This article seems to leave out critical "common knowledge": There are so many humans because birth rates tend to decline after child mortality rates go down. The article also seems to not address the detail of whether or not this group had access to birth control of some sort so as to engineer a decline in birth rates.

This is a (very recent) anachronism.

Most people in antiquity saw children as a blessing. The more children you had, the larger your bloodline would be. In fact, being unable to have children was a point of shame for a woman. It wasn’t until the rise of the modern era in the west that people started wanting small families or no children at all.

You can still see this idea of children as a blessing present in some communities that haven’t been westernized, e.g. some Mohawk communities in Canada.

If you read the article, that group is subsistence gatherers, basically trying to find enough calories daily to survive.

A very different situation than pondering one's bloodline.

it was a blessing because you had more help. Children could work the farm, help hunt, household chores, etc. When you're a subsistence farmer, getting more help is critical to feeding the family. Now, children can't be brought to the worksite or office, so the blessing is less helpful.

> Most people in antiquity saw children as a blessing.

2003 is antiquity?

> Gotta wonder if the women thought that was progress, or not.

It's not like women don't tend to love children...

The fact that they tend to love their own children (which is not a specifically female or motherly trait?) has little to do with whether the life they want for themselves is one of caring for 12 of them.

Hopefully you find what you want in life, but I’m not betting you will.

Those who want nothing have everything.

That's horribly reductive and I imagine that if some of these women had the choice or even knew better, would have dedicated their own lives to something other than child rearing.