I was reading this article, and it's honestly better cited than a lot of things I read, but one of the claims it includes contradicts my expectations. Specifically, this claim:
In the best-selling book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (audiobook), world renown historian, Yuval Noah Harari, describes the early periods of the agricultural revolution:
“With the move to permanent villages and the increase in food supply, the population began to grow. Giving up the nomadic lifestyle enabled women to have a child every year. Babies were weaned at an earlier age – they could be fed on porridge and gruel.” [1]
But, Noah Harari notes that this pursuit of an easier life led to unintended consequences:
“The extra hands were sorely needed in the fields. But the extra mouths quickly wiped out the food surpluses, so even more fields had to be planted. As people began living in disease-ridden settlements, as children fed more on cereals and less on mother’s milk, and as each child competed for his or her porridge with more and more siblings, child mortality soared.”
Based on the context in the article, the agricultural revolution being described is the Neolithic Revolution around 10,000 BC. The source of the claim is listed as the book "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari, but I don't have access to that book in order to check that.
The specific thing I'm questioning is that during the agricultural revolution "child mortality soared". That seems extremely counter-intuitive to me, since I would expect increased consistency and availability of food and shelter to have a positive effect on mortality rates. Additionally part of the reasoning listed seems to be a cycle of "need more food -> need more people to farm the food -> need more food for those people" but I had thought the entire premise of the Neolithic Revolution is explicitly that people would be able to farm more food than they could consume, meaning that the "more people" step would increase food production more than enough to cover those people rather than ending up back at needing more food.
However, all of that is just "my logic" and vague memories from history classes I didn't really pay close attention to. I can't be confident with just that, so did infant mortality rates increase substantially during the Neolithic Revolution?