Early Life and Influences Thomas Malthus 1766-1834
• Born in Surrey, England. The 6 th 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

An 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.

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 1 st 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?

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.
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.

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.

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….

Neo-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….

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)

Current 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…

January 23, 1921 – February 2, 1994
***Very interdisciplinary
Background
Early life and Influences
• Born in Vilnius, Lithuania
– Parents part of the intelligentsia
• 1908 her mother earned a doctorate in ophthalmology, & became the 1 st 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

1.Gimbutas Indo-
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

This theory states that the Proto-Indo-
European language diffused from modern day Ukraine through conquest.
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) warlike invasion by Proto-
Indo-Europeans as pastoral nomads (kurgan)

• 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.

• 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

July 25 th 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

• 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.

• 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

• 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/w atch?v=8sDobCiqbjY