Equilibrium dynamics of European pre-industrial populations: the evidence of carrying capacity in human agricultural societies
| Autor: | David Storch, Miroslav Šálek, Václav Fanta, Petr Sklenicka, Jan Zouhar |
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| Rok vydání: | 2017 |
| Předmět: |
0106 biological sciences
Rural Population Conservation of Natural Resources Technology 010504 meteorology & atmospheric sciences Natural resource economics Population Dynamics History 18th Century 010603 evolutionary biology 01 natural sciences General Biochemistry Genetics and Molecular Biology History 17th Century Carrying capacity Humans Rural settlement 0105 earth and related environmental sciences General Environmental Science Czech Republic General Immunology and Microbiology Ecology business.industry Historical demography Agriculture General Medicine Population ecology Natural resource Geography Disturbance (ecology) General Agricultural and Biological Sciences business |
| Zdroj: | Proceedings. Biological sciences. 285(1871) |
| ISSN: | 1471-2954 |
| Popis: | Human populations tend to grow steadily, because of the ability of people to make innovations, and thus overcome and extend the limits imposed by natural resources. It is therefore questionable whether traditional concepts of population ecology, including environmental carrying capacity, can be applied to human societies. The existence of carrying capacity cannot be simply inferred from population time-series, but it can be indicated by the tendency of populations to return to a previous state after a disturbance. So far only indirect evidence at a coarse-grained scale has indicated the historical existence of human carrying capacity. We analysed unique historical population data on 88 settlements before and after the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), one the longest and most destructive conflicts in European history, which reduced the population of Central Europe by 30–50%. The recovery rate of individual settlements after the war was positively correlated with the extent of the disturbance, so that the population size of the settlements after a period of regeneration was similar to the pre-war situation, indicating an equilibrium population size (i.e. carrying capacity). The carrying capacity of individual settlements was positively determined mostly by the fertility of the soil and the area of the cadastre, and negatively by the number of other settlements in the surroundings. Pre-industrial human population sizes were thus probably controlled by negative density dependence mediated by soil fertility, which could not increase due to limited agricultural technologies. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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