Demic and cultural diffusion propagated the Neolithic transition across different regions of Europe

Abstract

The Neolithic transition is the shift from hunting–gathering into farming. About 9000 years ago, the Neolithic transition began to spread from the Near East into Europe, until it reached Northern Europe about 5500 years ago. There are two main models of this spread. The demic model assumes that it was mainly due to the reproduction and dispersal of farmers. The cultural model assumes that European hunter–gatherers become farmers by acquiring domestic plants and animals, as well as knowledge, from neighbouring farmers. Here we use the dates of about 900 archaeological sites to compute a speed map of the spread of the Neolithic transition in Europe. We compare the speed map to the speed ranges predicted by purely demic, demic–cultural and purely cultural models. The comparison indicates that the transition was cultural in Northern Europe, the Alpine region and west of the Black Sea. But demic diffusion was at work in other regions such as the Balkans and Central Europe. Our models can be applied to many other cultural traits. We also propose that genetic data could be gathered and used to measure the demic kernels of Early Neolithic populations. This would lead to an enormous advance in Neolithic spread modelling.

Resilience of small-scale societies’ livelihoods: a framework for studying the transition from food gathering to food production

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Diffusion in the presence of a local attracting factor: Theory and interdisciplinary applications

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Does Environmental Knowledge Inhibit Hominin Dispersal?

“…In most archaeological dispersal models, such as those based on the wave of advance, density-dependence is assumed in terms of the rate of local population growth, but not in terms of mobility (Steele et al 1998;Fort 2015). A more recent approach to dispersal has been to use the assumptions of the ideal free distribution (or a variant known as the ideal despotic distribution), where a dispersing population is assumed to evaluate the local population density compared to the carrying capacity to find the location with the most available resources (e.g., Codding and Jones 2013;O'Connell and Allen 2012;Kennett and Winterhalder 2008).…”