Abstract
The origins of early farming and its spread to Europe have been the subject of major interest for some time. The main controversy today is over the nature of the Neolithic transition in Europe: the extent to which the spread was, for the most part, indigenous and animated by imitation (cultural diffusion) or else was driven by an influx of dispersing populations (demic diffusion). We analyze the spatiotemporal dynamics of the transition using radiocarbon dates from 735 early Neolithic sites in Europe, the Near East, and Anatolia. We compute great-circle and shortest-path distances from each site to 35 possible agricultural centers of origin—ten are based on early sites in the Middle East and 25 are hypothetical locations set at 5° latitude/longitude intervals. We perform a linear fit of distance versus age (and vice versa) for each center. For certain centers, high correlation coefficients (R > 0.8) are obtained. This implies that a steady rate or speed is a good overall approximation for this historical development. The average rate of the Neolithic spread over Europe is 0.6–1.3 km/y (95% confidence interval). This is consistent with the prediction of demic diffusion (0.6–1.1 km/y). An interpolative map of correlation coefficients, obtained by using shortest-path distances, shows that the origins of agriculture were most likely to have occurred in the northern Levantine/Mesopotamian area.
Highlights
The study of the origins of farming in the Near East and its dispersal to Europe has been a subject of major interest to archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists, and geneticists
Eight out of the nine other probable centers of origin of agriculture (POA) have values of R that overlap with the range for Abu Madi (R 1⁄4 0.827 6 0.026, using uncalibrated dates)
The R-values in Table 1 agree well with those reported by Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza [5,7]
Summary
The study of the origins of farming in the Near East and its dispersal to Europe has been a subject of major interest to archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists, and geneticists. The interest in agricultural origins can be traced to Gordon Childe [1], who proposed in 1942 that the Neolithic populations of the Near East were under substantial economic and demographic pressures triggered by marked population growth following the successful development of the Neolithic lifestyle. Clark allocated the few carbon-14 dates available at the time to three temporal classes: Group 1, dates equal to or earlier than 5,200 BC; Group 2, dates between 5,200 and 4,000 BC; and Group 3, dates between 4,000 and 2,800 BC His map shows a basic trend from east to west for the early Neolithic in Europe that is consistent with Childe’s ideas [2]
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