2004): “A ‘Bioeconomic View of the Neolithic and Recent Demographic Transitions

The demographic transitions here are associated with: 1) The shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture. 2) The industrial revolution. There are puzzles associated with both of these. In the neolithic transition to agriculture, humans became less well-fed, smaller, more prone to disease and lived shorter lives. Why then was this new system chosen? During the second, or “recent, ” transition, fertility fell markedly, despite an overall rise in income. Why did individuals not use the extra income to produce more offspring? The present paper develops a simple biological model, with two age classes, that reproduces the key phenomena in these two transitions