Regional population collapse followed initial agriculture booms in mid-Holocene Europe
By S. Shennan, Sean S. Downey, Adrian Timpson, Kevan Edinborough, S. Colledge, T. Kerig, K. Manning, Mark George Thomas. Nature Communications, 2013
660 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Following its initial arrival in SE Europe 8,500 years ago agriculture spread throughout the continent, changing food production and consumption patterns and increasing population densities. Here we show that, in contrast to the steady population growth usually assumed, the introduction of agriculture into Europe was followed by a boom-and-bust pattern in the density of regional populations. We demonstrate that summed calibrated radiocarbon date distributions and simulation can be used to test the significance of these demographic booms and busts in the context of uncertainty in the radiocarbon date calibration curve and archaeological sampling. We report these results for Central and Northwest Europe between 8,000 and 4,000 cal. BP and investigate the relationship between these patterns and climate. However, we find no evidence to support a relationship. Our results thus suggest that the demographic patterns may have arisen from endogenous causes, although this remains speculative. Between 8000 and 4000 BP, agriculture spread throughout Europe changing consumption patterns and increasing populations. Shennan et al. analyse radiocarbon date distributions and paleoclimate proxies to show that agriculture also triggered regional population oscillations and that climate forcing is an unlikely cause.
Subfields: Anthropology, Atmospheric Science, Paleontology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9a0b2aa9893fed8dd9ad394f75627d2a45a60017
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Citations in the corpus
- The city as innovation machine (2017, background): “research finds that some of humankind’s earliest technological and cultural early advances occurred in parts of the Middle East and Africa which had the highest population densities at that point in development (Shennan, 2002; Shennan et al., 2013).”