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> in an agricultural settlement people would be having more children than a hunter-gatherer tribe would Er, is this true? Birth-control seems a relatively mod
by snogglethorpe 14y ago
> in an agricultural settlement people would be having more children than a hunter-gatherer tribe would
Er, is this true? Birth-control seems a relatively modern thing... Even if a H-G society might be less inclined to have lots of children (I dunno, really), did they actually have the knowledge and/or wherewithal (e.g. to purposely refrain from sex) to achieve that?
- InclinedPlane 14y agoHow it happens isn't relevant, we know for a fact that hunter-gatherer tribes have low population growth rates compared even to stone age agrarian settlements. Exactly why this is so is probably an interesting question. A few things to remember: fertility is dependent on consistent nutrition, people don't necessarily have sex like rabbits all the time, and in low population tribes the ability to find a mate may be a challenge. Also, infant mortality during the winter can be a bitch, even in an agrarian society with tons of stored food. Edit: poking around on the internet, it looks like infant mortality is the big differentiator. In hunter-gatherers it's rather high, at around 1 in 3, which is nearly double the infant mortality you'd expect even in primitive agrarian societies. That's going to have a tremendous impact on the population growth.
- snogglethorpe 14y agoCertainly increased mortality would be the obvious explanation for low population grow absent birth-control... [Which makes H-G society sound rather less peachy than the original article seems to have been claiming...]