The Demographic Impact of the Agricultural System in Human History

Bocquet-Appel discusses the signal of a major demographic shift during the transition from the forager to the farming system, which has been detected in paleoanthropological cemetery data. This signal is interpreted as having been produced by the Neolithic demographic transition (NDT). The shift from a foraging to a producer economy coincided with an unprecedented increase in the amount of archaeological data in the Levant. This increase was interpreted for a long time in terms of demographic growth. The signature of the NDT was detected in the paleoanthropological data of cemeteries, but it is not directly visible to archaeologists unless they use an archaeometric procedure that combines the variation in a paleodemographic indicator, represented by the proportion of the immature skeletons in a cemetery, with a specific chronological frame, in relative chronology. This signature represents an average pattern. It is characterized by a noticeable increase in the proportion of immature skeletons, from 22% to 28%, during the forager/farmer transition. Also noticeable is the weak pre-NDT depression, where the proportion of immature individuals decreases, which suggests a population experiencing hardship.