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. 2025 Feb 11;15(1):5044.
doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-88863-y.

Ancient levantine demography follows ecological stochasticity

Ido Wachtel  1 , Uri Davidovich  1 , A Yair Grinberger  2 , Royi Zidon  3
Affiliations

Ancient levantine demography follows ecological stochasticity

Ido Wachtel et al. Sci Rep. .

Abstract

Unraveling the driving forces behind human colonization, settlement and abandonment throughout history has been a prominent research avenue for centuries. While social, political, technological, or environmental factors are commonly identified as the driving forces behind these processes, in this paper we explore a different factor - demographic stochasticity. Through an analysis based on the metapopulation theory, we assess whether demographic processes of a stochastic nature are the likely cause behind settlement abandonment and colonization within past human societies. We implement the analysis for a geographical region in the Levant and compare the results with historical and archaeological evidence. In all case studies tested but one, we show that our null hypotheses cannot be rejected. This suggests that, similarly to other species' metapopulations, demographic stochasticity holds a significant role in shaping human settlement dynamics. We thus claim that this approach should serve as a null hypothesis for the assessment of settlement dynamic and the role of social and cultural processes.

Keywords: Historical ecology; Metapopulation dynamics; Settlement patterns.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declarations. Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
The study area overlaid on an elevation map, and 19th-century settlements. The map was created using ArcGIS Pro version 3.2.2 (https://www.esri.com/en-us/arcgis/products/arcgis-pro/overview).
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
The 16th−20th century settlements and niches: (A) population size (individuals) and settlement (settled/abandoned); (B) the relation between new settlements and the distance to existing settlements; (C) settlements and niches for each period; (D) the distribution of three periods settlements overlaid; (E) the niches of three periods overlaid.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Random Forest model predicting village abandonment probabilities: feature importance analysis.
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Settlements and niches from the L. Chal to IB periods. (A) Population size (ha) and settlement continuity/abandonment; (B) L. Chal to IB Settlements and niches.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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