ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019
Periodic catastrophes over human evolutionary history are necessary to explain the forager population paradox.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Menopause Averted a Midlife Energetic Crisis With Help From Older Dependent Children and Parents: A Simulation Study.American journal of biological anthropology · 2026Article
- Demographic synchrony increases volatility and extinction risk in human populations.Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2026Article
- Indirect genetic effects among neighbors promote cooperation and accelerate adaptation in a small-scale human society.Science advances · 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
- Earliest directly dated rock art from Patagonia reveals socioecological resilience to mid-Holocene climate.Science advances · 2024Article
- Article
- 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
- Changes in limiting factors for forager population dynamics in Europe across the last glacial-interglacial transition.Nature communications · 2022Article
- The importance of elders: Extending Hamilton's force of selection to include intergenerational transfers.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- 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
- Human uniqueness? Life history diversity among small-scale societies and chimpanzees.PloS one · 2021Article
- WEIRD bodies: mismatch, medicine and missing diversity.Evolution and human behavior : official journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society · 2020Article
- The optimal timing of teaching and learning across the life course.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Marine resource abundance drove pre-agricultural population increase in Stone Age Scandinavia.Nature communications · 2020Article
- THE EXPOSOME IN HUMAN EVOLUTION: FROM DUST TO DIESEL.The Quarterly review of biology · 2019Article
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Abstract
The rapid growth of contemporary human foragers and steady decline of chimpanzees represent puzzling population paradoxes, as any species must exhibit near-stationary growth over much of their evolutionary history. We evaluate the conditions favoring zero population growth (ZPG) among 10 small-scale subsistence human populations and five wild chimpanzee groups according to four demographic scenarios: altered mean vital rates (i.e., fertility and mortality), vital rate stochasticity, vital rate covariance, and periodic catastrophes. Among most human populations, changing mean fertility or survivorship alone requires unprecedented alterations. Stochastic variance and covariance would similarly require major adjustment to achieve ZPG in most populations. Crashes could maintain ZPG in slow-growing populations but must be frequent and severe in fast-growing populations-more extreme than observed in the ethnographic record. A combination of vital rate alteration with catastrophes is the most realistic solution to the forager population paradox. ZPG in declining chimpanzees is more readily obtainable through reducing mortality and altering covariance. While some human populations may have hovered near ZPG under harsher conditions (e.g., violence or food shortage), modern
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