Precisely why is this hard to square away?
Was the era from 1900 to 2000 so special/different as to be a one-off?
(This is obviously an unpopular line of inquiry/source of confusion based on the voting.)
It kind of was, and one of the people you can thank for that is Norman Borlaug.
Percentage of children to survive to adulthood.
Global food surplus.
The was a big phase shift over the course of the 20th century...
I mean if you look at the rate of technology change and population growth, ya probably.
What we cannot compare is if the older species could assimilate all the information that we had to in that period. The vast wealth of knowledge of the human super-species wasn't avaliable then.