ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Climate change-induced population pressure drives high rates of lethal violence in the Prehispanic central Andes.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 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
8 citing papers in PubMed, 32 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- Towards understanding human-environment feedback loops: the Atacama Desert case.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Collective action problems led to the cultural transformation of Sāmoa 800 years ago.PloS one · 2024Article
- Bioarchaeology and evidence of violence from a precolonial later stone age communal burial in South Africa.PloS one · 2024Article
- Violence trends in the ancient Middle East between 12,000 and 400 BCE.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
- Climate-driven habitat shifts of high-ranked prey species structure Late Upper Paleolithic hunting.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- 1000 years of population, warfare, and climate change in pre-Columbian societies of the Central Andes.PloS one · 2023Article
- Decline in seasonal predictability potentially destabilized Classic Maya societies.Communications earth & environment · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 4 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Understanding the influence of climate change and population pressure on human conflict remains a critically important topic in the social sciences. Long-term records that evaluate these dynamics across multiple centuries and outside the range of modern climatic variation are especially capable of elucidating the relative effect of—and the interaction between—climate and demography. This is crucial given that climate change may structure population growth and carrying capacity, while both climate and population influence per capita resource availability. This study couples paleoclimatic and demographic data with osteological evaluations of lethal trauma from 149 directly accelerator mass spectrometry 14C-dated individuals from the Nasca highland region of Peru. Multiple local and supraregional precipitation proxies are combined with a summed probability distribution of 149 14C dates to estimate population dynamics during a 700-y study window. Counter to previous findings, our analysis reveals a precipitous increase in violent deaths associated with a period of productive and stable climate, but volatile population dynamics. We conclude that favorable local climate conditions fostered population growth that put pressure on the marginal and highly circumscribed resource base, resulting in violent resource competition that manifested in over 450 y of internecine warfare. These findings help support a general theory of intergroup violence, indicating that relative resource scarcity—whether driven by reduced resource abundance or increased competition—can lead to violence in subsistence societies when the outcome is lower per capita resource availability.
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