allot to research recently published in the journalPLOS ONE , there may have been few than 1,500 people be in Central Europe for prominent portions of the Stone Age . To put it into view , that is roughly equal to the population ofShipton Bellinger , a village and civil parish in the British constituency of Hampshire . Or tantamount to the number of mass you might find on amid - sized sail ship .
Isabell Schmidt and Andreas Zimmermann of the University of Cologne in Germany used archaeological grounds and population models to count on the number of mass living in a stretchiness of land that go from Spain in the W to Poland in the east and Denmark in the Second Earl of Guilford to Italy in the south during the Aurignacian – a period of clip sweep just timid of 10,000 days from 42,000 to 33,000 years ago .
To do so , Schmidt and Zimmermann mapped out more or less 400 site known to have been occupied by early humanity during this clip form . The investigator found that these locations were mostly limited to 13 regions , which would have intend bombastic swathes of Europe were left uninhabited .
Using archaeological evidence , they determined no more than 35 or so hunter - gatherer groups occupied each of the 13 region . And by using info collected on modern huntsman - gather community thought to resemble those from Stone Age Europe , at least in heed to the variety of fauna they hound , they estimated the average act of people who lived in each band of Aurignacian hunter - gatherer – 42 individuals .
Schmidt and Zimmermann , therefore , conclude that 35 groups of 42 hoi polloi would create a combined population of few than 1,500 for the entireness of Central and Western Europe , an area stretch out 1.5 million square kilometers ( 580,000 square miles ) .
That might be the mean but the researchers also include a lower limit of 800 people and an upper limit of 3,300 hoi polloi , and we have it off overall population level increased between the beginning and end of the Aurignacian .
Geographically verbalise , they found the highest populations exist in southwest France ( 440 citizenry ) , northerly Spain ( 260 hoi polloi ) , and Belgium ( 210 people ) . ( comparatively ) large populations also exist in the halfway Danube and Moravian ( 170 people ) and upper Danube area ( 140 people ) , while the remaining land site were home to somewhere between 10 and 80 individuals , they say .
Stone Age Europe was undoubtedly a much alone place than it is today or , indeed , since the introduction of agriculture8,500 years ago , but there are certain limitations to the study . All enquiry into prehistoric culture of necessity relies on incomplete and limited archeologic records and bet on a certain amount of assumption – in this case , as an good example , the number of individuals in Aurignacian hunting watch - gatherer society match the number of individuals in modern - day hunter - gatherer society and that there are no Aurignacian sites " missing " from the research .
" We are cultivate with a limited range of humbled - resolution data and are forced at each stage to rely on multiple , justifiable , but often for the most part untested , assumptions , " Jennifer French from University College London , toldNew Scientist .
