Mathematical Requirements for Homeostasis in Prehistory

If demographers could ask one question of the wisest of our prehistoric ancestors, they would surely ask, "How was the growth of your population kept so slow?" The average rate of growth in the numbers of our ancestors over a million years cannot by any stretch of the imagination have exceeded one thousandth of our own world rate of growth in the last two decades, and this low long-term average growth rate is the one undisputed empirical fact about the hunter-gatherer epoch in human demography.