Science Memes

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submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

High maternal mortality meant that having more than about 7 children per woman was rare. Total fertility rate was about 4.5 to 7 in the pre modern era. Population growth was low due to infant and early childhood mortality though.

If you start having children at age 12, you can have a child every year and reach 7 children by age 20. Without contraceptives, people weren’t having such large multi-year gaps between children like we do now.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Based on my own genealogical research, the trend I typically saw was 6-8 kids, between 18 and early 30s, about 20% of which died. Plus consider that some of those will be sons, and some daughters never become mothers, 25 is pretty spot on for the average age for a mother-to-mother generational gap.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 14 hours ago

Yes abd the field of genealogy, the size of a generation is given as 25 years. I believe specialists of genealogy who had to defined this metric did think about the way couple had kids in the past.