Population trends and the transition to agriculture: Global processes as seen from North America.

ABSTRACT: Agriculture-specifically an intensification of the production of readily stored food and its distribution-has supported an increase in the global human population throughout the Holocene. Today, with greatly accelerated of growth during recent centuries, we have reached about 8 billion people. Human skeletal and archaeobotanical remains clarify what occurred over several millennia of profound societal and population change in small-scale societies once distributed across the North American midcontinent. Stepwise, not gradual, changes in the move toward an agriculturally based life, as indicated by plant remains, left a demographic signal reflecting age-independent ([Formula: see text]) mortality as estimated from skeletons. Designated the age-independent component of the Siler model, it is

SUBMITTER: Milner GR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9942849 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature