Farming Gave Rise to Humanity’s First Baby Boom
Hunter-gatherers’ mobile lifestyle means that their women cannot care for or carry more than a single child that is too young to walk on its own and keep up with the rest of the group. As a result, hunter-gatherer women have a low birth rate. They must wait until their latest child is strong enough to walk on its own, before they give birth to another that has to be carried. Farmers in settled communities have no such restrictions. New children can be cared for by elderly relatives while their mothers toil in the fields.
Indeed, because farming is so labor intensive, farmers throughout history have tried to birth as many children as possible, as quickly as possible. They needed to keep ahead of high child mortality, and also, to put the surviving offspring to work. Eventually, much of the surplus went to feed the growing settled farmer populations. What had started off as abundance for the early farmers reached an equilibrium that left many of their descendants barely eking a living from the land.
