Fig. 1.

Median vertical distances to the nearest watercourses throughout 9 centuries. A comparison between the median vertical distances of newly established settlements (black squares) in the four situations (within and outside the Vltava region up to 25 years before and up to 50 years after flood disasters) and the range of randomly generated points (shaded areas) in the same areas and periods shows that people were strongly attracted towards watercourses. A dashed line refers to a statistically significant trend (see Results). The value before the third flood outside the Vltava was 34 m and lies beyond the presented limit. The variance in vertical distances of randomly generated points may be affected by the different sample size used for the simulation (see Methods section and Supplementary Table 1)