"Out of India"

[Luis Gonzalez-Reimann]

At 09:07 PM 12/11/96 GMT, Vidhyanath Rao wrote (Re: Lars Martin Fosse):
 

>> 10) The enourmous transfer of Europeans from Europe to the Americas during
>> the last 500 years
>> 11) The migration of Europeans to Australia during the last 200 years.
>
>The last two were migrations of much smaller number of people, follwed by
>a population explotion made possible by more intensive use of land by
>the newcomes. This was not possible for Indo-Europeans. Indo_iranians
>did not know even agriculture or wheel thrown pottery, remember :-^

Well, I don't know about North America, but agriculture was quite developed
in Mesoamerica and in the Andean region several yugas before the arrival of
the Spaniards. The Mayas and the Incas are just two well known examples.  So
I don't follow this argument about a population explosion due to a "more
intensive use of land."  I don't have the numbers, but there was a steady
flow of Spaniards and Portuguese into Latin America for a long time, and
many native inhabitants died either from war or, mainly, because of disease.
Latin was the sacred language of the new religion, while Spanish and
Portuguese were, in a sense, its prakrts.  There are still regions where
Spanish has not displaced the original languages, but it is, nevertheless,
pretty much widespread.  Both Spanish and Portuguese have long been the
prestige languages of the area.  All of this in only 500 years (although 100
years ago the situation was probably already much the same as it is now).

Luis Gonzalez-Reimann