How can population pyramids be used to explore the past?

TL;DR

Population pyramids serve as historical climate indicators, revealing past birth and death rates, and can identify major societal events like famines and wars through their structural signatures.

Contribution

This study demonstrates how to interpret population pyramids to uncover historical demographic events and assess their impacts, with a focus on identifying signatures of crises.

Findings

Population pyramids reflect past birth rate changes.

Major crises cause identifiable signatures in pyramids.

Comparison of North and South Korea illustrates this method.

Abstract

In the same way as tree rings give us useful information about the climate many decades ago (or even centuries ago in the case of big trees), population pyramids allow us to know birth or death rates several decades earlier. Naturally, they can fulfill such promises only if they have been recorded accurately. That is why we start this study by listing a number of pitfalls that may occur in the process of taking censuses. In this paper our main goal is to show how it is possible to "read" population pyramids. Sudden changes in birth rate give rise to the clearest signatures. This indicator reveals that major tragedies like famines, wars, or epidemics are generally accompanied by a fall in birth rates. Thanks to this observation, population pyramids can be used to identify and gauge the blows suffered by populations and nations. As an illustration of how this works, we compare the population pyramids of North and South Korea. This allows us, among other things, to gauge the scale of the food shortage that North Korea experienced at the end of the 1990s.