[accidentallfact]

>I’m going to try to win the award for the most controversial theory on this thread.

Extremely easy to beat that.

You can see that global population used to stay at around half a billion until around 1700. The growth is a recent thing.

So let me propose a more controversial theory - lead made people have a lot of children.

You can't beat this.

[chrisco255]

Lead? Lead was used for millenia. The Romans made copious use of lead.

[defrost]

And the Romans had many children?

Humans had many offspring for millennia, humanity has had fewer offspring since lead has been banned.

I'm not the one proposing the theory, but that's a correlation.