Demographics of Europe
Some current and past factors in European demography have included emigration, ethnic relations, economic immigration, a declining birth rate and an ageing population.
[4][5] According to Volker Heyd, an archaeologist at the University of Helsinki, up to 7 million people lived in Neolithic Europe in 3000 BCE.
If demographic trends keep their pace, its share may fall to around 7% in 2050, but still amounting to 716 million people in absolute numbers, according to the United Nations estimate.
The sub-replacement fertility and high life expectancy in most European states mean a declining and aging population.
High immigration and emigration levels within and from outside the continent are taking place and quickly changing countries, specifically in Western Europe, from a single ethnic group to a multicultural society.
][citation needed] According to different definitions, such as consideration of the concept of Central Europe, the following territories and regions may be subject to various other categorisations aside from geographic conventions.
Mirroring their mostly sub-replacement fertility and high life expectancy, European countries tend to have older populations overall.
[19] The reasons that Italian citizens give for not having children are economic costs, fear of losing their jobs, and lack of services for families.
For example, in the United Kingdom, the 2001 census revealed that over 70% of the population regarded themselves as "Christians" with only 15% professing to have no religion, though the wording of the question has been criticized as "misleading" by the British Humanist Association.
A decrease in religiousness and church attendance in western Europe (especially in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Norway, the Netherlands and Sweden) has been noted.
[31] According to the same survey the religiously unaffiliated make up the majority of the population only in two European countries: Czech Republic (75%) and Estonia (60%).
[33] Pan and Pfeil (2004) count 87 distinct "peoples of Europe", of which 33 form the majority population in at least one sovereign state, while the remaining 54 constitute ethnic minorities.
This family is divided into a number of branches, including Romance, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, Albanian, Celtic, Armenian and Greek.
The Uralic languages, which include Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Udmurt, Mordvin and Sami also have a significant presence in Europe.
Over the prehistoric period there was continuous settlement in Europe, notably by the immediate descendants of the Proto-Indo-Europeans who migrated west after the advent of the Neolithic Revolution.
[39] On the other hand, analyses of the Y chromosome[40][41] and of autosomal diversity[42] have shown a general gradient of genetic similarity running from the southeast to the northwest of the continent.
According to geneticist David Reich, based on ancient human genomes that his laboratory sequenced in 2016, Europeans formed from four West-Eurasian ancestral components in varying degrees: Western Hunter-Gatherers (WHG), Eastern Hunter-Gatherers (EHG), Neolithic Levant farmers and Neolithic Iranian farmers respectively.
^ e: Cyprus is physiographically entirely in Western Asia, but it has strong historical and sociopolitical connections with Europe.
^ k: Armenia is physiographically entirely in Western Asia, but it has strong historical and sociopolitical connections with Europe.
This also includes Georgian estimates for Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two regions that have declared and de facto achieved independence.
The precision of these figure is compromised by the ambiguous geographical extend of Europe and the lack of references for European portions of transcontinental countries.
