Talk:Demographic history

Merge proposal

Links to involved articles:

• Demographic history (target)
• Historical demography

The two articles "historical demographics" and "demographic history" are the same topic, but the latter is more common. The main article should be the study of the topic, and the currently disambiguated articles should simply be sub articles of the main topic. Oncenawhile (talk) 12:40, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

If demographic history is more common, then let "historical demography" be a simple redirect to the former, and put the remaining links in the see also section. Who can rename pages? I don't think I can. Xaxafrad (talk) 07:13, 28 December 2014 (UTC)

Piotrus, since you created the article Historical demography, please could you let us know your perspective here? Oncenawhile (talk) 09:06, 28 December 2014 (UTC)

Agree. In my opinion we need two long articles, one on history & one on methods. "dem history" should be focused on population history. It can be greatly expanded in terms of time and geography. we need a new separate article on the technical field of historical demography, which overlaps history & sociology & some other areas as well. Rjensen (talk) 11:02, 28 December 2014 (UTC)

Is this book a secondary source?

The Atlas of World Population History (by Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones) (1978) ISBN 0-14-051076-1, it's got a lot of primary sources referenced throughout the book, and the authors outlined their own thinking in coming to the book's conclusions, so I'm assuming it's a secondary source. I'd like to use it as a reference to expand this article, if that would be appropriate. Xaxafrad (talk) 04:47, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

Introduction

What is demographic history?

(From historical demography:Historical demography is the quantitative study of human population in the past. It is concerned with population size, with the three basic components of population change--fertility, mortality, and migration, and with population characteristics related to those components, such as marriage, socioeconomic status, and the configuration of families.)

Therefore, demographic history is the description of human population in the past. It should outline population size, including the rates of births, deaths, and migrations....I'm not sure about that last sentence. I'm going to go with "description of past human population" and keep it short. Other thoughts, please? Xaxafrad (talk) 04:58, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

New research on population growth 12 to 10 thousand years ago: Same Growth Rate for Farming, Non-Farming Prehistoric People

See "Prehistoric human populations of hunter-gatherers in the region that is now Wyoming and Colorado grew at the same rate as farming societies in Europe, according to a new radiocarbon analysis involving University of Wyoming researchers. The findings challenge the commonly held view that the advent of agriculture 10,000-12,000 years ago accelerated human population growth.

   "Our analysis shows that transitioning farming societies experienced the same rate of growth as contemporaneous foraging societies," says Robert Kelly, UW professor of anthropology and co-author of the study. "The same rate of growth measured for populations dwelling in a range of environments, and practicing a variety of subsistence strategies, suggests that the global climate and/or other biological factors - not adaptability to local environment or subsistence practices - regulated long-term growth of the human population for most of the past 12,000 years." Doug Weller talk 17:04, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

Further reading on Africa

Request: It would be great to have some further reading on the demographic history of Africa. I'm not well read on it myself but I believe there's some good recent scholarship on it. - Conflatuman (talk) 03:53, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

The section on carrying capacity only shows relatively old, very conservative sources.

A gorilla is far bigger than a human, a chimp also needs roughly the same amount of food. Humans and chimps are both omnivores with humans eating more meat by like 15-25 percent. The difference in trophic level and carrying capacity wouldn't be magnitudes different. Also when Heidelbergansis and Sapiens started regularly using fire they could make meat and root vegetables easier to eat. Humans also obviously occupy vastly more land. Orangeorang1 (talk) 22:34, 2 March 2026 (UTC)