Oh yeah, one in one hundred...hmm. That'll be pretty widespread.
It'll be more of a problem once communities grow larger. At the moment I think we still have nomadic groups and foraging villages, which won't have a particularly high population.
If each community has, say, 100 adults, which I'm guessing is fairly sizeable before agriculture hits the market, then each community will probably only see one adult zombie every generation. If these poor kids have generations only about 20 years apart each, then that's maybe a zombie every twenty years.
Compare to a bronze-age city with 500,000 people and the same birth- and deathrate, which makes about 250 zombies a year, or about one every weekday. Far, far more if plague comes to town.
Also, fun idea: Because the death rate for children tends to be MUCH higher than that of adults, most of our undead will be young children and infants, which their parents and family would be forced to destroy.
E: Another bonus! We might have a bit of culture going on here as sentient species tend towards burning the bodies of their dead to prevent reanimation instead of burying them where they could, with time, dig themselves up again.
That'll be fun to go into. I feel like I might do something regarding that soon enough. Might round up the corpse issue of Grotbrawl at the same time.
Or we will just throw him at the core of Jvan and watch some metaphysical nonconsensual sex take place.
In a bizarrely unexpected move, exposure to Thulemiz will actually turn Jvan into a spindly spider-legged goblin newt with great, blind white eyes, who waits in the eternal caverns for the cycles of the world to pass him by.
Fuck man now I'm nostalgic for Achozaal.
