ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
European Neolithic societies showed early warning signals of population collapse.
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. Cited by 22 papers.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed.
- Population discontinuity in the Paris Basin linked to evidence of the Neolithic decline.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- 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
- Is society caught up in a Death Spiral? Modeling societal demise and its reversal.Frontiers in sociology · 2024Review
- Multiproxy bioarchaeological data reveals interplay between growth, diet and population dynamics across the transition to farming in the central Mediterranean.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- The vulnerability of aging states: A survival analysis across premodern societies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Explaining population booms and busts in Mid-Holocene Europe.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Modelling coupled human-environment complexity for the future of the biosphere: strengths, gaps and promising directions.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Machine learning methods trained on simple models can predict critical transitions in complex natural systems.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Human-Plant Coevolution: A modelling framework for theory-building on the origins of agriculture.PloS one · 2022Article
- Societal Collapse and Intergenerational Disparities in Suffering.Neuroethics · 2022Article
- Spatially explicit paleogenomic simulations support cohabitation with limited admixture between Bronze Age Central European populations.Communications biology · 2021Article
- Contributions of evolutionary anthropology to understanding climate-induced human migration.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2021Review
- Loss of resilience preceded transformations of pre-Hispanic Pueblo societies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Agricultural land use and the sustainability of social-ecological systems.Ecological modelling · 2020Article
- Tipping positive change.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Review
- Nicotinamide as Independent Variable for Intelligence, Fertility, and Health: Origin of Human Creative Explosions?International journal of tryptophan research : IJTR · 2019Review
- Article
- Quantifying resilience of humans and other animals.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- The legacy of 4,500 years of polyculture agroforestry in the eastern Amazon.Nature plants · 2018Article
- Uncoupling human and climate drivers of late Holocene vegetation change in southern Brazil.Scientific reports · 2018Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Ecosystems on the verge of major reorganization-regime shift-may exhibit declining resilience, which can be detected using a collection of generic statistical tests known as early warning signals (EWSs). This study explores whether EWSs anticipated human population collapse during the European Neolithic. It analyzes recent reconstructions of European Neolithic (8-4 kya) population trends that reveal regime shifts from a period of rapid growth following the introduction of agriculture to a period of instability and collapse. We find statistical support for EWSs in advance of population collapse. Seven of nine regional datasets exhibit increasing autocorrelation and variance leading up to collapse, suggesting that these societies began to recover from perturbation more slowly as resilience declined. We derive EWS statistics from a prehistoric population proxy based on summed archaeological radiocarbon date probability densities. We use simulation to validate our methods and show that sampling biases, atmospheric effects, radiocarbon calibration error, and taphonomic processes are unlikely to explain the observed EWS patterns. The implications of these results for understanding the dynamics of Neolithic ecosystems are discussed, and we present a general framework for analyzing societal regime shifts using EWS at large spatial and temporal scales. We suggest that our findings are consistent with an adaptive cycling model that highlights both the vulnerability and resilience of early European populations. We close by discussing the implications of the detection of EWS in human systems for archaeology and sustainability science.
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