Explaining population booms and busts in Mid-Holocene Europe.

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

SUBMITTER: Kondor D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10250413 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature