Quand je suis né, en 1948, les femmes donnaient naissance en moyenne à 5 enfants chacune. Après 1965, le nombre a commencé à baisser comme jamais auparavant. Ces cinquante dernières années, il a chuté jusqu’à atteindre la moyenne mondiale incroyablement basse d’un peu moins de 2,5.

anatomically modern humans are estimated to have existed as long as 200,000 years.* With the earliest evidence of agriculture dating to about 8000 BCE, the amount of time our species has spent living in settled agricultural societies represents just 5 percent of our collective experience, at most. As recently as a few hundred years ago, most of the

Modern Homo sapiens arose approximately two hundred thousand years ago, the product of 3.5 billion years of adaptive evolution.

a characteristic world economy doubling time for Pleistocene hunter–gatherer society of 224,000 years; for farming society, 909 years; and for industrial society, 6.3 years.