Kyle Harper

It's all about energy.

You want to multiply, you want to grow, you want to survive.

It's all about energy.

And so the, you know, foragers require huge landscapes to extract enough energy to feed themselves and grow and reproduce.

Whereas farmers per unit of land can extract

such higher rates of energy that then can be, you know, through photosynthesis is captured and turned into edible sugars that we can metabolize.

And so those populations are just growing faster that they, you know, quote, unquote, outcompete the hunter-gatherer populations, say, of Europe that are largely but not completely

Now, on top of that – so just like the energy story alone is a big piece of it.

But then on top of that, you probably do have some kind of population difference in the exposure and possibly even immunity to infectious diseases.

So I definitely think that –

early farmers, the first farming societies that are starting to live sedentary lifestyles where you have aggregations.

These are not cities.

These are villages.

But still, that's more than like a hunter-gatherer band.

And your childhood is then going to be constant exposure to

to a series of pathogens, those kinds of populations, when they're then migrating into Europe, are probably carrying these pathogens with them that may have had a kind of further effect that on top of just being able to extract more energy and multiply faster, drives up the mortality of the existing populations.

Yeah, I mean, don't, like, make me swear, but it's, like, more like four than six.

Right.

Because women who are, you know, moving with a foraging van, you know, miles and miles on foot.

on average a day, and also carrying kids, are going to have very different life history than sedentary populations.