The population increased because half of it wasn't dying off immediately. You have to include the half that dies off early in the calculations of QoL for hunter/gatherers.
It is actually the plants (barley, grain, grapes, millet, potatoes, taro, maize, rice, sorghum, manioc) that tricked the humans into cultivating (reproduce) them/
I think there’s a version of the Malthusian trap that has explanatory merit - the idea that as population increased, you got diminishing returns from more people farming the same land. Population would therefore increase until famine, after which there would be good times until the cycle repeated. This cycle was broken by the industrial revolution.
Isn't this the same "trap" that any living life "falls into"? It gets many offspring, and only those survive who can feed themselves. Exponential growth fills up the niche until there are no more resources: any successful species is trapped against some kind of resource or environmental ceiling, unfortunately.
Is there a ceiling in the industrial revolution era? Famously the 1972 book Limits to Growth says yes for that question.
