ABSTRACT
The palaeodemographic material which we possess from the prehistoric hunter-gatherer communities is still very scanty. From Denmark and south Sweden together, about thirty individuals in all may with certainty be ascribed to the period. Denmark, however, has yielded one particular find which can give some idea of the mortality of the hunter population up to the introduction of agriculture. This is the find from Bøgebakken at Vedbæk, excavated in 1975 (S.E.Albrethsen et al., 1976). Here a little cemetery from the end of the sixth millenium BC was found to contain twenty-two individuals. Four of these were newborn babies and one was about one year old. The ratio between the number of dead infants and dead adults is thus 5:17. However, this hardly gives a correct impression of infant mortality, which was most probably even higher, as the number of children’s graves is hardly representative. Other investigations of prehistoric populations (G.Acsádi and J.Nemeskéri, 1970) indicate that an infant mortality of about 35 per cent or more is not uncommon.
