Growth of Human Population and Its Effect on the Environment

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The growth of the human population has been strikingly apparent that the rate of growth has been much steeper than recent times. The earlier Homo sapiens were vegetarians and gathers they hunted and fished for food. With increased knowledge humans learned how to farm, domesticate animals and used irrigation to meet their needs. The knowledge of water and sewer conditions along with better medical care and agriculture made life easier. Earlier man did not have these factors and the population remained stable, for over thousands of years.
The Toba super volcano is believed to have caused a massive environmental change. Creating a bottleneck of the human population that “occurred about seventy thousand years ago.” (Wikipedia, para. 1) This caused the population of man to decrease considerably and in turned the species that existed at the time became non-existent. This super volcano was the largest natural disaster at that time. “The exact geographic distribution of human populations at the time of the eruption is not known, and surviving populations may have lived in Africa and subsequently migrated to other parts of the world.”(Wikipedia, para 1) The population after the super volcano would have remained the same until the induction of agriculture. With the knowledge of agriculture, irrigation, and hunting the population thrived and grew.
A string of plagues created a decline in the population of humans. For example the Black plague would cause the termination of the European population killing an estimated 75 up to 200 million people towards the end of the 14th century. Another limiting factor would be bubonic plague it happened in the 14th century, and one fourth of the population was killed. Other factors are war,...

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...Gausset Q., Whyte, M. and T. Birch-Thomsen (eds.) (2005). Beyond territory and scarcity: Exploring conflicts over natural resource management. Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute Retrieved from http://nai.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:240419/FULLTEXT02
Wikipedia, Population by Region, Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
Wikipedia, Genetic bottlenecks in humans, Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe#Genetic_bottleneck_theory
Wikipedia, Migration after Toba, Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe#Genetic_bottleneck_theory
Wikipedia, Modern era, retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
McGivern, T. (2010), Resource Mismanagement is our problem, not Overpopulation, Retrieved from http://timmcgivern.wordpress.com/2010/05/24/resource-mismanagement-is-our-problem-not-overpopulation/

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