---
title: Isekai
path: isekai
---

Around fifteen thousand years, humans began to transition to a more sedentary lifesstyle. More food than someone could carry would be stored in one location rather than constantly migrating in search of new food. As these societies became more rooted, agriculture would develop. Cultivating your own plants allows for a certain area of land to produce more human accessible calories, at a cost of increased labor requirements. Societies that engaged in this more directed and sedentary cultivation were able to feed more people in a given space, an advantage they could use to displace other groups as they expand. A combination of this displacement and knowledge transfer, along with some indepedendent invention would lead to agriculture becoming the dominant mode of production for the majority of humans.

Let's start with a simple model, the amount of food produced in a given amount of land (a square kilometer along a river bank for this example) is dependent on the amount of labor put into it. When there are 0 households on this land, no food is being produced for human consumption. When there is one, they are operating at densities about double the normal hunter gatherer band. They might be engaging in a low density form of pastioralism (raising livestock), they might cultivate a smaller proportion of the land agriculturally or some combination fo the two. With densities this low, most of the land will run wild whether woods, a wetland or a heath.

A medieval peasant would like to be connected to other people, especially ones able to provide metal tools, the ability to store food and religious services. Thus they would rather live closer to centers of population, but if it were close enough to a center of population, they might take root but wish for a shorter walk. If given the proper tools for the environment, they would be able to produce much more than enough food for themselves most years. This would lead to population growth as households split as sons and daughters marry off with other families and new households move in to the empty land (if land is a constraint in nearby places).

A generation or two passes and now there are three households on the land. There is still plenty to go around and productive portions are still being left alone. They continue to be able to produce more than enough food for themselves, but every so often harvests will be small and a year of hunger would occur. The amount of labor required to feed a family remains light.

More generations pass and now there are five households leaving above 50 acres/20 hectares per family. Almost all the land has been put to some productive use.