Abstract
The signal of a relatively abrupt increase, in the immature proportion of skeleton is observed in cemeteries during the foraging-farming transition. This signal is interpreted as the signature of a major demographic shift in human history, now known as the Neolithic Demographic Transition (NDT). How can population growth be explained?’ Was population increase gradual or abrupt? Was it related to the stability in food provisioning due to building and maintaining storage facilities? Or was it just annual cultivation and harvesting under favorable climatic conditions that allowed the number of humans to increase? The volume presented here is divided into four parts. Part 1 concerns the demographic and economic aspects of the NDT. Part 2 focuses on settlement and village practices. The relatively rapid growth of human populations during the NDT radically transformed settlement behaviour. In this part, we consider the varied implications of the NDT for settlement and village practices at both regional and local or intra-village scales. Part 3 is concerned with community size and social organization. The growth of larger communities gave rise to unprecedented stresses within these expanding villages, which in turn stimulated the appearance of novel social practices and institutions. This part is concerned with the transformations of human social life that resulted from the NDT. Part 4 focuses on population growth and health. Can the signal of a return to homeostatic demographic equilibrium be detected, and what would have been its tempo during the NDT? Was the signal the same in the different geographical centres of agricultural innovation and expansion? Did the NDT produce a decline or an improvement in the living conditions of early farmers? The time has come to reflect upon the multiple consequences of that qualitative leap in human demographic history.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Bandy MS. 2005. New World settlement evidence for a two-stage Neolithic Demographic Transition. Current Anthropology 46(S):S109–S115.
Bandy M, S Naji and JP Bocquet-Appel. 2007. Did the eastern agricultural complex produce a Neolithic Demographic Transition? Submitted.
Bar-Yosef O. 2001. From sedentary foragers to village hierarchies: The emergence of social institutions. The Origin of Human Social Institutions. G. Runciman. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Proceedings of the British Academy, 110: 1–38.
Bar-Yosef O. 2002. Natufian: A complex society of foragers. In Beyond Foraging and Collecting, edited by B Fitzhugh and J Habu, pp. 91–149. Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, New-York.
Bar-Yosef O and A Belfer-Cohen. 1989. The origins of sedentism and farming communities in the Levant. Journal of World Prehistory 40(3):447–498.
Bar-Yosef O and A Belfer-Cohen. 1991. From sedentary Hunter-Gatherers to Territorial Farmers in the Levant. In Between Bands and States, Center for Archaeological Investigations, occassional Paper No. 9, edited by S Gregg, pp. 181–202. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University.
Bar-Yosef O and A Belfer-Cohen. 2002. Facing environmental crisis. Societal and cultural changes at the transition from the Younger Dryas to the Holocene in the Levant. In The Dawn of Farming in the Near East, edited by RTJ Cappers and S Bottema, pp. 55–66. ex oriente, Berlin.
Belfer-Cohen A and O Bar-Yosef. 2000. Early Sedentism in the Near East: A Bumpy Road to Village Life. In Life in Neolithic Farming Communities: Social Organization, Identity, and Differentiation, edited by I Kuijt, pp. 19–37. New York: Plenum Publication.
Belfer-Cohen A, L Schepartz and B Arensburg. 1991. New biological data for the Natufian Populations in Israel. In The Natufian Culture in the Levant, edited by O Bar-Yosef and FR Valla, pp. 411–424. International Monographs in Prehistory, Ann Arbor.
Bellwood P. 2005. First Farmers. The Origins of Agricultural Societies. Blackwell Publ. Malden: USA.
Binford LR. 2001. Constructing Frames of Reference. University of California Press: Berkeley.
Binford LR. 2007. Bands as characteristic of “Mobile Hunter-Gatherers” may exist only in the History of Anthropology. In Archaeology and Ethnoarchaeology of Mobility, edited by F Seller, R Greaves and PL Yu (eds.). University Press of Florida: Gainesville.
Birdsell JB. 1968. Some predictions for the Pleistocene based on equilibrium systems among recent hunter-gatherers. In Man the Hunte. Edited by RB Lee and I DeVore (eds.), pp. 229–240. Aldine Publishing Company: Chicago.
Birdsell JB. 1985. Biological Dimensions of Small, Human Founding Populations. Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience, edited by BR Finney and EM Jones (eds.), pp. 110–119. University of California Press: Berkeley.
Bocquet-Appel JP. 2002. Paleoanthropological traces of Neolithic demographic transition. Current Anthropology 43: 638–650.
Bocquet-Appel JP and S Naji. 2006. Testing the Hypothesis of a Worldwide Neolithic Demographic Transition. Corroboration from American Cemeteries (with comments). Current Anthropology 47(2): 341–365.
Bocquet-Appel JP, PY Demars, L Noiret and D Dobrowsky. 2005. Estimates of Upper Palaeolithic meta-population size in Europe from archaeological data. Journal of Archaeological Science 32:1656–1668.
Bocquet-Appel JP y M Paz de Miguel Ibanez. 2002. Demografia de la difusion neolitica en Europe y los datos paleoantropologicos. Saguntum 5:23–44.
Caldwell JC and BK Caldwell. 2003. Pretransitional population control and equilibrium. Population Studies 57(2):199–215.
Caldwell C, P Caldwell and B Caldwell. 1986. Anthropology and Demography: The mutual reinforcement of speculation and research. Current Anthropology 28(1):25–43.
Cohen MN. 1977. The Food Crisis in Prehistory. Yale University Press: New-Haven CN.
Davis SJM. 1983. The age profile of gazelles predated by ancient man in Israel: Possible evidence for a shift from seasonality to sedentism in the Natufian. Paléorient 9:55–62.
Fuller DQ, Harvey E and L Qin. 2007. Presumed domestication? Evidence for wild rice cultivation and domestication in the fifth millennium BC of the Lower Yangtze region. Antiquity 81:316–331.
Gordon CC and JE Buikstra. 1981. Soil PH, Bone preservation and sampling bias at mortuary sites, American Antiquity 46(3):566–571.
Guy H, Cl Masset and CA Baud. 1997. Infant Taphonomy. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 7(3):221–229.
Hesse, B. 1979. Rodent remains and sedentism in the Neolithic: Evidence from Tepe Ganj Dareh, Western Iran. Journal of Mammalogy 60(4):856–857.
Hassan F. 1973. On methods of Population growth during the Neolithic. Current Anthropology 14:535–542.
Hietala HJ and DE Stevens. 1977. Spatial Analysis: Multiple procedures in pattern recognition studies. American Antiquity 42:539–559.
Hitchcock, RK. 1987. Sedentism and site structure: Organizational changes in Kalahari Basarwa residential locations. In Method and Theory for Activity Area Research, edited by S Kent, pp. 374–423. Columbia University Press, New York.
Howell NL. 1980. Demographic behavior of hunter-gatherers: Evidence for density-dependent population control. In Demographic Behavior 45, edited by T Burch (ed.). Conn.: Westview.
Johansson SR and S Horowitz. 1986. Estimating mortality in skeletal populations: Influence of the growth rate on the interpretation of levels and trends during the transition to agriculture. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 71:233–250.
Kent, S. (ed.). 1989. Farmers as Hunters: The Implications of Sedentism. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Kramer C. 1982. Village Ethnoarchaeology. New York, Academic Press.
Kramer C. 1983. Spatial organization in contemporary southwest Asian villages. The Hilly Flanks and Beyond. TC Young, Jr., PEL Smith and P Mortensen. Chicago, The Oriental Institute: 347–368.
Kramer KL and JL Boone. 2002. “Why intensive agriculturalists have higher fertility: a household energy budget approach.” Current Anthropology 43(3): 511–517.
Kuijt I. (ed.). 2000. Life in Neolithic Farming Communities: Social Organization, Identity, and Differentiation. Fundamental Issues in Archaeology. New York, Plenum Press.
Lee RB. 1979. The !Kung San: men, women and work in a foraging society. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Lieberman DE. 1993. The rise and fall of seasonal mobility among Hunter-Gatherers: The case of the Southern Levant. Current Anthropology 34: 599–632.
Lieberman DE and JJ Shea. 1994. Behavioural differences between archaic and modern humans in the Levantine Mousterian. American Anthropologist 96:300–332.
Lozoff B and G Brittenham. 1979. Infant care: Cache or carry. The Journal of Pediatrics 95(3):478–483.
MacNeish RS. (ed.). 1967–72. The Prehistory of the Tehuacán Valley, vols. 1–5. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Matson RG. 1985. The relationship between sedentism and status inequalities among hunters and gatherers. In Status, Structure and Stratification: Current Archaeological Reconstructions, pp. 245–252. University of Calgary.
McCaa R. 2002. Paleodemography of the Americas. From ancient times to colonialism and beyond, In The Backbone of history, edited by RH Steckel and JC Rose (eds.), pp. 94–124. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Marlowe FW. 2005. Hunter-Gatherers and Human Evolution. Evolutionary Anthropology 14:54–67.
Newell RR and TS Constandse-Westermann. 1986. Testing an ethnographic analogue of Mesolithic social structure and the archaeological resolution of Mesolithic ethnic groups and breeding populations. Proceedings of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, Series B, 89(3):243–310
Ogilvie MA. 2006. Changing mobility roles at the advent of agriculture. In Archaeology and Ethnoarchaeology of Mobility, edited by F Sellet, R Greaves and PL Yu (eds.), pp. 155–183. University Press of Florida: Gainsville.
Reed CA. 1977. Origins of Agriculture. World Anthropology series. The Hague and Paris: Mouton.
Sattenspiel, L and H Harpending. 1983. Stable Populations and Skeletal Age. American Antiquity 48:489–498.
Sellet F, R Greaves and PL Yu. 2006. Archaeology and Ethnoarchaeology of mobility. University Press of Florida: Gainesville.
Sussman RW. 1972. Child transport, family size, and increase in Human population during the Neolithic. Current Anthropology 13(2):258–259.
Tangri, D and G Wyncoll. 1989. Of mice and men: Is the presence of commensal animals in archaeological sites a positive correlate of sedentism? Paleorient 15(2):85–94.
Tchernov E. 1991. On mice and men: Biological markers for long-term sedentism: A reply. Paléorient 17(1):153–160.
Tchernov, E. 1993. The impact of sedentism on animal exploitation in the Southern Levant. In Archaeozoology of the Near East: Proceedings of the first international symposium on the archaeozoology of southwestern Asia and adjacent areas, edited by H Buitenhuis and AT Clason, pp. 10–26. Universal Book Services/Dr. W. Backhuys, Leiden.
Valleggia CR and Ellison PT. 2004. Lactational amenorrhoea in well-nourished Toba women of Formosa, Argentina. Journal of Biosocial Science 36:573–595.
Weiss E, ME Kislev and A Hartmann. 2006. Autonomous Cultivation Before Domestication. Science 312(5780):1608–1610.
Willcox, G. 2005. The distribution, natural habitats and availability of wild cereals in relation to their domestication in the Near East: Multiple events, multiple centres. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 14:534–541.
Wobst HM. 1974. Boundary conditions for Palaeolithic social systems: A simulation approach. American Antiquity 39:147–178.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2008 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bocquet-Appel, JP., Bar-Yosef, O. (2008). Prehistoric Demography in a Time of Globalization. In: Bocquet-Appel, JP., Bar-Yosef, O. (eds) The Neolithic Demographic Transition and its Consequences. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8539-0_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8539-0_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-8538-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-4020-8539-0
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawSocial Sciences (R0)