Abstract
Population dynamics, economy, and human demography started with Malthus, the idea that population growth is limited by resources and “positive checks” occur when population growth overshoots the available resources. In fact, historical evidence indicates that long-term climate changes have destabilized civilizations and caused population collapses via food shortages, diseases, and wars. One of the worst population collapses of human societies occurred during the early fourteenth century in northern Europe; the “Great Famine” was the consequence of the dramatic effects of climate deterioration on human population growth. Thus, part of my motivation was to demonstrate that simple theoretical-based models can be helpful in understanding the causes of population change in preindustrial societies. Here, the results suggest that a logistic model with temperature as a “lateral” perturbation effect is the key element for explaining the population collapse exhibited by the European population during the “Great Famine”.
Highlights
The modern sciences of economics, human demography, and population dynamics started with Malthus (1798), who developed the idea that populations grow geometrically, while food resources only expand at an arithmetic rate
Human population growth rates in Europe during the AD 800–1800 period were characterized by irregular fluctuations and positive values interrupted by some important population collapses (Fig. 1A)
The widely reported crisis of the fourteenth century, the population collapse observed in France during the period 1500–1600, and a smaller population collapse recorded during the first half of the seventeenth century in some a 2014 The Authors
Summary
The modern sciences of economics, human demography, and population dynamics started with Malthus (1798), who developed the idea that populations grow geometrically, while food resources only expand at an arithmetic rate. The first mathematical model of a population growing in a limited environment was developed by Verhulst (1838) through his logistic equation. This model was used by Pearl and Read (1920) to predict human population growth in the USA, but it failed at predicting population growth at that time. Population ecologists developed a theory based on simple models and few principles and the statistical analysis of population size changes (Royama 1992; Berryman 1999; Turchin 2003; Ginzburg and Colyvan 2004). After two centuries since the publication of Malthus’s book, demographers and population ecologists have started to share a common conceptual framework (Lee 1987; Turchin 2009; Lima and Berryman 2011)
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