• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage
• Publications close
• Research data close
• Research software close
• Other research products close
• Academy of Finland close
• Human population dynamics in Africa... close
• FI close

Hunter-gatherer population growth rate estimates extracted from archaeological proxies and ethnographic data show remarkable differences, as archaeological estimates are orders of magnitude smaller than ethnographic and historical estimates. This could imply that prehistoric hunter-gatherers were demographically different from recent hunter-gatherers. However, we show that the resolution of archaeological human population proxies is not sufficiently high to detect actual population dynamics and growth rates that can be observed in the historical and ethnographic data. We argue that archaeological and ethnographic population growth rates measure different things; therefore, they are not directly comparable. While ethnographic growth rate estimates of hunter-gatherer populations are directly linked to underlying demographic parameters, archaeological estimates track changes in the long-term mean population size, which reflects changes in the environmental productivity that provide the ultimate constraint for forager population growth. We further argue that because of this constraining effect, hunter-gatherer populations cannot exhibit long-term growth independently of increasing environmental productivity. This article is part of the theme issue 'Cross-disciplinary approaches to prehistoric demography'. Peer reviewed

This submission contains data and R-code that enable to reproduce the data manipulations and analyses in the paper “Why are population growth rate estimates of past and present hunter-gatherers so different?” by Miikka Tallavaara and Erlend Kirkeng Jørgensen (Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society B). Please, cite the paper and this Zenodo repository if you use the files included in this Zenodo record in your work. The submission includes a html-file titled “Why are population growth rate estimates of past and present hunter-gatherers so different? - Data analyses” (TJ2020.html) that contains R-code and instructions and comments for running the code (open this file in your browser). In addition, the submission includes Rdata-file (dataTJ2020.Rdata) containing all the data that are not created within the code and pure R-code (TJ2020.R).