Abstract
Human expansions motivated by the spread of farming are one of the most important processes that shaped cultural geographies during the Holocene. The best known example of this phenomenon is the Neolithic expansion in Europe, but parallels in other parts of the globe have recently come into focus. Here, we examine the expansion of four archaeological cultures of widespread distribution in lowland South America, most of which originated in or around the Amazon basin and spread during the late Holocene with the practice of tropical forest agriculture. We analyze spatial gradients in radiocarbon dates of each culture through space-time regressions, allowing us to establish the most likely geographical origin, time and speed of expansion. To further assess the feasibility of demic diffusion as the process behind the archaeological expansions in question, we employ agent-based simulations with demographic parameters derived from the ethnography of tropical forest farmers. We find that, while some expansions can be realistically modeled as demographic processes, others are not easily explainable in the same manner, which is possibly due to different processes driving their dispersal (e.g. cultural diffusion) or problematic/incomplete archaeological data.
Highlights
Following the successful colonization of the globe by our species, new waves of human expansion happened during the Holocene, reshaping cultural, linguistic and genetic landscapes worldwide [1,2,3]
The demographic and technological advantages offered by the onset of agriculture as drivers of Holocene cultural expansions are supported by the distribution of the largest language families of the world, as summarized in the Farming-Language Dispersal Hypothesis (FLDH) [5]
The sites that yielded the highest coefficients as hypothetical origins tended to be clustered in the same regions and close to the sites with the earliest dates, suggesting that the geographical origin of each archaeological expansion can be identified with reasonable certainty–namely, the Orinoco for Saladoid-Barrancoid and Incised-Punctate, eastern Amazon for Tupiguarani, and central Brazil for Una (Fig 4)
Summary
Following the successful colonization of the globe by our species, new waves of human expansion happened during the Holocene, reshaping cultural, linguistic and genetic landscapes worldwide [1,2,3]. Such expansions may have been triggered by the emergence of food production economies and associated increases in population growth rate [4]. According to the FLDH, the uneven distribution of language families in the world is explained as a consequence of population growth of farmers and their subsequent expansion from early domestication.
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