The case that mortality rose either with the Neolithic Revolution or subsequent urbanization is made by both medical ecologists and anthropologists. The former point out that only dense farming or urban populations could sustain epidemic disease. Many anthropologists believe that Palaeolithic society either controlled population numbers or experienced low natural fertility, and that both fertility and mortality rose with denser, sedentary populations. Given that the evidence for low

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... rer fertility is unsatisfactory, and that the balance of fertility and mortality was inevitably approximately maintained into the Neolithic period, it is possible that there was no Neolithic mortality crisis. This paper examines how the case was built for near consensus on such a mortality crisis, and the implications of this case being wrong. The proposition that the beginning of agriculture (or irrigation or urbanization) was associated with a significant rise in mortality has been widely discussed and mostly supported over the last half-century. The case is found in the medical or epidemiological literature, especially that in the ecological tradition, and in works on anthropology and palaeodemography. This paper examines how these ideas developed and questions whether this near consensus could prove to be fallible.