Excuse me, if this is the wrong sub for this but I’m genuinly confused. According to [this graph](https://flic.kr/p/5T5hkE) I found by accident, the world population barely increased at all between 1300 and 1900. And then it suddenly took off like crazy. What caused this sudden fast increment of the world population?
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Vaccines and modern medicines, coupled with improved transport.
That’s the thing with exponential growth: you don’t see it until it’s too late.
I can’t speak to the early part of the 1900s, but this man had the most impact on the increased population https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug
Three factors contributed the most, but by no means are the only 3 factors.
First one being a better understanding of medicine and disease, including the introduction of vaccines. People died less often from preventable disease, especially children, meaning more people made it to adulthood to themselves also breed. Fewer babies dying means both more adults,and more breeders.
Second, mechanical farming and chemical farming – that is, artificial fertilizer. Between better fertilizer which improved crop yields, and farm equipment which allowed more to be harvested in less time meaning there was more food for even the new larger population.
And third was a combination of the internal combustion engine and the plane. With transportation that made land, air, and sea travel much much faster, it was suddenly much easier to transport all of this food to where the people are.
Obviously it’s a lot more complicated and this is a really simple explanation
Short answer is sex, lots of sex. Infant mortality also dropped dramatically with invention of modern medicine. Vaccines, all the vaccines. More high quality food kept people healthier and so they live longer. So basically: reliable healthy food, medicine, lots of sex
Math. Even without all the good stuff that’s been mentioned, human populations were increasing exponentially. When you’re doubling from 1 million to 2 million people, it barely registers on this vast planet. But doubling from four billion to eight billion?
Here’s a [logarithmic graph](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_growth_(lin-log_scale).png) of population, where small populations are exaggerated and large ones are unserstated. Easier to see that population stayed rather steady until 7000 years ago, and rose at a steady rate until around 300 years ago, and rose even faster in the last 100 years or so.
I’m curious about the events around 5000 BCE, but the more recent increases are definitely due to science and cultural acceptance of it. Industrial food processing and germ theory mostly explain the events around the 1700s. A better understanding of nutrition, medicine, agriculture, and improvements in fertilizer mean we can sustain people for far longer.
I’d argue that people were having sex at roughly the same rates all along, but that everyone’s health and longevity has vastly improved.
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So the key things that affect population size are birth rates and death rates. If more people die than get born, then the population goes down. If fewer people die than get born, then the population goes up.
For most of human history, people died at a shockingly high rate, especially among children. Because of this (and lack of contraception) people tended to have lots and lots of children in the hope that one or two of them would survive to adulthood. As an example Queen Anne (probably one of the richest and most powerful person on the planet) had 17 pregnancies. Only 5 were born alive, only one lived past the age of two, and he died at 11. This was not unusual.
What changed was a better understanding of how diseases worked. Simple measures such as keeping wounds clean, washing hands etc. Helped greatly. As did vaccination which started to take hold in the 18th century. By the Victorian era the death rates had plummeted in much of the world. However people still tended to have large families out of habit.
Victoria, 150 years later, had 9 children, all of whom survived to adulthood.
During this phase the population goes up fast. Eventually people stop having as many kids and the population stops growing as fast. Most developed countries are at this stage now. Developing countries are still in the earlier stage where the population is exploding, which is why the world population is up to 8 billion, but it won’t keep growing at this rate forever.
The Haber-Bosch process, developed in WWI Germany removed the limits on food production imposed by scarce nitrogen fertilizers. Ammonia could be produced with nitrogen from the air, hydrogen, and an iron catalyst. This improved crop yields many times.
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