Originally Posted by
Caesar
I would disagree with that analysis. Infant mortality, followed by early child mortality, are the two biggest factors in human mortality overall, with infant mortality being significantly greater. Infant mortality in 3rd world, rural environments hovers around 10% or more. This is in the modern world, where those people have access to more food and technology than they would have in a stone-age setting, but lets take it as such more or less. Now the human population took tens of thousands of years to break out, with an exponential growth of only about 0.5% per year for most of our early history (70,000 years!). So you can see, it doesn't take a lot of numbers much higher than this to flatline the human population, and this was in a world full of food and resources, where we are the apex species.