Holocene Fluctuations in Human Population Demonstrate Repeated Links to Food Production and Climate

Overview

Journal Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A

Specialty Science

Date 2017 Nov 22

PMID 29158411

Citations 40

Authors

Andrew Bevan

Sue Colledge

Dorian Fuller

Ralph Fyfe

Stephen Shennan

Chris Stevens

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

We consider the long-term relationship between human demography, food production, and Holocene climate via an archaeological radiocarbon date series of unprecedented sampling density and detail. There is striking consistency in the inferred human population dynamics across different regions of Britain and Ireland during the middle and later Holocene. Major cross-regional population downturns in population coincide with episodes of more abrupt change in North Atlantic climate and witness societal responses in food procurement as visible in directly dated plants and animals, often with moves toward hardier cereals, increased pastoralism, and/or gathered resources. For the Neolithic, this evidence questions existing models of wholly endogenous demographic boom-bust. For the wider Holocene, it demonstrates that climate-related disruptions have been quasi-periodic drivers of societal and subsistence change.

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