Demographic uniformitarianism: the theoretical basis of prehistoric demographic research and its cross-disciplinary challenges

French, Jennifer C.

doi:10.1098/rstb.2019.0720

Cited by 20 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 81 publications

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“…The oscillations could even increase in range, resulting in extinction. Moreover, demographic studies of present-day forager groups showed that they were expanding at very fast rates, incompatible with evidence that over the long-term, hunter-gatherer populations were at very low levels, the socalled 'forager population paradox', discussed here by French & Chamberlain [38] and Tallavaara & Jørgensen [33]. The former also draw attention to another paradox in archaeological demography.…”

Section: Populations In Fluxmentioning

confidence: 56%

Archaeology, demography and life history theory together can help us explain past and present population patterns

Shennan

Sear

2020

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Population matters. Demographic patterns are both a cause and a consequence of human behaviour in other important domains, such as subsistence, cooperation, politics and culture. Demographers interested in contemporary and recent historical populations have rich data at their fingertips; the importance of demography means many interested parties have gathered demographic data, much of which is now readily available for all to explore. Those interested in the demography of the distant past are not so fortunate, given the lack of written records. Nevertheless, the emergence in recent years of a new interest in the demography of ancient populations has seen the development of a range of new methods for piecing together archaeological, skeletal and DNA evidence to reconstruct past population patterns. These efforts have found evidence in support of the view that the relatively low long-term population growth rates of prehistoric human populations, albeit ultimately conditioned by carrying capacities, may have been owing to ‘boom–bust’ cycles at the regional level; rapid population growth, followed by population decline. In fact, this archaeological research may have come to the same conclusion as some contemporary demographers: that demography can be remarkably hard to predict, at least in the short term. It also fits with evidence from biology that primates, and particularly humans, may be adapted to environmental variability, leading to associated demographic stochasticity. This evidence of the fluctuating nature of human demographic patterns may be of considerable significance in understanding our species' evolution, and of understanding what our species future demographic trajectories might be. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Cross-disciplinary approaches to prehistoric demography’.

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Section: Populations In Fluxmentioning

confidence: 56%

Archaeology, demography and life history theory together can help us explain past and present population patterns

Shennan

Sear

2020

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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“…observed in data (8,11). As such, uniformitarian assumptions of ecological and demographic equivalence in the past and present can be considered uniformitarian principles (25,26).…”

Section: Modeling Ethnographic Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Reconstructing the biogeography of a hunter-gatherer planet using machine-learning

Hamilton¹,

Walker

Buchanan

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Estimating the human abundance of the pre-agricultural, pre-urban, and pre-industrial planet is important to setting a baseline prediction for the density, diversity, and distribution of the human species if all energy requirements were foraged from wild populations of plants and animals, and all material requirements were met by locally available raw materials. Here we ask what the biogeography and demography of a hunter-gatherer planet would look like if populated by ethnographic foraging societies. Given ethnographic societies likely include some of the largest, densest, and most complex foraging societies to have existed, global inferences drawn from this sample can be considered maximum demographic estimates. To do this we trained an extreme gradient boosting algorithm (XGBoost) to learn ethnographic hunter-gatherer population densities from a large matrix of climatic, environmental, and geographic data and used the results to reconstruct the biogeography of a hunter-gatherer planet. We find the total estimated human abundance to be 6.1 (4.1-8.1) million with an ethnolinguistic diversity of about 8,200 (5,500-10,800) populations. The most common foraging lifestyles were coastal tropical foragers. Major model predictors included temperature and precipitation variables and so the global abundance and diversity of the human species in colder, drier periods of earth history was likely much less.

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“…R. Soc. B 376: 20190707 foundations-the assumption that both demographic processes and biological markers for inferring age and sex are universal across human populations and through time [58,59].…”

Section: (C) Osteological Proxies (Skeletal Palaeodemography)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A good case in point is the 'forager population paradox' [76]; the differences in population growth rate estimates between those recorded among recent hunter-gatherers and those estimated for prehistoric huntergatherers based on back-projections of known global population sizes. One possible solution to this paradox is that prehistoric and recent hunter-gatherers are demographically different (although as French & Chamberlain [59] show, this interpretation violates the principle of demographic uniformitarianism that underlies all palaeodemographic research). A more persuasive solution, as presented by Tallavaara & Jørgensen [42] in this volume, relates to the differences in temporal scale inherent in the data on population growth rate(s) of past and present hunter-gatherers.…”

Section: Looking Forward: Grand Challenges For Palaeodemographymentioning

confidence: 99%

A manifesto for palaeodemography in the twenty-first century

French

Riris

Pablo

et al. 2020

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Demographic uniformitarianism: the theoretical basis of prehistoric demographic research and its cross-disciplinary challenges

Cited by 20 publications

References 81 publications

Archaeology, demography and life history theory together can help us explain past and present population patterns

Archaeology, demography and life history theory together can help us explain past and present population patterns

Reconstructing the biogeography of a hunter-gatherer planet using machine-learning

A manifesto for palaeodemography in the twenty-first century

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