Hindcasting global population densities reveals forces enabling the origin of agriculture

Kavanagh, Patrick H.; Vilela, Bruno; Haynie, Hannah J.; Tuff, Ty; Lima‐Ribeiro, Matheus S.; Gray, Russell D.; Botero, Carlos A.; Gavin, Michael C.

doi:10.1038/s41562-018-0358-8

Cited by 47 publications

(39 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Several other environmental and sociocultural variables also shape potential population densities. For example, population densities may increase in coastal regions, given greater access to marine resources; in topographically complex areas due to access to a range of nearby ecosystems and restrictions on available level surfaces for settlement [41,42]; and in areas of higher river density, where rivers provide services such as food and water that directly affect the establishment of human groups [7]. In addition, less mobile groups and those with established land ownership norms tend to have higher population densities [41,43,44].…”

Section: (A) Factors Contributing To Language Diversity Patternsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Drivers of geographical patterns of North American language diversity

et al. 2019

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Although many hypotheses have been proposed to explain why humans speak so many languages and why languages are unevenly distributed across the globe, the factors that shape geographical patterns of cultural and linguistic diversity remain poorly understood. Prior research has tended to focus on identifying universal predictors of language diversity, without accounting for how local factors and multiple predictors interact. Here, we use a unique combination of path analysis, mechanistic simulation modelling, and geographically weighted regression to investigate the broadly described, but poorly understood, spatial pattern of language diversity in North America. We show that the ecological drivers of language diversity are not universal or entirely direct. The strongest associations imply a role for previously developed hypothesized drivers such as population density, resource diversity, and carrying capacity with group size limits. The predictive power of this web of factors varies over space from regions where our model predicts approximately 86% of the variation in diversity, to areas where less than 40% is explained.

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Section: (A) Factors Contributing To Language Diversity Patternsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Drivers of geographical patterns of North American language diversity

et al. 2019

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“…The dynamic changes in a population's size and density are ultimately the summary outcome of decisions related to its life history that are cued, and in part determined, by climate and the environment [3,21,22]. In fact, the mere variability and amplitude of different ecological contexts in general, and their tendency to increase subsistence failure in particular, has generated a counter-proposal against the role of demography and its causal role in episodes of cultural change.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Demographic estimates from the Palaeolithic–Mesolithic boundary in Scandinavia: comparative benchmarks and novel insights

Lundström

Peters²,

Riede

2020

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Prehistoric demography has recently risen to prominence as a potentially explanatory variable for episodes of cultural change as documented in the archaeological and ethnographic record. While this has resulted in a veritable boom in methodological developments seeking to address temporal changes in the relative size of prehistoric populations, little work has focused on the manner in which population dynamics manifests across a spatial dimension. Most recently, the so-called Cologne Protocol has led the way in this endeavour. However, strict requirements of raw-material exchange data as analytical inputs have prevented further applications of the protocol to regions outside of continental Europe. We apply an adjusted approach of the protocol that makes it transferable to cases in other parts of the world, while demonstrating its use by providing comparative benchmarks of previous research on the Late Glacial Final Palaeolithic of southern Scandinavia, and novel insights from the early Holocene pioneer colonization of coastal Norway. We demonstrate again that population size and densities remained fairly low throughout the Late Glacial, and well into the early Holocene. We suggest that such low population densities have played a significant role in shaping what may have been episodes of cultural loss, as well as potentially longer periods of only relatively minor degrees of cultural change. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Cross-disciplinary approaches to prehistoric demography’.

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“…As expected from the fact that most of the world had some level of exposure to agriculture by the early 1900s, our proxies for contemporary ecological opportunities (i.e., local richness of wild plants and animals) are correlated with farming propensity. Specifically, we find a stronger reliance on farming in richer environments, suggesting that the adoption of farming is more strongly favoured by opportunity (i.e., environments that can potentially sustain a greater diversity of domesticated plants and animals) than food insecurity, a pattern that has also been shown to be the case for the timing and locations of agricultural origins (Kavanagh et al, 2018).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 60%

Cultural transmission and ecological opportunity jointly shaped global patterns of reliance on agriculture

et al. 2020

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The evolution of agriculture improved food security and enabled significant increases in the size and complexity of human groups. Despite these positive effects, some societies never adopted these practices, became only partially reliant on them, or even reverted to foraging after temporarily adopting them. Given the critical importance of climate and biotic interactions for modern agriculture, it seems likely that ecological conditions could have played a major role in determining the degree to which different societies adopted farming. However, this seemingly simple proposition has been surprisingly difficult to prove and is currently controversial. Here, we investigate how recent agricultural practices relate both to contemporary ecological opportunities and the suitability of local environments for the first species domesticated by humans. Leveraging a globally distributed dataset on 1,291 traditional societies, we show that after accounting for the effects of cultural transmission and more current ecological opportunities, levels of reliance on farming continue to be predicted by the opportunities local ecologies provided to the first human domesticates even after centuries of cultural evolution. Based on the details of our models, we conclude that ecology likely helped shape the geography of agriculture by biasing both human movement and the human-assisted dispersal of domesticates.

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Hindcasting global population densities reveals forces enabling the origin of agriculture

Cited by 47 publications

References 37 publications

Drivers of geographical patterns of North American language diversity

Drivers of geographical patterns of North American language diversity

Demographic estimates from the Palaeolithic–Mesolithic boundary in Scandinavia: comparative benchmarks and novel insights

Cultural transmission and ecological opportunity jointly shaped global patterns of reliance on agriculture

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