Nevertheless, increasing population density, coupled with the concentration of livestock, domesticated plants and parasites, often led to massive epidemics and the collapse of entire civilizations. In an agrarian society, the vast majority of the population can only satisfy their minimum needs through subsistence farming. The primitive economy relied mainly on agriculture, on the achievements of which the slow evolution of society largely depended. We would not be mistaken if we said that about three-quarters to four-fifths of the traditional labor force was employed in agriculture (cf. Livi Bacci 2000, p. 12).
According to Thomas Malthus, in a traditional society, the population grows geometrically, while food production grows arithmetically. Geometric population growth with arithmetical production growth is a path to the Malthusian trap, that is, to the crisis and death of the entire society or that part of it that cannot feed itself. An agrarian society remains, to a large extent, part of its natural environment: the development of its meanings constantly encounters natural constraints—be they environmental disasters, crop failures or epidemics.
Quality and quantity of meanings
Meanings change according to the laws of probability. On the one hand, they can increase and complicate when people (re)combine them trying to get different results. On the other hand, they can decrease and simplify when people lose them during transmission. Culture is an ongoing experiment based on experience:
“Larger populations can overcome the inherent loss of information in cultural transmission because if more individuals are trying to learn something, there’s a better chance that someone will end up with knowledge or skills that are at least as good as, or better than, those of the model they are learning from. Interconnectedness is important because it means more individuals have a chance to access the most skilled or successful models, and thereby have a chance to exceed them, and so can recombine elements learned from different highly skilled or successful models to create novel recombinations”(Henrich 2016, p. 220).
The quality and quantity of meanings depend on the strength, diversity and sociality of human populations, and population numbers depend on the quantity and quality of meanings: