Land ho! New research shows that first colonists of new lands produce more offspring than those who remain within the fold. There is something called the "wave front," which marks the outer reaches of human settlement. So, if you move to central Alaska and set up shop (like this guy), you would be on the wave front. Why would you do that? Simply put, to create lots of offspring."We think this heritability on the wave front and not in the core population is due to the fact that there is some competition for resources in the core, which prevents members of large families to access land and to get married early," says Laurent Excoffier, one of the study's authors. "Since there is more land available on the front, there is less competition and, thus, this correlation persists there.""We have studied the spread of a whole human population over a few centuries in a specific geographical region," Damian Labuda, another author, said at a press conference. "We don’t know yet to what extent our results can be generalized for other human expansions in other regions of the world…However, we would speculate that similar processes might have occurred in other successful demographic expansions of farmers into new territories."This may all seem paradoxical. Surely, there aren't that many eligible mates in Fairbanks. But that’s where you're wrong. You see, just living on the frontier significantly increases your odds of reproducing at a higher rate. Yup. That's a lot of heat in your igloo.So, grab your harpoon and move on up. It's time to get busy.Imagevia
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