Recent Advances in Palaeodemography: Data, Techniques, Patterns

Jean-Pierre BOCQUET-APPEL CNRS, Paris, France The written data used by demographers essentially cover the last five centuries. Since Homo ergaster moved out of Africa around 1. 8 million years ago and until the sub-contemporary periods, there is no data allowing us to reconstruct a demographic history that can be interpreted with the traditional tools of demography. If we want to be able to tackle demographic issues over a long evolutionary duration, trying to reconstitute our human demographic history and thinking out and testing macro-demographic theories, we need to draw on sources other than written data and on techniques other than those commonly used by demographers. This necessarily means using inf- mation of every kind, from archaeology, physical anthropology, pale- tology, primatology or genetics, along with relevant models of interpretation. The volume presented here has been developed from a core of papers selected for the paleodemographic session of the 25th World Population Congress (July 2005, Tours, France), to which further requested contri- tions have been added. The publication covers recent paleodemographic innovations, in terms of data, techniques and the detection of patterns making it possible to highlight hitherto unknown prehistoric demographic processes. Now that the anxiety over ways of defusing the population “time bomb”, which mobilized mainstream demographic thinking as from the 1960s (see, for authority, Bogue and Tsui 1979; Demeny 1979) has largely been dis- pated, the focus has shifted to other important issues.