There was a lot of social reformation to get rid of Bride price and some of that literature used to be a part of compulsory readings during my schooling.

I lived a couple of years in a small mountain village in Guatemala. The second summer there was a bean shortage, and corn was short, none in the market town or very expensive. People began extending their diets with various ‘weeds’, and eating things normally fed to animals. This lasted about a month, until the harvest started. Lucky for them it was a decent harvest so there was no actual starvation. But they were close.

Malthusian limits apply on the margins. A single bad year will set the limit for an entire generation, so populations at the limit may not appear to be there most of the time. So, maybe I am wrong about prehistoric hunter-gatherers. A few drought years per generation may have set the Malthusian Limit, even if generally there was plenty of food, as reflected in the skeletons. I am looking forward to seeing more fine-grained bone analysis.

As for polygamy, Carr-Saunders doesn’t say much about it, but other sources suggest that moderate polygamy (i.e. men with 2 or 3 wives) was not uncommon among hunter-gatherers. Among Australian tribes the older men tended to monopolise the fertile women, while younger men had to make do with pre-teen children.

We also have to remember that predation was a significant factor in keeping human populations down. Lions are a formidable foe, and compete with human males for the same prey, and humans don’t gain a technological advantage over them until the advent of metal weapons. The Bleek & Lloyd archive records numerous instances of /Xam people being killed in the nineteenth century.

People wanting to study the difference between agricultural and nomadic societies could do well to look at the transition as it happens in Egypt, about which quite a lot is known. It happens very swiftly, and coincides quite precisely with the arrival of grain.

Not sure dowry system was part of Brahmanical ritualism when MN Srinivas coined that word. That appears to be Feudalization than Sanskritization.

When reproduction is predictable, it is manageable; when it isn’t, it amounts to chaos, genetically, and few pairings can result in families within the context of the long term commitments that humans rely upon to form the anchor of society, to aid, and to protect each other.

In a polygamous world of the past, that impulse would not have been present, except to the extent when all were attacked as in wars. Predictable agriculture and predictable industry aids predictable human society, socially, cognitively, and biologically, and therefore, contributes more to progressive human society than not. It may also reduce the opportunity for harmful disease which would otherwise inflict rampantly promiscuous society.

For technological societies to advance, some measure of safe, secure, and predictable routine is required in order to form the rudiments of government and industry to drive societies forward. That is a part of the latent struggle of developing societies which have no yet reached a predictable culture and continue to mine the pleasures of polygamy, and the downside risks and problems associated with it.

While polygamy may seem harmless, it is actually quite harmful to society in that manner, not to mention the fact that by setting an example of polygamy in others, the norm can become one that there is no reason not to embrace by human society, thereby sacrificing the progress of all for the preferred deviance of some.

the anthropology on this is a bit confused, but fwiw the same argument has made for peasants. judging by the number of saint’s days, etc. the main issue is that on the malthusian margin it isn’t as if people had enough to eat where you could expect them to put lots of strenuous labor input anyhow. basically they may have just put enormous inputs into particular times of the year.

that being said, i do think that moderns tend to not realize that “leisure” in a pre-modern society may have been pretty difficult. the “starving times” when the larder is nearly done and there’s a temptation to go the seed corn.

What kept population numbers down, IMHO, wasn’t the average state of things, but periodic droughts, blights, hurricanes, etcetera. Liebig’s Law of the Minimum. It’s easy to forget that these days, when the Red Cross shows up to hand out relief supplies (as they did after a hurricane hit the small Tongan island on which I was living). My Tongan dictionary, compiled more than 100 years ago, is full of plant names followed by the observation, “eaten in times of famine”. Us Kauvai folk didn’t have to experiment with any of those. We had Red Cross flour.

It was the 5- to 10-fold reduction in climatic variability after the Younger Dryas which made agriculture viable in the first place. Skateholm (Sweden) shows evidence of sedentism and violence prior to the receipt of agriculture in Scandinavia.

obviously the practices spread from upper to lower castes, and from the center-north to the rest of the nation, more or less.

I suspect that other things besides food resources limited population.