Multicentennial cycles in continental demography synchronous with solar activity and climate stability.

Human population dynamics and their drivers are not well understood, especially over the long term and on large scales. Here, we estimate demographic growth trajectories from 9 to 3 ka BP across the entire globe by employing summed probability distributions of radiocarbon dates. Our reconstruction reveals multicentennial growth cycles on all six inhabited continents, which exhibited matching dominant frequencies and phase relations.

The impact of farming on prehistoric culinary practices throughout Northern Europe.

To investigate changes in culinary practices associated with the arrival of farming, we analysed the organic residues of over 1,000 pottery vessels from hunter-gatherer-fisher and early agricultural sites across Northern Europe from the Lower Rhine Basin to the Northeastern Baltic. Here, pottery was widely used by hunter-gatherer-fishers prior to the introduction of domesticated animals and plants. Overall, there was surprising continuity in the way that hunter-gatherer-fishers and farmers used pottery.

The transmission of pottery technology among prehistoric European hunter-gatherers.

Human history has been shaped by global dispersals of technologies, although understanding of what enabled these processes is limited. Here, we explore the behavioural mechanisms that led to the emergence of pottery among hunter-gatherer communities in Europe during the mid-Holocene. Through radiocarbon dating, we propose this dispersal occurred at a far faster rate than previously thought.

Ancient Maltese genomes and the genetic geography of Neolithic Europe.

Archaeological consideration of maritime connectivity has ranged from a biogeographical perspective that considers the sea as a barrier to a view of seaways as ancient highways that facilitate exchange. Our results illustrate the former. We report three Late Neolithic human genomes from the Mediterranean island of Malta that are markedly enriched for runs of homozygosity, indicating inbreeding in their ancestry and an effective population size of only hundreds, a striking illustration of maritime isolation in this agricultural society.

Late Glacial and Early Holocene human demographic responses to climatic and environmental change in Atlantic Iberia.

Successive generations of hunter-gatherers of the Late Glacial and Early Holocene in Iberia had to contend with rapidly changing environments and climatic conditions. This constrained their economic resources and capacity for demographic growth. The Atlantic façade of Iberia was occupied throughout these times and witnessed very significant environmental transformations.

Palaeodemographic modelling supports a population bottleneck during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition in Iberia.

Demographic change lies at the core of debates on genetic inheritance and resilience to climate change of prehistoric hunter-gatherers. Here we analyze the radiocarbon record of Iberia to reconstruct long-term changes in population levels and test different models of demographic growth during the Last Glacial-Interglacial transition. Our best fitting demographic model is composed of three phases.