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Demographic constraints on population growth of early humans

Emphasis on the probable role of females in overcoming such constraints

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Abstract

The human population grew at very low average rates for most of its existence. Mortality was reasonably severe and expectation of life at birth was low. The level of fertility necessary to achieve even inifinitesimal population growth under such mortality implies birth intervals sufficiently short to conflict with the ability to care for and carry children in a mobile foraging economy. Techniques for the control of mortality, especially of children before puberty and of women in childbirth, and of child care exchange, probably developed by females, may have been essential in permitting population growth under conditions of mobile foraging.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Demography, University of California, Berkeley, 2232 Piedmont Avenue, 94720, Berkeley, CA

    E. A. Hammel

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  1. E. A. Hammel
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Correspondence to E. A. Hammel.

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E. A. Hammel is Professor in the Graduate School in Demography and Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology at Berkeley in 1959; conducted ethnographic field work in California, New Mexico, Peru, Mexico, and the Balkans and archaeological field work in California and New Mexico; and has published analyses in archaeology, ethnography, semantic analysis, statistical applications, biological anthropology, and demography. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Recent publications include “The Elderly in the Bosom of the Family:la famille souche and Nuclear Hardship Reincorporation,” inAging in the Past: Demography, Society, and Old Age (David Kertzer and Peter Laslett, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, in press); “Economics 1: Culture 0. Fertility Change and Differences in the Northwest Balkans, 1700–1900,” inSituating Fertility: Anthropology and Demographic Inquiry (S. Greenhalgh, ed. Pp. 225–258. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); “Gender and the Academic Career in North American Anthropology: Differentiating Intramarket from Extramarket Bias” (with Carl Mason, Ariadne H. Prater, and Robert T. Lundy.Current Anthropology 36:366–380); and “Fertility Decline in Prussia, 1875–1910: A Pooled Cross-section Time Series Analysis” (by P. Galloway, E. A. Hammel, and R. D. Lee.Population Studies 48:135–158).

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Hammel, E.A. Demographic constraints on population growth of early humans. Human Nature 7, 217–255 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02733396

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