‘Here by the Sea and Sand’:Uninterrupted Hunter-Fisher-Gatherer Coastal Habitation Despite Considerable Population Growth

At the end of the Pleistocene as temperatures warmed, new habitats opened up to human occupation as the Fennoscandian Ice Sheet receded. Along the west coast of modern-day Norway, human populations of coastal foragers slowly transitioned from short-term settlement patterns in the Early Mesolithic (ca. 11,500–10,000 cal BP), to more lasting ones during the Late Mesolithic (8500-6000 BP) and Early Neolithic (ca. 6000–5200 BP) as climatic conditions improved and stabilized. Here, using spatially and temporally resolved archaeological observations, paleoclimate data, and a spatiotemporal species distribution model, we test whether a) improvements in climate resulted in expansion of the available human niche space allowing for human population growth, and b) whether increasing population densities and ensuing deprecation of habitat suitability pushed people into occupying successively lower ranked habitats as predicted by the Ideal Free Distribution model. We find that a) climate gradually improved and stabilized during the Holocene, with the effect of improving general habitat suitability, which in turn led to an increase in human population size, b) that immediate proximity to sheltered coastal areas was central to settlement decisions but that c) increasing populations did not drive dispersal patterns into lower ranked habitats. The latter is likely attributable to the general improvements in habitat suitability due to the warming climate and the relative abundance of coastal habitats found in Norway.