The Prehistoric Populations of Britain

第一批占领英国的人类在50多万年前到达，但这些事件是由零星的小而孤立的社区组成的，这些社区无法在最后一个冰河时代的波动气候中完全建立并持续在英国生存。在上一个冰河时代结束后，英国或多或少地连续居住着从事不同谋生方式的人们，从狩猎、捕鱼和采集，到自给农业，再到更广泛的以市场为导向的农业，到2000年前罗马人占领英国时，建立了原始城市社区。我们已经对这些过去的社区所占据的地点和密度以及所从事的活动范围有了很多了解，但人口的规模及其人口特征（包括出生率和死亡率、人口增长能力和移徙程度）在很大程度上仍然未知。我所提议的研究的目的是整理来自尽可能广泛的相关来源的信息，包括对现代和过去种群的遗传研究；聚落分布与资源利用研究；以及对考古遗址骨骼遗骸的研究。根据这些信息，我打算为过去的人口结构和过程建立模型，这样我就可以研究人类与自然环境的关系，并在较长的时间尺度上绘制人口发展图。这次审查将考虑生命史变量的差异（例如成熟的速度和寿命的长度），这些变量现在被认为是在解剖学上的现代人到来之前占领欧洲的不同人种的特征。英国最早的居民可能对环境变化很敏感，有一些新的证据表明，在英国中更新世和上更新世期间，大范围的环境条件与人类种群密度之间存在相关性。从更新世晚期到全新世早期和中期，现代人类对英国的殖民和再殖民的速度可以通过分析放射性碳年代的分布来追踪，放射性碳年代是这一时期人类活动程度的重要“代理”。这项研究的一个关键特点是，将采用广泛的材料和方法来研究有关史前人口的问题，从而能够采用一种完全跨学科的方法。例如，通过“烧杯同位素项目”（对英国烧杯时期的骨骼进行大规模再分析，通过稳定的同位素分析来检查饮食和流动性）等项目，我们现在有了一个庞大的数据集，可以研究新石器时代晚期的移民和流动性问题。该项目将需要对古人类学、古人口学、生物分子考古学、丧葬考古学和骨考古学的广泛研究进行评估，因为这些学科中的每一个都可以为我们对过去人口的理解做出重要贡献。

The first humans to occupy Britain arrived more than half a million years ago, but these events consisted of sporadic visits by small and often isolated communities that were not able to become fully established and survive continuously in Britain in the fluctuating climates of the last ice age. Following the end of the last ice age, Britain saw more or less continuous inhabitation by peoples practising different ways of subsistence, ranging from hunting, fishing and gathering, through subsistence farming to more extensive market-oriented farming and the establishment of proto-urban communities by the time the Romans occupied Britain 2000 years ago. We already know a lot about the locations and densities of sites occupied and the range of activities undertaken by these past communities, but the sizes of the populations and their demographic properties (including birth and death rates, capacity for population growth and the extent of migration) are still largely unknown. The intention of my proposed research is to collate information from as wide a range of relevant sources as possible, including genetic studies of modern and past populations; studies of settlement distribution and usage of resources; and studies of skeletal remains from archaeological sites. From this information I intend to develop models for past population structures and processes so that I will be in a position to investigate the relationship of humans to their natural environment and plot their demographic development over an extended time scale.The review will take account of differences in life history variables (e.g. rates of maturation and length of life span) that are now believed to characterise the different species of hominins that occupied Europe prior to the arrival of anatomically modern humans. The earliest inhabitants of Britain were probably sensitive to environmental change, and there is some emerging evidence for correlations between broad-scale environmental conditions and hominin population density during the Middle and Upper Pleistocene in Britain. The pace of colonisation and re-colonisation of Britain by modern humans during the late Pleistocene and into the early and middle Holocene can be tracked by analysing distributions of radiocarbon dates, an important 'proxy' for the extent of human activity during this time period. A key feature of this research will be the breadth of materials and methods that will be brought to bear on questions concerning prehistoric demography, enabling a fully interdisciplinary approach to be adopted. For example, through projects such as the Beaker Isotope Project (a large-scale reanalysis of British Beaker period skeletons to examine diet and mobility through stable isotope analysis) we now have available a large dataset with which questions of migration and mobility in the Late Neolithic can be investigated. The project will require an appraisal of a wide range of research in palaeoanthropology, palaeodemography, biomolecular archaeology, funerary archaeology and osteoarchaeology, as each of these disciplines can make an important contribution to our understanding of past populations.