Why so Low so Long? Constraints on Human Population Growth in Late Pleistocene Sahul

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Human populations in Sahul (Pleistocene Australia-New Guinea) probably numbered in the tens of thousands, two orders of magnitude below the 3-4 million estimated at time of European contact. They were also more patchily distributed than simple hypotheses grounded in an ideal free distribution model would lead one to expect. This situation persisted until the Middle Holocene, 40,000 years post-arrival, when sharp population growth and dispersal to previously uninhabited areas suddenly ensued. Factors potentially responsible for this history are identified and discussed.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24116