Winter Temperature as a Constraint to the Migration of Preindustrial Peoples
John W. M. Whiting, John A. Sodergren, Stephen M. Stigler · American Anthropologist · 1982
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]