The complex life course of mobility: Quantitative description of 300,000 residential moves in 1850–1950 Netherlands

Abstract

Mobility is a major mechanism of human adaptation, both inthe deep past and in the present. Decades of research in the human evolutionary sciences have elucidated how much, how, and when individuals and groups move in response to their ecology. Prior research has focused on small-scale subsistence societies, often in marginal environments and yielding small samples. But adaptive movement is commonplace across human societies, providing an opportunity to study human mobility more broadly. We provide a detailed, life-course structured demonstration, describing the residential mobility system of a historical population living between 1850-1950 in the industrialising Netherlands. We focus on how moves are patterned over the lifespan, attending to individual variation and stratifying our analyses by gender. We conclude that this population was not stationary: the median total moves in a lifetime were 10, with a wide range of variation and an uneven distribution over the life course. Mobility peaks in early adulthood (age 20–30) in this population, and this peak is consistent in all the studied cohorts, and both genders. Mobile populations in sedentary settlements provide a productive avenue for research on adaptive mobility and its relationship to human life history, and historical databases are useful for addressing evolutionarily-motivated questions.