sfrose -- I had this happen in one of my villages too, only I haven't finished any collections in that village. Usually, after I finished the puzzles, I lower my speed to 1/2 time so I don't have to rebuild the fire so often. Well, when I discovered that my population was aging, I bumped it up to x2 so they'd die quicker (I'm a heartless guiding hand) and my parents could re-populate slowly.

I generally have a fair number of girls on parenting duty at any one time, so as soon as an elderly villager dies, one of them will produce offspring to make up the numbers again. Talk about dead men's shoes ... In the meantime they are all busy kissing one poor inoffensive male and steadily working towards becoming master parents. I usually also make the "alpha male" also a parent. I figure that if the girls have all the fun kissing him he ought to be able to do some kissing back.

i had 2 of those raft events that left one of my villages with a 20 year gap in between 2 villagers and that sometimes causes the population to go back down to around 50.

My tribe started with only one female, and she kept producing boys. I was really worried, but finally a girl child was born - whew!

The tribe is now 81 villagers and sex ratios are normal...

About baby boom: at one point I made the mistake of having about 10 babies all at once. Algae covered the ocean. The strain on the food supply was major and I didn't dare do more babies for quite a while. So there was a gap of 14 years in the ages. The old folks died and there were no babies to find the collectibles, and all the ladies were either too young or too old and it was a mess.