The Palaeolithic of Europe: A Demographic and Social Prehistory was funded by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship (ECF-2016-128) (2016-2019) and a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship scheme from the Wenner-Gren Foundation (2019-2020) both held at the UCL Institute of Archaeology.

The project monograph Palaeolithic Europe: A Demographic and Social Prehistory is now published with Cambridge University Press as part of their World Archaeology Series.

This book presents a new synthesis of the archaeological, palaeoanthropological, and palaeogenetic records of the European Palaeolithic, adopting a unique demographic perspective on these first two-million years of European prehistory. Unlike prevailing narratives of demographic stasis, it emphasises the dynamism of Palaeolithic populations of both our evolutionary ancestors and members of our own species across four demographic stages, within a context of substantial Pleistocene climatic changes. Integrating evolutionary theory with a socially oriented approach to the Palaeolithic, this volume bridges biological and cultural factors, with a focus on women and children as the drivers of population change. This volume shows how, within the physiological constraints on fertility and mortality, social relationships provide the key to enduring demographic success. Through its demographic focus, this book combines a ‘big picture’ perspective on human evolution with careful analysis of the day-to-day realities of European Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer communities—their families, their children, and how they lived and died.

Demography and society in Ice Age Europe: a blog post about the book

Most of us are familiar with current concerns about the demographic trajectory of Europe; of the worries about the relationship between the resources available to the ca. 750 million (and growing) people who call the continent home, and the economic challenges of a society in which an increasing number of people live into their eighth and ninth decades. The earliest modern human (Homo sapiens) occupants of the continent—hunter-gatherers who lived during the Pleistocene or ‘Ice Age’—faced very different demographic challenges. Mortality (particularly that of babies and children) was high, living to be old was much rarer, and with the total population of Europe numbering that of a single minor present-day city (think along the lines of Leicester in the UK or Nice, France), problems caused by too few, rather than too many people, prevailed. These challenges were even greater among earlier members of our lineage. For the various archaic humans who resided in Europe between ~1.8 million and 45,000 years ago (Homo antecessor, Homo heidelbergensis, and Neanderthals), the demographic picture is one of small groups of people scattered across the landscape; people who were especially vulnerable to environmental shifts caused by the fluctuating Ice Age climate.

The small size of Ice Age populations means they are often glossed over by archaeologists in their accounts of humanity’s demographic history, reflecting a prevailing consensus that there is little to be said about demography until the establishment of substantial settlements and agricultural practices in the later Neolithic period. Drawing on a wide range of data from multiple disciplines (archaeology, palaeoanthropology, genetics) my book “Palaeolithic Europe: A Demographic and Social Prehistory” refutes this latter claim, revealing the dynamism of the earliest European populations of all human species and presenting a ‘big picture’ demographic framework for this exciting period of human evolution centred on four key stages (outlined in the accompanying figure).

Demography is driven by biology, but the processes of life and death do not occur in a vacuum and my book emphasises the importance of social variables to the study of past population histories. Among the earliest populations of Europe, the strength and extent of social ties between groups was a key determinate of survival. Strong extended social networks help to mitigate some of the challenges intrinsic to life in small groups, such as the limited pool of potential marriage and sexual partners (which can promote inbreeding) and the outsized effect of the loss of an individual on the rest of the group. In Europe, we see a clear increase in population size as well as in the evidence for social networks after ~45,000 years ago— coincident with the arrival of Homo sapiens on the continent. Most fundamentally, a demographic perspective provides a visceral reminder of what we share with these early prehistoric populations, of all human species. At its heart, this is a book about Ice Age people: the daily realities of their lives, their relationships to each other, their families, their children, the way they lived and died.

A summary of the demography history of Pleistocene (Ice Age) Europe. The four demographic stages (Visitation, Residency, Expansion, and Intensification) are shown alongside the hominins (human species) with which they are associated, and placed within the chronological and archaeological framework of this period (bottom) (From French 2021: Figure 8.1)