[ExI] And What About the Vikings? (was "an aboriginal human...")

[Stefano Vaj]

On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 5:46 PM, Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com> wrote:
> Keith wrote
>      If via time machine a modern day Swedish 1-day old baby boy
>      was swapped for a 10th century 1-day old baby boy, with no
>      parents or medical personel being aware of our switch, could
>      we or should we expect the two growing boys and young men
>      to be somewhat ill-suited for their societies?

If I had to make a (semi-)educated guess, I believe that
*statistically* your babies might actually be in average better suited
for their own age and society. Recent research suggests that
population genetics changes and evolves much more quickly than we used
to think.

On the other hand, nothing forbids that a single randomly-picked 10th
century Swedish baby might be in fact better suited to modern-day
Sweden than another randomly-picked baby having been born there, and
vice-versa. You would have to take a much larger sample or a much
longer time to make any such change obvious.

Stefano Vaj