Background: approaches to population history

The biological problem of unravelling the evolutionary tempo and mode of a given species and its evolutionary relationships to other species has been approached by several biological sciences, among which molecular biology has given a huge boost to the field. In the exploration of the past of human populations, several disciplines can contribute to our understanding, be it in the social sciences (archaeology and other historical sciences, historical linguistics) or in the biological sciences (palaeoanthropology, molecular biology, genetics). The time depth of the events under study and their geographical locations may be of key importance in order to recognize both which disciplines may be relevant and, within a given discipline, which are the appropriate tools to use.

Issues that may be addressed range from wide and global ones as, for example, the origin of the whole of humanity, to more specific ones, such as the origin of the settlers of a given area or ethnic group. Historical sciences have, in their long tradition of scholarship, used very different methods to investigate the social structure of the past according to the time period under scrutiny, from oral or written traditions to the sophisticated physical and chemical methods used in archaeology.