Population ’boom-and-bust’ followed start of farming in Western Europe

The introduction of farming into Western Europe 7,500 years ago led to dramatic population collapse on a similar scale to the Black Death, according to researchers at UCL. The study, which is published , is the first to show the existence of a 'boom-and-bust' pattern, with decreases in population size as great as 60 per cent following rapid initial population increases of up to three or four times previous levels. Professor Stephen Shennan (UCL Institute of Archaeology), lead author of the study, said: "The introduction of farming is widely believed to have led to sustained population growth, but the new evidence we've uncovered suggests this large-scale 'boom-and-bust' pattern.  The reasons behind this trend still remain unknown, but they could have been to do with farming itself." Looking at the distribution of nearly 8,000 radiocarbon dates from archaeological sites in several regions, and using novel statistical analysis, the team noticed that while there was evidence of a dramatic increase in human activity shortly after farming was introduced, it was not sustained. Instead they saw evidence of population collapse in many regions. Professor Mark Thomas (UCL Genetics, Evolution & Environment), co-author of the paper, said: "One of the problems with using counts of archaeological sites dating to different periods of time as an indicator of population size change is that sometimes interesting patterns can appear just by chance. It was therefore necessary for us to develop new statistical methods to account for this, and to test if the boom-and-bust patterns we saw were real, and not just the result of some throw of the archaeological dice." - New evidence we've uncovered suggests this large-scale 'boom-and-bust' pattern.