ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2016
The empirical case against the 'demographic turn' in Palaeolithic archaeology.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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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.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed, 86 citations in OpenAlex.
- Identifying the necessary conditions for large populations to enhance cumulative culture.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Use it or lose it: A model-based assessment of the hypothesis that European Neanderthals relied on wildfires to create their campfires.Open research Europe · 2025Article
- Expanding the causal menu: An interventionist perspective on explaining human behavioural evolution.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- After the blades: The late MIS3 flake-based technology at Shuidonggou Locality 2, North China.PloS one · 2022Article
- First modern human settlement recorded in the Iberian hinterland occurred during Heinrich Stadial 2 within harsh environmental conditions.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- An ecological niche shift for Neanderthal populations in Western Europe 70,000 years ago.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Article
- Innovation, life history and social networks in human evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Scaling human sociopolitical complexity.PloS one · 2020Article
- Reply to Martens: Various factors may enable large populations to enhance cumulative cultural evolution, but more evidence is needed.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Increasing population size can inhibit cumulative cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Divide and conquer: intermediate levels of population fragmentation maximize cultural accumulation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Article
- On the absence of a correlation between population size and 'toolkit size' in ethnographic hunter-gatherers.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Review
- The effect of dispersal on rates of cumulative cultural evolution.Biology letters · 2018Article
- Radiocarbon test for demographic events in written and oral history.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Greater than the sum of its parts? Modelling population contact and interaction of cultural repertoires.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2017Article
- The Driving Forces of Cultural Complexity : Neanderthals, Modern Humans, and the Question of Population Size.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2017Article
- Major transitions in human evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Recently, it has become commonplace to interpret major transitions and other patterns in the Palaeolithic archaeological record in terms of population size. Increases in cultural complexity are claimed to result from increases in population size; decreases in cultural complexity are suggested to be due to decreases in population size; and periods of no change are attributed to low numbers or frequent extirpation. In this paper, we argue that this approach is not defensible. We show that the available empirical evidence does not support the idea that cultural complexity in hunter-gatherers is governed by population size. Instead, ethnographic and archaeological data suggest that hunter-gatherer cultural complexity is most strongly influenced by environmental factors. Because all hominins were hunter-gatherers until the Holocene, this means using population size to interpret patterns in the Palaeolithic archaeological record is problematic. In future, the population size hypothesis should be viewed as one of several competing hypotheses and its predictions formally tested alongside those of its competitors.This article is part of the themed issue 'Major transitions in human evolution'.
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