Berlin 2015 – scientific programme

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 63: Physics of Sustainability and Human-Nature Interactions II (joint session SOE/ DY/ jDPG/ BP)

DY 63.1: Topical Talk

Thursday, March 19, 2015, 17:00–17:30, MA 001

Critical Transitions in Socio-econo-ecological Systems—A Global Adaptive Model of the Regional Transitions to Agriculture 8000 BC to AD 500 — •Carsten Lemmen and Kai W. Wirtz — Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht, Geesthacht, Germany

Critical transitions in societies emerge as boundaries between cultural “ages”, e.g. the transition from the Industrial to the Information Age, or from the Holocene to the Anthropocene. Societal transitions are believed to emerge from nonlinear feedbacks between environment, economy, and society, but hypotheses have been difficult to test so far.

We propose to employ “numerical experiments in history” and consider one of the major critical transitions in world history—the abandonment of a foraging lifestyle in favor of agriculture and pastoralism. We investigate this transition with a deterministic and dynamic model of society. The global model resolves regional-scale human-environment interactions in space and time, based on only few prognostic adaptive societal traits and their co-evolutionary dynamics with population size.

We successfully reproduced the agropastoral transition as seen in archaeological data; we tested demic and cultural hypotheses about its expansion, finding both equally consistent with the data; we explored the stability of the expansion pattern facing large-scale palaeoenvironmental excursions and found strong resilience of populations and their key traits. Our model enabled us to quantify global and regional emissions of CO₂ and the sustainable population size for the past 10000 years.