Why Did the Human Population Explode After the Advent of Farming Around 10,000 Years Ago? — Here’s What Experts Believe

The growth of the human population for the vast majority of our history has remained fairly slow and steady, with some major events like glacial cycles and climate change causing disruptions. However, when human societies began farming around 12,000 to 10,000 years ago, a massive change happened: the human population started to grow rapidly.

Our ancestors who lived as hunter-gatherers survived by moving around, migrating to new habitats with more resources. They hunted, scavenged, foraged, and gathered necessary materials that were found readily available in their environment. But with agriculture, this lifestyle was gradually replaced. Still, how exactly did all of these changes lead to a worldwide population growth? Let’s dive into the possible reasons and theories in this article.

More Food and Greater Stability

One of the biggest reasons why the population grew is simple. It is because farming gave early humans a much more stable and reliable food supply, which could then support a higher number of individuals within the group. Before, the hunter-gatherers would only rely on what they could find in nature, so if the resources got depleted, they had to move.

Additionally, the farming and agricultural revolution that started around 12,000 to 10,000 years ago was believed to be heavily influenced by the environmental shifts. The world during this time underwent a lot of positive changes for early humans. The ice sheets melted, the climate became warmer, and the natural habitats grew more abundant in some regions.

This phenomenon allowed them to experiment with planting crops and to domesticate wild animals for thousands of years. Then slowly, they learned which type of seeds to plant and how to harvest and store them for future use. Soon, they were able to produce more food than they could consume, and it gave their communities a surplus of resources.

Surplus meant that even in bad days when the farm isn’t productive, or some form of disaster hits the group, they would still be able to survive. This brought stability that allowed more people to live together in one place. Over time, this factor contributed to the rise in the population of early humans.

Read more: Wikipedia

Lower Death Rates and Health Improvements

Human Population Through Time #datavisualization

Farming also affected how many births the group had and how many infants reached adulthood. Before agriculture, human societies would constantly move to find resources. When one habitat is exhausted, to survive, they need to migrate to a new place. This constant moving made frequent births impractical and more dangerous.

But when farming began, early humans needed to stay near the land to tend to the crops and livestock. This meant that they created permanent homes, developed defenses to protect their food supply and territory, and also took more control of their water and shelter. In other words, the dangers and threats that they faced when they were constantly moving around diminished.

Additionally, with a more reliable food supply, fewer people died from starvation or extreme shortages of resources, and their bodies were able to grow and cope with diseases. However, farming did not come without any problems. Once they are settled, and more people gather near each other at one location, the faster the diseases spread. So, if a specific sickness they are not immune to spreads, then it could also result in a catastrophic event. Still, the overall effect showed there were more births than deaths, which, over time, naturally led to an increase in population.

Increased Birth Rates and Family Size

Some evidence points to early farmers having less nutrition than their hunter-gatherer counterparts. It could be because of constantly eating the same food that the farm produces, unlike the hunter-gatherer societies, which have a much diverse diet, although their food supply could be unreliable and limited.

So, in other words, the shift to farming doesn’t necessarily mean that the people were healthier and not suffering from malnutrition. But, it is still true that their birth rates increased after they chose the sedentary lifestyle, and stayed in one place to tend to their farms.

This could be because, for a mobile group, children would be a liability and would add more burden to the survival of the group during their early years. But in farming societies, where there is a surplus of food supply, and survival is much more predictable, families could have more children.

Additionally, children, when they grow up a bit, could already be an asset, even before their adulthood. They could help tend to the farms, feed the animals, fetch some water, or harvest seeds. This gave an incentive for the group to have more children to assist with labor. Then it led to the natural increase of birth rates, which have often been above their death rates, ultimately leading to population growth.

Read more: PubMed Central

Migration, Expansion, and Filling New Lands

The Neolithic Revolution: The Development of Agriculture - The Journey to Civilization #02

Finally, when farming allowed more people to live together and increase their numbers, it led to added pressure for the farm to be more efficient and produce more supplies to keep up with the increasing population. So, naturally, they expanded and even migrated to new areas that have suitable land for farming.

This expansion further contributed to the rise of the population because it meant new lands, new settlements, and another increase in the food supply and production. In other words, farming has created a cyclical process that goes through like this: more food, resulting in more people, which necessitates expansion, and therefore produces more food, until the cycle repeats again.

However, expansion is not unlimited. In the early days, there could be more lands that they could farm in, but soon, different groups of human societies developed enough to also expand, which created a competition for these farming lands. There could also be some logistical and environmental constraints, that too much land to process could result in poor management of crops and a poor harvest.

But it is generally accepted that the transition to agriculture allowed human societies to push their population to the very limit that this lifestyle could support.

The explosion of the human population after the rise of farming did not just happen because of one single reason. It was instead a result of a multitude of factors that farming directly and indirectly caused. This included the increase in reliable food supply, the incentive to have more children to help with labor, and the necessity to expand due to the demand of the increasing population.

So, farming allowed humans to grow in numbers to the very limit that the new lifestyle could produce. However, it was not an infinite growth and unlimited expansion. Soon, they faced challenges such as resource depletion, competition with other groups, faster spreading of diseases, and social conflicts arising from the developing complexity of their new societies.

Still, the demographic shift that farming started or heavily contributed to laid down the foundation for communities of early humans that would have become villages, cities, states, and ultimately, civilizations. Without the rise in population that came with farming, our world and history would have been completely different from what it is today.

Read next: How Did the Rise of Farming Around 12,000 Years Ago Spark a Major Technological Revolution? — Here’s What Researchers Found

References & Further Reading

Bocquet-Appel, J.-P. (2011). When the world’s population took off: The springboard of the Neolithic Demographic Transition. Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1208880

Shennan, S., et al. (2013). Regional population collapse followed initial agriculture booms in mid-Holocene Europe. Nature Communications. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms3486

Kohler, T. A., et al. (2014). Long and spatially variable Neolithic Demographic Transition in the North American Southwest. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1404367111

Dunne, J., et al. (2012). First dairying in green Saharan Africa in the fifth millennium BC. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature11186

Stantis, C., et al. (2019). Reconstructing breastfeeding and weaning practices in the past using stable nitrogen isotope analysis of dentin serial sections. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7217027/