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Paleodemography: “Not quite dead”
Author(s) -
Konigsberg Lyle W.,
Frankenberg Susan R.
Publication year - 1994
Publication title -
evolutionary anthropology: issues, news, and reviews
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.401
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1520-6505
pISSN - 1060-1538
DOI - 10.1002/evan.1360030306
Subject(s) - prehistory , human evolution , documentation , principal (computer security) , settlement (finance) , history , geography , genealogy , evolutionary biology , anthropology , archaeology , biology , sociology , world wide web , computer science , payment , programming language , operating system
As Kim Hill 1 recently noted in Evolutionary Anthropology , humans are unique among the hominoids with regard to the length of their lives, as well as other elements in the individual life histories. The evolutionary details that modified a basic pongid life history into a hominid one remain obscure, but aspects of recent human demographic history are assailable. Study of the last 10,000 years or so is an important part of ongoing anthropological discourse, for demographic changes may be intimately linked to such major developments as agriculture and urbanization. 2‐8 Whether demographic changes are antecedents for or consequences of these major developments is a matter of great contention, but at the least we should attempt to document the nature of human demographic changes in the recent past. Although this documentation can take different forms, the principal sources are archeological information on past settlement patterns and analyses of prehistoric human skeletal material.