Having more babies in fact became a boon, providing extra labor, and recent skeletal studies suggest that the average woman in an early farming village, staying in one place with stores of food, gave birth to seven or eight babies (of whom maybe four would survive to their first birthday and perhaps three to reproductive age) as compared to the mere five or six live births of her roving ancestresses. The more food people grew, the more babies they could feed; although, of course, the more babies they fed, the more food they had to grow.
