A farming-fueled baby boom long thought to have sparked the rise of ancient cities in southwest Asia turns out to have been a bust.
If accurate, those numbers would support a decades-old idea that after around 10,000 years ago, early Neolithic villages experienced rapid growth and revolutionary social changes thanks to plant and animal domestication.
But an average of only 600 to 800 people lived at this farming and herding village during its heyday, around 8,600 years ago, two archaeologists conclude in the June Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. Children under age 5 represented roughly 30 percent of the population, say Ian Kuijt of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana and Arkadiusz Marciniak of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland.
Prior population estimates have typically, and mistakenly, assumed that Çatalhöyük buildings crowded closely together were constructed at the same time, with all dwellings simultaneously occupied over at least several generations, the researchers contend. In other words, a big archaeological site retaining remnants of lots of buildings must have housed a big crowd.
2024-05-20 10:30:00
Original from www.sciencenews.org