The Demographic Impact of the Agricultural System in Human History

摘要

Mark Cohen's instructions for the workshop were to present"the state of work in your field and how work in your fieldrelates to the other areas to be discussed." This commenttherefore focuses on the signal of a major demographic shiftduring the transition from the forager to the farming system,which has been detected in paleoanthropological cemeterydata. This signal is interpreted as having been produced bythe Neolithic demographic transition (NDT; Bocquet-Appel2002, 2008a; Bocquet-Appel and Naji 2006). A demographictransition can be defined as a quantitative leap in the self-regulated flow of population inputs and outputs that is de-termined by a qualitative change in the causal mechanismsunderlying the regulation. Two figures presented during theworkshop (figs. 1, 3) are commented on; there follows a shortreflection concerning both the link between demographicpressure and cultural change and the significance of the NDTfrom the perspective of human demographic history, con-tinuing a discussion that initiated 50 years ago (Deevey 1960).