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Population increase (Factor 5) by people coming together would be augmented by an increase in the number of children in each family. Among mobile hunter-gatherers infant children must be carried everywhere and nursed until they can eat on their own, and children contribute little to the food quest because of insufficient hunting skills or plant collecting knowledge. For the residentially-stable farmer, on the other hand, children do not need to be carried around by the mother because they can be fed at home by older siblings or grandmother with the soft foods available to farmers. Thus, mother can be freed from childcare to pursue other activities in the field or in the home. Furthermore, children are valuable to the farmer in weeding fields and throwing rocks at birds and rabbits.
Population increase further reinforces dependence on cultivated foods by depleting local supplies of wild plants and animals. Eventually, people must go farther and farther away from the village to find animals or plants to augment the food grown in the fields. At this point they have become fully committed to and totally dependent on cultivated foods as their dietary mainstay.
Psychological factors (Factor 6), which admittedly are difficult to identify in the archaeological record, also must play a role in keeping people together once they have sufficient food resources to make it possible. We humans are social animals and prefer the security and companionship of other people. It is because normal human beings do not wish to live alone that threats of being ostracized from the group function effectively as social control in small communities.
It is easier to understand the general process of shifting to food production than to identify the actual events of prehistory that led to making farmers out of Archaic hunter-gatherers. Several facts are known. Whereas evidence for Early and Middle Archaic people is scarce, Late Archaic sites dating between 1000 B.C. and A.D. 200 are abundant, and most have botanical evidence of corn.
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