Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion General Science Discussion Forum The population explosion started early

This story in Phys.Org is about a genetic study that claims that the population explosion that we usually associate with the neolithic revolution started a lot earlier. The general belief is that the world population was fairly constant up until about 10,000 years ago. Then farming was invented and the population started climbing. That is the neolithic revolution. The study referenced in Phys.Org however has studied the genetics of a large number of groups and finds that the population started expanding something like 60 to 80 thousand years ago. There must have been some innovations that allowed more efficiency in the hunter gatherer life style that everybody used at that time. It isn't clear just what those innovations would have been.

I think that this idea could explain the movement of modern humans out of Africa and into the rest of the world. Increasing population pressures would drive people to seek new places to live.

Bill Gill

Maybe someone built a better bow, or improved their arrowhead technique? Maybe the game they hunted got stupider? Maybe they learned cooperation in taking down game? What was the fauna doing at that particular time in history? Many unanswered questions remain to be solved.

You got that right. There have already been a lot of suggestions as to why modern humans over ran the world when they did, but they are all questionable. There seems to have been an overall increase in innovation about that time, but if you ask several paleoanthropologists what it was you will probably get just as many answers. It could have been the development of advanced languages. That is one I kind of like, but just because I like it doesn't make it right. Obviously having advanced languages was necessary, but it may not have been the final driver. You will get a lot of argument about just how advanced the language used by the Neanderthals was.

Bill Gill