Why are population growth rate estimates of past and present hunter-gatherers so different?

ABSTRACT: Hunter-gatherer population growth rate estimates extracted from archaeological proxies and ethnographic data show remarkable differences, as archaeological estimates are orders of magnitude smaller than ethnographic and historical estimates. This could imply that prehistoric hunter-gatherers were demographically different from recent hunter-gatherers. However, we show that the resolution of archaeological human population proxies is not sufficiently high to detect actual population dynamics and growth rates that can be observed in the historical and ethnographic data. We argue that archaeological and ethnographic population growth rates measure different things; therefore, they are not directly comparable. While ethnographic growth rate estimates of hunter-gatherer populations are directly

SUBMITTER: Tallavaara M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7741106 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature