Holocene climate change and human population growth rates

Summary

Statistical analysis of large databases of radiocarbon dates enables research on the processes regulating human population growth rates. Recent analysis of summed probability distributions of dates from the entire states of Colorado and Wyoming has found that both states had similar long-term growth rates of .04% for most of the Holocene. This growth rate was the same for Australia, Europe, and North America throughout much of the Holocene. Similar growth rates between different environments and non-agricultural/agricultural societies suggests that long-term population growth was regulated by non-local processes such as global climate or endogenous biological mechanisms. On the other hand, short-term deviations from this long-term growth rate were regionally variable. This suggests that long-term and short-term population growth rates were regulated by different factors at different spatial scales. We investigate this apparent scalar variability by comparing the different millennial-scale trends in the summed probability distributions with regional and global paleonvironmental data.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Understanding the Nature and Timing of Human Responses to Environmental Change

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