Submitted by Michela Leonardi on Tue, 07/07/2020 - 08:08
Our group just published a new paper in Nature Human Behaviour. It analyses radiocarbon dates, palaeoclimatic reconstructions and ancient DNA to show how climate shaped the expansion of Neolithic farmers in Europe and their interaction with local hunter-gatherers.
Lia Betti, Robert M. Beyer, Eppie R. Jones, Anders Eriksson, Francesca Tassi, Veronika Siska, Michela Leonardi, Pierpaolo Maisano Delser, Lily K. Bentley, Philip R. Nigst, Jay T. Stock, Ron Pinhasi, Andrea Manica (2020) Climate shaped how Neolithic farmers and European hunter-gatherers interacted after a major slowdown from 6,100 BCE to 4,500 BCE. Nature Human Behaviour 4, 1004–1010.
Abstract
The Neolithic transition in Europe was driven by the rapid dispersal of Near Eastern farmers who, over a period of 3,500 years, brought food production to the furthest corners of the continent. However, this wave of expansion was far from homogeneous, and climatic factors may have driven a marked slowdown observed at higher latitudes. Here, we test this hypothesis by assembling a large database of archaeological dates of first arrival of farming to quantify the expansion dynamics. We identify four axes of expansion and observe a slowdown along three axes when crossing the same climatic threshold. This threshold reflects the quality of the growing season, suggesting that Near Eastern crops might have struggled under more challenging climatic conditions. This same threshold also predicts the mixing of farmers and hunter-gatherers as estimated from ancient DNA, suggesting that unreliable yields in these regions might have favoured the contact between the two groups.