ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Agriculture, population growth, and statistical analysis of the radiocarbon record.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 44 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
44 citing papers in PubMed, 184 citations in OpenAlex.
- Human burials indicate climate-mediated shifts in South African agriculturalist demography after 2000 years ago.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Landscape of fear: indirect effects of conflict can account for large-scale population declines in non-state societies.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- Demographic models predict end-Pleistocene arrival and rapid expansion of pre-agropastoralist humans in Cyprus.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Article
- Patrilineal segmentary systems provide a peaceful explanation for the post-Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck.Nature communications · 2024Article
- The long-term expansion and recession of human populations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- A model of long-term population growth with an application to Central West Argentina.PloS one · 2024Article
- Agentic processes in cultural evolution: relevance to Anthropocene sustainability.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Positive feedbacks in deep-time transitions of human populations.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- From the Ground Up: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Past Fertility and Population Narratives.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- Population trends and the transition to agriculture: Global processes as seen from North America.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Article
- p3k14c, a synthetic global database of archaeological radiocarbon dates.Scientific data · 2022Article
- Bayesian analyses question the role of climate in Chulmun demography.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- An insight into understanding the coupling between homologous recombination mediated DNA repair and chromatin remodeling mechanisms in plant genome: an update.Cell cycle (Georgetown, Tex.) · 2021Review
- Stewardship of global collective behavior.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Review
- Demographic uniformitarianism: the theoretical basis of prehistoric demographic research and its cross-disciplinary challenges.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Why are population growth rate estimates of past and present hunter-gatherers so different?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Population density and size facilitate interactive capacity and the rise of the state.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Directly modelling population dynamics in the South American Arid Diagonal usingPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The human population has grown significantly since the onset of the Holocene about 12,000 y ago. Despite decades of research, the factors determining prehistoric population growth remain uncertain. Here, we examine measurements of the rate of growth of the prehistoric human population based on statistical analysis of the radiocarbon record. We find that, during most of the Holocene, human populations worldwide grew at a long-term annual rate of 0.04%. Statistical analysis of the radiocarbon record shows that transitioning farming societies experienced the same rate of growth as contemporaneous foraging societies. The same rate of growth measured for populations dwelling in a range of environments and practicing a variety of subsistence strategies suggests that the global climate and/or endogenous biological factors, not adaptability to local environment or subsistence practices, regulated the long-term growth of the human population during most of the Holocene. Our results demonstrate that statistical analyses of large ensembles of radiocarbon dates are robust and valuable for quantitatively investigating the demography of prehistoric human populations worldwide.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.