ABSTRACT
Since the last Ice Age, agriculture has essentially replaced foraging as the human means of subsistence. A t the end of the Pleistocene all humans were foragers. Today, foragers represent such a small proportion of the human population as to be essentially nonexistent. I n geological terms this replacement was rapid, although for most groups i t was a slow, incremen tal process. Population issues have been central to debate surrounding the agricultural transition (Cohen 1977, 1989; Cohen and Armelagos 1984; Cowgi l l 1975; Hassan 1981; Rafferty 1985; Wood et al. 1992). One particu larly controversial issue has been the relative importance of changes in fer t i l i ty and mortality i n the long-term demographic growth that followed the adoption of agriculture (Buikstra and Konigsberg 1985; Cohen 1989; Pennington 1996). Specifically, what was the relative importance of increases i n fertility and / o r decreases i n mortality for human population growth that followed the transition to agriculture?
