one thing is consistant though, barring catastrophies, population does continue to grow.
No it doesn't. Some populations are growing. Others are diminishing. Every species population is in a struggle for limited resources (mostly food supplies) with the other species in their environment. That is why natural selection occurs. To take modern human population growth, which has resulted from a technological explosion over the last few hundred years, and extrapolate it backwards to the time before that technology, is simply a nonsense. Human hunter-gatherer societies that existed prior to agriculture (invented a few-thousand years ago) were very low-density and there was no particular reason for the population to grow.