Pre-Historic Population Size

[zqw]

After thinking about the genetic pre history of Europe, a question came to mind and I'm curious if anyone here knows. Is there any estimates on the population size of certain key periods in Europe's pre-history from archaeologists or geneticists. In particular I'm wondering how many farmers left Anatolia to colonize Europe during the Neolithic or the population size of the Yamnaya culture and how many people left the steppe to spread the Indo-European Languages. For both of these sets of migrations are we talking, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands?

 

[Tamakore]

I recommend the Penguin Atlas of World Population History by McEvedy and Jones. For example, they estimated that the population of Anatolia increased from 40,000 in the Mesolithic to 200,000 in the early Neolithic. The population of the Balkans changed from an estimated 25,000 hunter-gatherers in the Mesolithic to 250,000 farmers by 5000 BC.

Since the earliest Neolithic sites in Europe are more than a thousand years younger than the earliest Neolithic sites in Anatolia, the expansion of the Anatolian Neolithic into Europe may have been a slow process. Probably not a great migration of hundreds of thousands, perhaps a small but steady flow of migrants over several centuries.