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Stone Age Europe was a lonely place to live. An assessment of ancient population sizes suggests a vast swathe of western and central Europe may have been home to no more than 1500 people at any one time.

Our species, Homo sapiens, . Archaeological evidence, particularly the appearance of distinctive stone tools at multiple sites, suggests these humans rapidly spread across the continent. But it’s an open question exactly how many people lived in Europe at this time.

Now Isabell Schmidt and Andreas Zimmermann at the University of Cologne, Germany, have estimated the average population size in a period of European prehistory called the Aurignacian, between 42,000 and 33,000 years ago.

The two researchers looked at a large chunk of Europe stretching from northern Spain in the west to Poland in the east. They plotted the location of the approximately 400 known Aurignacian sites across this area. This revealed that humans really occupied just 13 small regions of the continent – leaving most areas effectively uninhabited.

How many people?

To estimate how many hunter-gatherer groups lived in these 13 regions, Schmidt and Zimmermann looked more closely at the archaeological evidence, including how far stone material was likely transported to make tools at these sites. They argue that from the way the sites cluster, the 13 regions were home to no more than about 35 different hunter-gatherer groups.

To get a sense for how many people lived in those 35 groups, the researchers used information about more recent hunter-gatherers recorded by explorers as they spread throughout the world in the past few centuries. Groups that most closely resembled the Aurignacians in terms of the animals they hunted contained about 42 individuals, on average.

Schmidt and Zimmermann assumed Stone Age hunter-gatherer groups were similar. So if there were about 35 hunter-gatherer groups, each containing 42 people, there may have been about 1500 or so people in this part of Europe.

“It is really a small number,” says Schmidt. “But Aurignacian hunter-gatherers developed successful strategies to survive.”

“Generating absolute population estimates for this period is incredibly difficult,” says Jennifer French at University College London. “We are working with a limited range of low-resolution data and are forced at each stage to rely on multiple, justifiable, but often largely untested, assumptions.”

That said, she thinks the new study is solid, and the results broadly make sense. “There is some precedent in previous studies for generally low Aurignacian population estimates,” says French.

Findings like this are a stark reminder of the dramatic differences between life in modern Europe and in the Europe of the Stone Age. “We need to be much better at ‘thinking small’, so to speak,” says French.