance of it happening. And many families may have been bigger than 6. I'm sure someone here could find out the sort of families that we used to get in the 3rd world pre-pill. My sister's father in law came from a British family of 13 kids in the 20th century!

^ I am thinking of nomadic cultures. We need to stop speculating and get some hard data.

Peter - the enormous longevities and late child bearing stopped pretty quickly after the flood.

Percy, I've got a plot of age vs year of birth that shows a neat curve with a 1000 year asymptote on the left and an approximate 70 year asympotote on the right. Most of the drop of course occurs over about 20 generations between Adam and Abraham. It's nice, it's fun, it's suggestive but doesn't prove aything.For us we have no problem with long human lifespans - if we had near perfect genomes it would have taken time for degredation to build up. People today can live to 130. We're only talking a single order of magnitude. I think this is one of the most over-rated Bible bloopers. By the 23rd century with personal genomics we could be back up near Biblical ages - who knows?PS - no one got over 1000 years because "the 'day' you eat of the fruit you shall surely die". Hmmm . . . and in Rev Satan is let out of the pit at the end of the millenium to see that man now has lived for 1000 years. The curse of Genesis is broken. It all comes together . . .

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[This message has been edited by Tranquility Base, 06-13-2002]

^ I thought everyone knew the pi 'contradiction' was easily solved by noting that the measurements may have been an inner diameter and an outer circumference?[This message has been edited by Tranquility Base, 08-08-2002]

wj, amazingly, there is recent evidence that pi has changed over the last 15 years. I got this email news from American Scientist last week:>ROUND BUT NO APPLES
>Los Angeles, CA
>
>The obsession of some mathematicians for calculating the value
>of 'pi' to the nth decimal place has been a mystery for many.
>Pi, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to it's diameter is
>approximately 3.14. The current record is in the millions of decimal
>places. At the 27th Congress on Number Theory held at UCLA last week
>Dr. Michael Leermann of Princeton University revealed a fascinating
>new twist in the search for pi.
>
>Although current determinations of pi are more accurate than
>previous computer estimates, Leermann notes that there is a
>statistically significant trend for higher values of pi as
>determined over the last 15 years. "This cannot be written-off as a
>statistical fluke" claimed Leermann in a radio interview. "The
>result is far too significant to be due to random variation and our
>group has ruled out all possible systematic sources of error".
>
>The discrepancy shows up in the non-random centering of the values
>obtained around the average value. Prof. Mark Wellford at the
>University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, agrees that there is no
>other possible explanation. "Pi has drifted over the last 15 years
>and we cannot explain it. As much as we hate to admit it, the
>universe has flexed and with it the mathematical laws we know and
>love".
>
>American Scientist
>3rd August 2002[This message has been edited by Tranquility Base, 08-13-2002]