Winter Temperature as a Constraint to the Migration of Preindustrial Peoples
- 1 June 1982
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Wiley in American Anthropologist
- Vol. 84 (2) , 279-298
- https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1982.84.2.02a00020
Abstract
The dispersion of preindustrial peoples is strongly related to winter temperature in two surprising respects. Based on a classification of societies by language, we introduce a statistical model for their dispersion and show that (1) the 10°C (50°F) winter temperature isotherm has been an effective constraint to migration and expansion, and (2) the dispersion of language phyla has been remarkably homogeneous in a certain temperature scale, in contrast to the marked heterogeneity in terms of geographical dispersion, [climate, language, migration]This publication has 9 references indexed in Scilit:
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