UnReal World > General Discussion

Northern Tribes

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Twezzk:
First of all im sorry for posting so many questions,i know most of them are silly but i love this game for its roleplay.

This is not a question that has an exact answer but lets try to answer it.

Why are northern people (norther tribes) smaller and lighter in averge (a lot,lot,lot),i mean what male human being 16 years old has 34kg?They mainly eat a diet of meat and should be bulkier (more proteins?)  while their southern brothers eat mainly plants,grains...And why are they darker(darker skin or hair?)as it is usually that people from northern areas are usualy blonde (vikings?)

How did they suceed  to ?evolve? so quicly?How long has it passed since Inehmo became many?

spamgoose:
I think it's a complicated answer.

As I understand it, the Northern Tribes in the game are meant to represent the Sami. There's a general belief (I don't know if evidence has backed it up anywhere) that the Sami are shorter than other northern Europeans.

However, there are a lot of complications. One is that the modern Sami population is genetically complicated and shares a lot of DNA in common with their fellow Scandinavians. The degree to which this is "new" is probably very debatable.

The other is to do with historical bias and the way food effects people. The problem isn't protein vs. grain, so much as it is fat. Animals diets can work, but you need a way to get fat to supplement all that protein or you'll still be suffering from malnutrition.  It's been shown how access to consistent food sources that are high in fat will increase the average heights of populations fairly quickly, when it previously wasn't available. It's hard to tell how much of that is fat, and how much is reliability of food.

If the Sami have been shorter over the last couple hundred years, it probably has a lot to do with being later to the western food party, as well as living in places where agriculture is difficult. I don't know how much fat one gets from Reindeer milk... but reindeer themselves are decently lean. Probably seasonal access and trade for sea goods like seal fat was important to keeping their diet sound.

My point being, the relative shortness of the Sami could be a modern perspective, that we are placing into the past. Coastal Finns with grain, and access to milk and cheese, were probably as tall as anyone else. However, Finns living in the interior were probably not that different than the Sami. It's hard to say.

I'd love to populate a database full of archaeological discoveries of human bodies in Finland and figure it out. It's possible somebody already has.

Regarding darkness... well again, a lot of debate. The reality is there is a lot of variation throughout Scandinavia so I would be remiss to venture a guess as to how much darker, or whether they are darker at all, are the Sami. For some perspective, see this -- especially the talk section. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_on_Sami

So yea... I'm speculating as to the motives for the description... hopefully that gives you some context.

Twezzk:
Well northern tribes should a very high fat consumations as tey eat a lot of fish and fish is high in fat plus seals.
Inuits for example have a 50 percent energy form fat,40,30 from proteins and 10-20 percent from carbs

PALU:
The Saami were basically wholly reliant on reindeer herding and hunting, plus land based fishing (i.e. rivers and lakes), if I understand it correctly. I don't think they used much or any ocean fishing or boats for fishing. Since reindeer have better feed at higher elevations the Saami probably didn't get much access to any of the coasts, and thus not much access to seals (and on the Baltic side the coastal areas were already occupied by agricultural/fishing populations, so they'd risk conflict if moving in that direction). The Saami life stile was quite different from the Eskimo one so that comparison is not particularly useful, unless, of course, (some of) the northern tribes are intended to portray Eskimos rather than Saami, which I don't find likely (and all northern tribes have reindeer, which I don't think Eskimos have ever had: hunting, yes, owning, no).

I would expect the Saami life style to favor stamina and wiriness over brute strength given the need for traveling long distances over snow covered terrain, and I would also expect it to penalize obesity (should the chance to get obese ever arise).

Erkka:
A short clarification as it might not be otherwise obvious:


--- Quote --- And why are they darker(darker skin or hair?)as it is usually that people from northern areas are usualy blonde (vikings?) 
--- End quote ---

We are mainly talking about hair colour here. In real life, as most of the Finns tend to have either blonde or sand-brown hair, the Saami people often have darker brown hair. But, all in all, I'd guess this is a rather minor detail, isn't it?

Also, just a reminder; although the game world is based on roughly 1000 - 1200 AD Finland, the cultures and tribes aren't intended as 100% historically accurate. We decided to allow ourselves some artistical freedom - that makes game development easier; we can dig into historical facts and sources as much as we like, and when we find conflicting or missing data we can just use our imagination, sometimes also combining different elements and blending them into our imaginary vision of UnReal World.

(I think the other have already pretty much described the reasons why we imagine the semi-nomadic northern tribe members to be somewhat smaller than the southern folks)

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