Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel’s contributions to paleodemography

Bocquet-Appel’s most highly cited work was his article with Claude Masset published in 1982 in the Journal of Human Evolution: “Farewell to paleodemography.” Indeed, this article has been cited over twice as much as Bocquet-Appel’s second most cited article (“When the world’s population took off”) from the journal Science. While on the surface Bocquet-Appel and Masset’s “Farewell” might be taken as a literal adieu, the article functioned as a clarion call for a paradigm shift in paleodemography. The article pointed out a problem later to be known as “age mimicry,” it questioned the statistical basis for age estimation in paleodemography, and it introduced new demographic estimators that were related to life table parameters while being relatively resistant to biases. Had Bocquet-Appel simply stopped at this point, his contributions to paleodemography would have been substantial. Instead, he continued to publish and push for improvements in paleodemographic methods. While others toiled on maximum likelihood methods, Bocquet-Appel was at the vanguard of those developing Bayesian methods in paleodemography. Although these Bayesian methods were crystalized by others, it is questionable whether they would have done so without Bocquet-Appel’s work in and following his “Farewell to paleodemography” with Masset.