title: Population size does not explain past changes in cultural complexity.
abstract: Demography is increasingly being invoked to account for features of the archaeological record, such as the technological conservatism of the Lower and Middle Pleistocene, the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition, and cultural loss in Holocene Tasmania. Such explanations are commonly justified in relation to population dynamic models developed by Henrich [Henrich J (2004)Am Antiq69:197-214] and Powell et al. [Powell A, et al. (2009)Science324(5932):1298-1301], which appear to demonstrate that population size is the crucial determinant of cultural complexity. Here, we show that these models fail in two important respects. First, they only support a relationship between demography and culture in implausible conditions. Second, their predictions conflict with the available archaeological and ethnographic evidence. We conclude that new theoretical and empirical research is required to identify the factors that drove the changes in cultural complexity that are documented by the archaeological record.
authors.affiliation: School of Innovation Sciences, Eindhoven University of Technology, 5612 AZ Eindhoven, The Netherlands; Human Origins Group, Faculty of Archaeology, University of Leiden, 2333 CC Leiden, The Netherlands; k.vaesen@tue.nl.
authors.forename: Krist
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Vaesen
authors.affiliation: Human Evolutionary Studies Program and Department of Archaeology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6 Canada; Department of Archaeology, University of Aberdeen, AB24 3UF Aberdeen, United Kingdom;
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Collard
authors.affiliation: Department of Archaeology and History, La Trobe University, MB 167 Melbourne, Australia.
authors.forename: Richard
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Cosgrove
authors.affiliation: Human Origins Group, Faculty of Archaeology, University of Leiden, 2333 CC Leiden, The Netherlands;
authors.forename: Wil
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Roebroeks
keywords: Tasmania; Upper Paleolithic transition; cultural complexity; cultural evolution; demography