The historical growth rates I use, already reflect that, it’s got the plague, the dark ages, the wars, etc built in. I just don’t buy that mankind was around 100,000 years and maintained small numbers for the first 95,000.
Just look at the documented growth rates of the last 5000 years. Or any 1000 years and you’ll see what I mean.
And some archeological finds would have us believe that modern humans were around much longer than that.
I don't think anybody claims 95,000. More like 10,000.
That's about when agriculture started to develop. Prior to the production of food, human populations were drastically limited by the carrying capacity of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, which was very low. Humans being the ultimate apex predator, they required huge tracts of land. Tigers also have never been dense on the ground.
Just finished a book about the Yanomamo of the Amazon. They are sparsely settled over their territory, mostly because they constantly raid and kill each other.
I suspect this was the norm of human history prior to the development of agriculture and government, the two institutions that allowed dense populations to develop.
I hear tell that an eruption of the supervolcano Toba came close to extinguishing the human race about 70,000 years ago. If true, that would have been pretty much a start-over point.