I'm glad I wasn't born a 1000 years ago

More then 1000 years ago, Sweden was not yet an united kingdom and the gospels of Christ had not yet reached the remote Scandinavian peninsular. The Viking era was coming to an end and the majority of the people living on the Scandinavian peninsular were slaves. Being a slave meant that you belonged to someone else 24 hours a day. Your owner could force you to work till you faint, he could sell you, beat you up, rape you and kill you; the slaves were not people nor scum, they were nothing.
People and slaves lived in small villages. The villages lay like small open islands in the landscape, surrounded by wild forest. Between the villages there were huge, deep, dark forests full of giants and other scary creatures. The Scandinavian peninsular was split up in many small local principalities and they were ruled by fear and ignorance.

During that time there were three ways to travel:
1. By foot
2. By horse
3. By boat.
The Scandinavian peninsular has a long coastline and there are many lakes across the land. Sailing a boat along the coast could take you the same distance in five days, that would take 4-5 weeks to walk or ride. That’s how we became the Vikings.
Roads were more like muddy paths through the forest. Riding was not necessary much faster than walking but it was more convenient. Most people lived off the coasts in the forests.

I realized that If I had lived in the Scandinavian peninsular a thousand years ago I would not have met my wife in Malaysia, some 12 000 kilometres away. There would probably have been a greater chance that I would have married someone from the same village, maybe the neighbour’s daughter or better off, a girl from a neighbouring village.
There would also have been a greater chance that I would have married someone who was my second or third cousin or blood related some other way. The risk our offsprings would die due to bad hygiene, malnutrition or inbreeding would have been high; 40% or maybe more of all the children that were born would never have reached the age of 5 years.

Thanks to technology the world has become smaller. Now we can travel around the world in a couple of days. This creates millions of situations when people from different ethnic origins meet and interact in corporate and social life. People who meet and interact may start to like each other and they may fall in Love.
To me it has been surprising to understand how many people actually get in contact over the internet, fall in Love and become couples. The world is there via your ADSL-modem!

What does this development mean to the diversity of ethnicity?

In thousand years the average man’s world has increased from a little village with 1000 inhabitants, maybe half of them inbreeded, and most of them afraid of everything outside the village, to a world of millions of people, from hundreds of ethnic groups, connected by the web-browser in your PC.

Isn't that fantastic?