Archaeologist Peter Jordan has together with colleagues from the UK and the US received the prestigious ERC Synergy Grant. The research aims to shed new light on the demography of hunter-gatherer societies, potentially shifting our understanding of human history over the past 10,000 years entirely.
The project FORAGER will examine why certain hunter-gatherer societies experienced both population growth and decline - just like early farming communities.
"Receiving an ERC Synergy Grant is a fantastic opportunity to carry out a large-scale and ambitious research program together with prominent colleagues from various disciplines and institutions around the world," says Peter Jordan.
Peter Jordan will lead the project together with Enrico Crema (University of Cambridge), Oliver Craig (University of York), and Anna Marie Prentiss (University of Montana). Thanks to the ERC grant, they will be able to bring together an interdisciplinary team of 37 leading specialists, including paleo-demographers, climate scientists, lab-based bioarchaeologists, cultural anthropologists and representatives from local Indigenous groups.
"We approach these fundamental questions from very different perspectives. By combining our expertise, methods, and vast amounts of existing data, the project can work on a scale that has never before been possible," explains Peter Jordan.
A deeper understanding of hunter-gatherer societies
After the end of the last Ice Age, warmer and more stable climates led to the development of new food systems, which in turn triggered population booms across mid-latitude environments globally.
These momentous changes are often reduced to a simple linear narrative that tracks progression from mobile foraging to settled farming, and from there to urbanisation and state formation.
This 'agri-centric' narrative is problematic because in most cases behaviours typically attributed to farming societies, such as storage, settled life, and social complexity, emerged among foraging societies well before agriculture: moreover, foraging remained the dominant socio-economic system in much of the world for most of the Holocene.
In addition, these foraging systems were capable of triggering sudden population booms of a similar magnitude to farming.
"However, we still do not fully understand why these changes occurred or what they meant for societies that did not depend on farming for their food supply," says Peter Jordan.
The results are therefore likely to upend our current understanding of a 'lost chapter' of demographic change, that included periods of great upheaval and resilience. The question remains whether we have overlooked these alternative and perhaps more sustainable social-ecological systems.
Global reach of the ERC Synergy Grants:
"Twenty-eight of the 66 newly selected teams include a researcher based outside Europe, mainly in the United States, but also Canada, Australia, Brazil, Ghana, South Africa and Singapore. Europe's frontier research has never been so international. This global collaboration strengthens European science, gives our researchers access to world-class expertise and infrastructure, and brings leading scientists from around the world closer to Europe.", comments Ekaterina Zaharieva, European Commissioner for Startups, Research and Innovation.
About the ERC Synergy Grant:
The research project, FORAGER (Investigating alternative trajectories for human demographic growth in temperate northern Holocene societies) will study four temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere; Japan, the Pacific North West Coast, the Atlantic North-East Coast, and the Baltic.
The team will use rich legacy data already available, and aim to generate comparative insights into major patterns of cultural diversity and change among non-agricultural societies.
The grant totals EUR 10 million over a six-year period, starting 1 May 2026.
