(Phys.org)—A team of researchers from University College London and the University of Plymouth, both in the U.K., has found evidence that suggests at least some of the population shifts that have occurred over the past several thousand years in Britain and Ireland were likely due to climate change rather than human activities. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes analyzing data from thousands of prior research efforts to create charts of population swings during the early and late Holocene, and then comparing what they found to climate research data from the same time periods.