ArticleScientific reports2023
Explaining population booms and busts in Mid-Holocene Europe.
Article in Scientific reports, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Late Neolithic 'decline' is a grave question.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Social dynamics signals in archaeological time-series: How cultural transmission and production biases shape assemblage diversity.PloS one · 2026Article
- Modeling the European Neolithic expansion suggests predominant within-group mating and limited cultural transmission.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Ancient forests help document the long-term impacts of climate change.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Demographic interactions between the last hunter-gatherers and the first farmers.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Cliopatria - A geospatial database of world-wide political entities from 3400BCE to 2024CE.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Spatiotemporal distribution of the North American Indigenous population prior to European contact.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Multicentennial cycles in continental demography synchronous with solar activity and climate stability.Nature communications · 2024Article
- 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
- Modern archaeological research and the importance of information management.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- The long-term expansion and recession of human populations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- A model of long-term population growth with an application to Central West Argentina.PloS one · 2024Article
- The Demographic-Wealth model for cliodynamics.PloS one · 2024Article
- Explaining population booms and busts in Mid-Holocene Europe.Scientific reports · 2023Article
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6 authors.
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Abstract
Archaeological evidence suggests that the population dynamics of Mid-Holocene (Late Mesolithic to Initial Bronze Age, ca. 7000-3000 BCE) Europe are characterized by recurrent booms and busts of regional settlement and occupation density. These boom-bust patterns are documented in the temporal distribution of 14C dates and in archaeological settlement data from regional studies. We test two competing hypotheses attempting to explain these dynamics: climate forcing and social dynamics leading to inter-group conflict. Using the framework of spatially-explicit agent-based models, we translated these hypotheses into a suite of explicit computational models, derived quantitative predictions for population fluctuations, and compared these predictions to data. We demonstrate that climate variation during the European Mid-Holocene is unable to explain the quantitative features (average periodicities and amplitudes) of observed boom-bust dynamics. In contrast, scenarios with social dynamics encompassing density-dependent conflict produce population patterns with time scales and amplitudes similar to those observed in the data. These results suggest that social processes, including violent conflict, played a crucial role in the shaping of population dynamics of European Mid-Holocene societies.
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