ArticleNature communications2022
Changes in limiting factors for forager population dynamics in Europe across the last glacial-interglacial transition.
Article in Nature communications, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Life on the edge: Mesolithic population size and viability on Malta.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Understanding the spread of agriculture in the Western Mediterranean (6th-3rd millennia BC) with Machine Learning tools.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Large scale and regional demographic responses to climatic changes in Europe during the Final Palaeolithic.PloS one · 2025Article
- Article
- Human response to the Younger Dryas along the southern North Sea basin, Northwest Europe.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- A macroevolutionary analysis of European Late Upper Palaeolithic stone tool shape using a Bayesian phylodynamic framework.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Legacies of millennial-scale climate oscillations in contemporary biodiversity in eastern North America.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- The Neanderthal niche space of Western Eurasia 145 ka to 30 ka ago.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- A quantitative analysis of Final Palaeolithic/earliest Mesolithic cultural taxonomy and evolution in Europe.PloS one · 2024Article
- The late-Quaternary megafauna extinctions: Patterns, causes, ecological consequences and implications for ecosystem management in the Anthropocene.Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2024Review
- Catastrophic climate change and the collapse of human societies.National science review · 2023Article
- Climate-driven habitat shifts of high-ranked prey species structure Late Upper Paleolithic hunting.Scientific reports · 2023Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
Population dynamics set the framework for human genetic and cultural evolution. For foragers, demographic and environmental changes correlate strongly, although the causal relations between different environmental variables and human responses through time and space likely varied. Building on the notion of limiting factors, namely that at any one time, the scarcest resource caps population size, we present a statistical approach to identify the dominant climatic constraints for hunter-gatherer population densities and then hindcast their changing dynamics in Europe for the period between 21,000 to 8000 years ago. Limiting factors shifted from temperature-related variables (effective temperature) during the Pleistocene to a regional mosaic of limiting factors in the Holocene dominated by temperature seasonality and annual precipitation. This spatiotemporal variation suggests that hunter-gatherers needed to overcome very different adaptive challenges in different parts of Europe and that these challenges varied over time. The signatures of these changing adaptations may be visible archaeologically. In addition, the spatial disaggregation of limiting factors from the Pleistocene to the Holocene coincided with and may partly explain the diversification of the cultural geography at this time.
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