Related papers: The evolving system of Trypillian settlements
We present a stochastic two-population model that describes the migration and growth of semi-sedentary foragers and sedentary farmers along a river valley during the Neolithic transition. The main idea of this paper is that random migration…
The science of cities seeks to understand and explain regularities observed in the world's major urban systems. Modelling the population evolution of cities is at the core of this science and of all urban studies. Quantitatively, the most…
(Abridged) We present palaeoeconomy reconstructions for pre-modern agriculture, with the Cucuteni-Trypillia Cultural unity (5,400-2,700 BC, modern Ukraine, Moldova and Romania) as example. The starting point of our analysis is the…
Understanding the time evolution of fragmented animal populations and their habitats, connected by migration, is a problem of both theoretical and practical interest. This paper presents a method for calculating the time evolution of the…
Two classical hypotheses are examined about the population growth in a system of cities: Hypothesis 1 pertains to Gibrat's and Zipf's theory which states that the city growth-decay process is size independent; Hypothesis 2 pertains to the…
Human settlements on Earth are scattered in a multitude of shapes, sizes and spatial arrangements. These patterns are often not random but a result of complex geographical, cultural, economic and historical processes that have profound…
Recently we have introduced a simplified model of ecosystem assembly (Capitan et al., 2009) for which we are able to map out all assembly pathways generated by external invasions in an exact manner. In this paper we provide a deeper…
Stochastic equations constitute a major ingredient in many branches of science, from physics to biology and engineering. Not surprisingly, they appear in many quantitative studies of complex systems. In particular, this type of equation is…
Quantifying the spatial organization of human settlements is fundamental to understanding the complexity of urban systems. However, the quantitative patterns of the distribution of villages, towns, and cities that lie between random and…
The rank-size distribution of cities follows Zipf's law, and the Zipf scaling exponent often tends to a constant 1. This seems to be a general rule. However, a recent numerical experiment shows that there exists a contradiction between the…
Game theory ideas provide a useful framework for studying evolutionary dynamics in a well-mixed environment. This approach, however, typically enforces a strictly fixed overall population size, deemphasizing natural growth processes. We…
Although there has been much interest in estimating divergence and admixture from genomic data, it has proven difficult to distinguish gene flow after divergence from alternative histories involving structure in the ancestral population.…
For the first time the systems of cities in seven countries or regions among the largest in the world (China, India, Brazil, Europe, the Former Soviet Union (FSU), the United States and South Africa) are made comparable through the building…
Human populations have experienced dramatic growth since the Neolithic revolution. Recent studies that sequenced a very large number of individuals observed an extreme excess of rare variants, and provided clear evidence of recent rapid…
The rank-size plots of a large number of different physical and socio-economic systems are usually said to follow Zipf's law, but a unique framework for the comprehension of this ubiquitous scaling law is still lacking. Here we show that a…
A substantial share of the Earth's land surface is managed by humans, with cities representing the most extreme form of anthropogenic land use. There are zillion ways in which settlements can be arranged across a given area, and their…
The shape of urban settlements plays a fundamental role in their sustainable planning. Properly defining the boundaries of cities is challenging and remains an open problem in the Science of Cities. Here, we propose a worldwide model to…
Epochal dynamics, in which long periods of stasis in an evolving population are punctuated by a sudden burst of change, is a common behavior in both natural and artificial evolutionary processes. We analyze the population dynamics for a…
Over the last decades, in disciplines as diverse as economics, geography, and complex systems, a perspective has arisen proposing that many properties of cities are quantitatively predictable due to agglomeration or scaling effects. Using…
The growth of a population divided among spatial sites, with migration between the sites, is sometimes modelled by a product of random matrices, with each diagonal elements representing the growth rate in a given time period, and…