Conclusion

The use of SPD for inferring past population dynamics has recently sparked debate, raising questions concerning the reliability of the underlying data and its general validity as a proxy (e.g. [45,74–76]). As it stands, the advantages provided by SPD over alternative methods outweighs its potentials limitations. We however stress that no proxy provides a unique and definitive portrait of prehistoric demography, and that when possible, multiple lines of evidence [70,77,78] should be https://ilovedating.net/pl/badoo-recenzja/ assessed in comparative fashion. Furthermore, we would like to highlight that SPDs, as well as other count-based proxies, should never be simply assessed in visual terms, but compared against formal statistical models. Future studies should also go beyond the hypothesis-rejecting framework, and aim to statistically compare multiple working hypotheses. Recent advances in likelihood-free inferential methods such as Approximate Bayesian Computation [79–80] is offering potential new lines of research that has already been applied for the study of prehistoric demography .