On Mechanisms of Population Growth During the Neolithic

One of the major events associated with the transition from hunting and gathering to food production was a "4rapid" increase in population. Anthropological interest in the interrelationship between this increase and the structure of the sociocultural system is manifest in many hypotheses on the relationship between population increase, urbanization, centralized government, the rise of the state, kinship, and economic growth. It has also been suggested that the transition to agriculture could have been a result of demographic disequilibrium (Binford 1968). Most of the models and hypotheses advanced by anthropologists, however, give very limited consideration to the demographic mechanisms involved. This is a regrettable shortcoming, since an understanding of these mechanisms would shed more light on the relationship between population dynamics and cultural processes than does consideration of the gross outcome of these mechanisms. For this reason, the attempt by Sussman (CA 13:258-59) to explain the mechanisms of the increase in human population during the Neolithic in demographic terms is a considerable advance over the traditional explanations, which invariably invoke the increase in the amount of food supply with no concern for the nature of the direct demographic mechanisms involved. Polgar's comments and his model of the capacity for growth in primitive groups (CA 13:203-11, 26062) are also valuable contributions. Although Sussman's model is of the kind required, I have arrived at some results that are different from those he reports, using a similar approach in the course of a general study of the population dynamics of the Palaeolithic-Neolithic transition. I shall here discuss some aspects of Sussman's model and attempt to provide an alternative model. To achieve the latter goal, I shall approach the problem in terms of a conceptual model of the cultural-demographic nexus of population growth, an estimate of the maxi-