BIO 2129 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Demographic Transition, Industrial Revolution
1 Nov 2016
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Document Summary
There was a spike at the industrial revolution. Resource consumption is an overwhelming part of the human story it influences the recent human growth trends. Usually, population density decreases with the size of a mammal. But humans have similar population densities to mammals with a body size of about 1 kg higher than you would expect. The structures that humans build around us shelter us from the normal natural constraints that would affect population density. Human populations will consequently crash, from this point of view. Human populations around the 1950s were growing very very quickly. In the absence of green technologies that were developed, many of those people would have been hard pressed to find food. Productivity has increased faster than human population, at least until recently. The curve going the opposite direction for central africa represents the societal structures more than the ecological / agricultural. Continental population projections differ from global population projections.
