SignificanceDo human societies from around the world exhibit similarities in the way that they are structured and show commonalities in the ways that they have evolved? To address these long-standing questions, we constructed a database of historical and archaeological information from 30 regions around the world over the last 10,000 years. Our analyses revealed that characteristics, such as social scale, economy, features of governance, and information systems, show strong evolutionary relationships with each other and that complexity of a society across different world regions can be meaningfully measured using a single principal component of variation. Our findings highlight the power of the sciences and humanities working together to rigorously test hypotheses about general rules that may have shaped human history.

No abstract

Raw counts of archaeological sites, estimates of changing settlement size and summed radiocarbon probability distributions have all become popular ways to investigate long-term regional trends in human population. Nevertheless, these three archaeological proxies have rarely been compared. This paper therefore explores the strengths and weaknesses of different kinds of archaeological evidence for population patterns, as well as how they address related issues such as taphonomic loss, chronological uncertainty and uneven sampling. Our overall substantive goal is to reconstruct demographic fluctuations in central Italy from the Late Mesolithic to the fall of the Roman Empire (7500 BC-AD 500), and with this in mind, we bring to bear an unusually detailed and extensive dataset of published central Italian archaeological surveys, consisting of some 10,971 occupation phases at 7,383 different sites. The comparative results demonstrate reassuring consistency in the suggested demographic patterns, and where such patterns diverge across different proxies (e.g. Late Bronze Age/Iron Age) they often do so in useful ways that suggest changes in population structure such as site nucleation or dispersal.

We review and evaluate human adaptations during the last glacial-interglacial climatic transition in southwest Asia. Stable isotope data imply that climatic change was synchronous across the region within the limits of dating uncertainty. Changes in vegetation, as indicated from pollen and charcoal, mirror step-wise shifts between cold-dry and warm-wet climatic conditions, but with lag effects for woody vegetation in some upland and interior areas. Palaeoenvironmental data can be set against regional archaeological evidence for human occupancy and economy from the later Epipalaeolithic to the aceramic Neolithic. Demographic change is evaluated from summed radiocarbon date probability distributions, which indicating contrasting-and in some cases opposite-population trajectories in different regions. Abrupt warming transitions at ~14.5 and 11.7 ka BP may have acted as pacemakers for rapid cultural change in some areas, notably at the start of the Natufian and Pre-Pottery Neolithic cultures. However temporal synchroneity does not mean that climatic changes had the same environmental or societal consequences in different regions. During cold-dry time intervals, regions such as the Levant acted as refugia for plant and animal resources and human population. In areas where socio-ecological continuity was maintained through periods of adverse climate (e.g. Younger Dryas) human communities were able to respond rapidly to subsequent climatic improvement. By contrast, in areas where there was a break in settlement at these times (e.g. central Anatolia), populations were slower to react to the new opportunities provided by the interglacial world.

This synthesis paper offers a comparative perspective on how seven different Mediterranean regions, from Iberia and Morocco to the Levant, have been transformed by human and natural agencies during the past 10 millennia. It draws on a range of data sources: notably (1) archaeological site surveys ( n = 32,000) and 14C dates ( n = 12,000) as proxies for long-term population change, (2) pollen records as a proxy for past vegetation and land cover ( n = 253) and (3) proxies, such as stable isotopes, from lake, cave and marine records as indicators of hydro-climate ( n = 47). Where possible, these data sets have been made spatially and temporally congruent in order to examine relationships between them statistically and graphically. Data have been aggregated or averaged for each region/sub-region and put into 200-year time windows. Archaeo-demographic data show a clear increase at the start of Neolithic farming, followed by a series of regionally asynchronous fluctuations in population, prior to a pan-Mediterranean Roman settlement maximum. Pollen data indicate a late-Holocene decline in %Arboreal Pollen in those regions that were initially well wooded, but not in drier regions of the southern/eastern Mediterranean. Overall, the clearest palynological proxy for human land cover change is provided by the OJCV (tree crop) index. The cultivation of these trees in the eastern Mediterranean after 6500 cal. yr BP may have been an adaptive response to mid-Holocene climatic desiccation. These anthropogenic pollen indicators correlate more closely with trends in population than with regional hydro-climatic z scores, implying that they reflect primarily human activities. During the mid Holocene, most Mediterranean landscapes were transformed by a combination of climate and rural land use, but after ~3500 cal. yr BP, human actions became increasingly dominant in determining land cover. During the past 1500 years, the dominant landscape trajectory in the eastern Mediterranean was markedly different to that in the central/western Mediterranean.

This paper offers a comparative study of land use and demographic development in northern and southern Greece from the Neolithic to the Byzantine period. Results from summed probability densities (SPD) of archaeological radiocarbon dates and settlement numbers derived from archaeological site surveys are combined with results from cluster-based analysis of published pollen core assemblages to offer an integrated view of human pressure on the Greek landscape through time. We demonstrate that SPDs offer a useful approach to outline differences between regions and a useful complement to archaeological site surveys, evaluated here especially for the onset of the Neolithic and for the Final Neolithic (FN)/Early Bronze Age (EBA) transition. Pollen analysis highlight differences in vegetation between the two sub-regions, but also several parallel changes. The comparison of land cover dynamics between two sub-regions of Greece further demonstrates the significance of the bioclimatic conditions of core locations and that apparent oppositions between regions may in fact be two sides of the same coin in terms of socio-ecological trajectories. We also assess the balance between anthropogenic and climate-related impacts on vegetation and suggest that climatic variability was as an important factor for vegetation regrowth. Finally, our evidence suggests that the impact of humans on land cover is amplified from the Late Bronze Age (LBA) onwards as more extensive herding and agricultural practices are introduced.

Much attention has been placed on the drivers of vegetation change on the Iberian Peninsula. Whilst climate plays a key role in determining the species pools within different regions and exerts a strong influence on broad vegetation patterning, the role of humans, particularly during prehistory, is less clear. The aim of this paper is to assess the influence of prehistoric population change on shaping vegetation patterns in eastern Iberia and the Balearic Islands between the start of the Neolithic and the late Bronze Age. 3385 radiocarbon dates have been compiled across the study area to provide a palaeodemographic proxy (radiocarbon summed probability distributions: SPD). Modelled trends in palaeodemographics are compared with regional-scale vegetation patterns deduced from analysis of 30 fossil pollen sequences. The pollen sequences have been standardised with count data aggregated into contiguous 200-yr time windows from 11000 cal. yr BP to present. Samples have been classified using cluster analysis to determine the predominant regional land cover types through the Holocene. Regional human impact indices and diversity metrics have been derived for northeast and southeast Spain and the Balearic Islands. The SPDs show characteristic boom-and-bust cycles of population growth and collapse, but there is no clear synchronism between northeast and southeast Spain other than the rise of Neolithic farming. In northeast Iberia patterns 2 of demographic change are strongly linked to changes in vegetation diversity and human impact indicator groups. In the southeast increases in population throughout the Chalcolithic and early Bronze Age result in more open landscapes and increased vegetation diversity. The demographic maximum occurred early in the 3 rd millennium cal. BP on the Balearic Islands and is associated with highest levels of human impact indicator groups. The results demonstrate the importance of population change in shaping the abundance and diversity of taxa within broad climaticallydetermined biomes.

No abstract