Comment by woodandsteel
10 years ago
Also reproduction rates. From what I understand, in hunter-gatherer societies, children were breast-fed for a number of years, and, since women generally are infertile when nursing, children were spaced out. With agriculture infants came to be fed on porridge, goats milk, etc, and so the size of families increased greatly. And this made sense economically, since children can't hunt and are of limited use gathering, but even a very young one can pull weeds.
>since women generally are infertile when nursing
Fertility may be reduced but they are absolutely not infertile.
Source: a friend of my wife who got pregnant while breastfeeding and various doctors and midwives who repeated "you can get pregnant while breastfeeding" like some sort of chant in the weeks following the birth of our child.
They aren't absolutely infertile, but in hunter gather societies this is handled by infanticide. When it isn't possible for a mother to support two children under the age of four, the only solution was to kill one, which is what they did.
In the _Wandering God_ by Morris Berman, there is a story of a story of a girl (maybe 19th or early 20th century?) in a nomadic society in Africa. Her mother got pregnant again and was going to kill the baby, but the three year old child protested and agreed to go with being breast fed to try to save her newborn sibling. It wasn't possible to breastfeed two children at once, so her mother was going to kill the infant.
Miraculously the child managed to survive, but it was by no means guaranteed and she had to figure out to be self sufficient to some degree. It was considered such an odd occurrence that the relevant anthropologist reported the story.
I think we forget that infanticide wasn't uncommon that long ago. It was one of the major 'moral' victories of Christianity to make infanticide uncommon. And it could only do that because it wasn't necessary anymore.