Forty thousand years ago, the Southern Caucasus was not an easy place to be human. The landscape spanning what is now Armenia, Georgia, and neighboring territories pitched from sea level to over 5,000 meters, with vegetation, temperature, and rainfall shifting dramatically across elevation bands and seasons. Resources were uneven, unpredictable, and scattered across terrain that could be brutal.
The populations living there during Marine Isotope Stage 3 — roughly 59,000 to 27,000 years ago — were small. Sparse. By any conventional measure of prehistoric demography, they should have been fragile.
And yet they weren’t. That’s what makes the record from this region interesting.
A new synthesis paper led by Ariel Malinsky-Buller and colleagues, published in Quaternary Science Reviews,1 draws together thirteen research articles investigating human population dynamics in the Southern Caucasus and Armenian Highlands. The central question threading through the volume is deceptively simple: how did these groups actually survive? The answer the authors arrive at has less to do with physiological hardiness or lucky resource access than with something harder to see in the archaeological record — social architecture.
The paper uses a heuristic model developed by Whallon (2006), itself built on earlier demographic simulation work by Wobst (1974), to think about the spatial footprint of a “viable” population. In Whallon’s framework, hunter-gatherer bands of 25 to 30 people formed the basic social unit. A “maximal band” — the largest aggregation a group could sustain under favorable conditions — topped out around 175 individuals. These were not crowds. These were the kinds of groups where everyone knew everyone, and where losing even a handful of people to illness or accident could tip the whole system toward collapse.
The model works well as an ideal. Reality was messier.
