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Explaining population booms and busts in Mid-Holocene Europe.
Dániel Kondor1, James S Bennett2, Detlef Gronenborn3
1Complexity Science Hub, Vienna, Austria. kondor@csh.ac.at.
Scientific Reports
|June 8, 2023
Summary
Mid-Holocene European population dynamics show recurrent booms and busts. Agent-based models reveal that social dynamics, not climate, best explain these population fluctuations and settlement patterns.
Area of Science:
- Archaeology
- Computational Social Science
- Paleoecology
Background:
- Mid-Holocene European societies (ca. 7000–3000 BCE) exhibited cyclical population dynamics, marked by periods of rapid growth and decline in settlement density.
- These patterns are evident in radiocarbon (14C) date distributions and regional archaeological settlement data.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the drivers of Mid-Holocene European population dynamics.
- To test competing hypotheses of climate forcing versus social dynamics (inter-group conflict) using computational modeling.
Main Methods:
- Development and application of spatially-explicit agent-based models (ABMs).
- Translation of climate and social dynamics hypotheses into quantitative ABM scenarios.
- Comparison of model-generated population fluctuation patterns with empirical archaeological data.
Main Results:
- Climate variation alone could not replicate the observed periodicities and amplitudes of population booms and busts.
- ABM scenarios incorporating density-dependent social conflict successfully reproduced the quantitative features of observed population dynamics.
Conclusions:
- Social processes, particularly inter-group conflict, were a significant factor in shaping Mid-Holocene European population dynamics.
- Climate forcing is insufficient to explain the observed settlement and population fluctuations during this period.
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