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Boldsen JL, Milner GR, Ousley SD. Paleodemography: From archaeology and skeletal age estimation to life in the past. AMERICAN JOURNAL OF BIOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 2022; 178 Suppl 74:115-150. [PMID: 36787786 DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.24462] [Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/20/2021] [Revised: 11/09/2021] [Accepted: 11/22/2021] [Indexed: 12/14/2022]
Abstract
Much of paleodemography, an interdisciplinary field with strong ties to archaeology, among other disciplines, is oriented toward clarifying the life experiences of past people and why they changed over time. We focus on how human skeletons contribute to our understanding of preindustrial demographic regimes, including when changes took place that led to the world as we know it today. Problems with existing paleodemographic practices are highlighted, as are promising directions for future work. The latter requires both better age estimates and innovative methods to handle data appropriately. Age-at-death estimates for adult skeletons are a particular problem, especially for adults over 50 years that undoubtedly are mistakenly underrepresented in published studies of archaeological skeletons. Better age estimates for the entirety of the lifespan are essential to generate realistic distributions of age at death. There are currently encouraging signs that after about a half-century of intensive, and sometimes contentious, research, paleodemography is poised to contribute much to understandings of evolutionary processes, the structure of past populations, and human-disease interaction, among other topics.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jesper L Boldsen
- ADBOU, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, Odense M, Denmark
| | - George R Milner
- Department of Anthropology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA
| | - Stephen D Ousley
- Department of Anthropology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee, USA
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Turchin P, Hoyer D, Korotayev A, Kradin N, Nefedov S, Feinman G, Levine J, Reddish J, Cioni E, Thorpe C, Bennett JS, Francois P, Whitehouse H. Rise of the war machines: Charting the evolution of military technologies from the Neolithic to the Industrial Revolution. PLoS One 2021; 16:e0258161. [PMID: 34669706 PMCID: PMC8528290 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0258161] [Citation(s) in RCA: 7] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/28/2021] [Accepted: 08/18/2021] [Indexed: 11/18/2022] Open
Abstract
What have been the causes and consequences of technological evolution in world history? In particular, what propels innovation and diffusion of military technologies, details of which are comparatively well preserved and which are often seen as drivers of broad socio-cultural processes? Here we analyze the evolution of key military technologies in a sample of pre-industrial societies world-wide covering almost 10,000 years of history using Seshat: Global History Databank. We empirically test previously speculative theories that proposed world population size, connectivity between geographical areas of innovation and adoption, and critical enabling technological advances, such as iron metallurgy and horse riding, as central drivers of military technological evolution. We find that all of these factors are strong predictors of change in military technology, whereas state-level factors such as polity population, territorial size, or governance sophistication play no major role. We discuss how our approach can be extended to explore technological change more generally, and how our results carry important ramifications for understanding major drivers of evolution of social complexity.
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Affiliation(s)
- Peter Turchin
- Complexity Science Hub, Vienna, Austria
- University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, United States of America
- University of Oxford, Oxford, England
| | - Daniel Hoyer
- Evolution Institute, Tampa, FL, United States of America
- George Brown College, Toronto, Canada
| | - Andrey Korotayev
- HSE University, Moscow, Russia
- Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia
| | - Nikolay Kradin
- Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnology, Far East Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Vladivostok, Russia
| | - Sergey Nefedov
- Institute of History and Archeology of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Ural Federal University, Yekaterinburg, Russia
| | - Gary Feinman
- Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, IL, United States of America
| | - Jill Levine
- Evolution Institute, Tampa, FL, United States of America
| | | | | | | | - James S. Bennett
- University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States of America
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