Final answer:
The average size of settlements varied depending on the time and location, ranging from early cities like Uruk with tens of thousands, to smaller medieval peasant settlements, and ancient communities such as Çatal Hüyük with over 5,000 inhabitants.
Step-by-step explanation:
The average size of settlements varied greatly depending on the period and location in history. For example, early cities in Sumer, such as Uruk, had populations ranging from 10,000 to potentially 50,000 residents. During the days of Pericles and Socrates, Athens likely boasted about 100,000 inhabitants. On the other hand, medieval peasant settlements could be as large as 700 or as small as a few families, and in the case of the Roman Empire, a city like Rome saw its population dramatically decrease from hundreds of thousands to about 30,000 by the end of the 6th century. In contrast, Çatal Hüyük in Anatolia housed a thriving community of more than 5,000 people about 8,000 to 9,000 years ago. The average size of settlements in the United States during the 19th century included small chiefdoms with populations in the thousands and later urban societies that relied on immigration from rural areas for population maintenance, leading to a total human population of about 600 million by 1700 AD.