During the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were faced with a multitude of adversities, which included changing land- scapes, climate upheavals and rising sea levels. In the following Neolithic period this only partially stabilized. The first farming communities entering Belgium encountered poor soils and more climatic downturns, which put a limit and strain on the size and the spread of populations. We studied this in the western half of the Scheldt drainage basin in western Belgium and northern France. The area has been extensively studied during the preceding decades, mainly through developer-led archaeology, which lead to the discovery of hundreds of sites, both through intensive prospection campaigns and through excavations. A large number of these sites have been subject to extensive dating efforts. Through the use of summed radiocarbon probability distributions and site counts, the paleo-demographic dynamics can be reconstructed in order to better understand if the first farming communities were able to weather short-term climate events and other difficulties. Both popular methods have proven to be successful in gaining more insight into population dynamics, yet both have their drawbacks. By comparing and contrasting the results, the validity of both models can be tested, together with the impact of site taphonomy and changing building traditions. Following careful critical selection of the data we fit MCMC- and KDE-models on the summed probability distribu- tions, and utilize raw count and aoristic weighing of the settlement data to form a preliminary model of demographic evolutions within the study area for the Neolithic period and the beginning of the Bronze Age against the background of climate and environmental changes.