ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
Productivity, biodiversity, and pathogens influence the global hunter-gatherer population density.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 34 papers.
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34 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Pan-African model explainsbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Environmental constraints and diffusion shaped the global transition to food production.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The evolving three-dimensional landscape of human adaptation.Science advances · 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
- Physiography, foraging mobility, and the first peopling of Sahul.Nature communications · 2024Article
- A model of long-term population growth with an application to Central West Argentina.PloS one · 2024Article
- Why did foraging, horticulture and pastoralism persist after the Neolithic transition? The oasis theory of agricultural intensification.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Is there still evolution in the human population?Biologia futura · 2022Review
- Changes in limiting factors for forager population dynamics in Europe across the last glacial-interglacial transition.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Sustainable human population density in Western Europe between 560.000 and 360.000 years ago.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Human populations in the world's mountains: Spatio-temporal patterns and potential controls.PloS one · 2022Article
- Global hunter-gatherer population densities constrained by influence of seasonality on diet composition.Nature ecology & evolution · 2021Article
- Climatic windows for human migration out of Africa in the past 300,000 years.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Stochastic models support rapid peopling of Late Pleistocene Sahul.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Ecological variation and institutionalized inequality in hunter-gatherer societies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- 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
- Carrying capacity, population density and the later Pleistocene expression of backed artefact manufacturing traditions in Africa.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
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Abstract
The environmental drivers of species distributions and abundances are at the core of ecological research. However, the effects of these drivers on human abundance are not well-known. Here, we report how net primary productivity, biodiversity, and pathogen stress affect human population density using global ethnographic hunter-gatherer data. Our results show that productivity has significant effects on population density globally. The most important direct drivers, however, depend on environmental conditions: biodiversity influences population density exclusively in low-productivity regions, whereas pathogen stress does so in high-productivity regions. Our results also indicate that subtropical and temperate forest biomes provide the highest carrying capacity for hunter-gatherer populations. These findings document that environmental factors play a key role in shaping global population density patterns of preagricultural humans.
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