Climate and Prehistoric Migration

Peter Huybers, Marco Tabellini, Charles A. Taylor and Francesco Toti

No 35371, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: What factors drove human migration before modern states, markets, and borders? We develop a sorting framework in which climate-specific subsistence knowledge depreciates with ecological distance. To test this, we use ancient DNA identity-by-descent segments to construct bilateral migration flows across Western Eurasia over the last 10,000 years. We document three main findings. First, migration flows decline with differences in growing degree days, precipitation, and soil characteristics between origins and destinations. Second, the binding factor varies across subsistence systems: farmers exhibit strong thermal and soil matching, while pastoralists match most strongly on precipitation. Third, periods of warming increase farmer expansion while cooling increases pastoral expansion in patterns that recover known archaeological migration episodes. Migration also acts as a margin of climate adaptation: populations exposed to temperature change move to destinations that partly offset the shift.

JEL-codes: N01 N50 O13 Q54 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo and nep-his
Note: DAE EEE
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w35371.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35371

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w35371
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().