This chapter considers the LBK in south-western Germany, which is an ideal study area regarding questions of community diversity, because it was at or near the frontier zone between foragers and farmers for centuries, c. 5500–5200 cal bc. The presence of shell-tempered, La Hoguette pottery in terminal Mesolithic contexts in Alsace indicates that indigenous groups were at least in indirect contact with Neolithic (probably Cardial) communities, even if it is debatable whether La Hoguette predates the earliest LBK in southern Germany. Flint from the Paris Basin and the Maas Valley of the Netherlands, each well within Mesolithic territory during the early LBK, are found in LBK contexts in the Rhine valley, at sites such as Bruchenbrücken, Zimmersheim, Ensisheim, Bischoffsheim, and Spechbach–Le-Bas. At Bruchenbrücken, the earliest LBK blades have faceted striking platforms with a 70° angle between the striking platform and the dorsal ridge, which is common on Mesolithic blades from the Paris Basin, but not in Earliest LBK blades elsewhere, for which 90° was the norm. In addition, a pointed base vessel recently discovered at the LBK site of Rosheim in Alsace may derive from the Ertebølle culture or even possibly the Russian steppes.

Rational models are psychologically unrealistic….. the central characteristic of agents is not that they reason poorly, but that they often act intuitively. And the behavior of these agents is not guided by what they are able to compute, but by what they happen to see at a given moment'-Daniel Kahneman, Nobel economics lecture, 2003

Evidence is growing that in many markets consumers select not simply on the basis of the perceived attributes of products, but their preferences are modified by the behaviour of others. Economists have paid relatively little attention to such markets. We consider evidence from the activity of hill‐walking. The Munros are a list of Scottish hills over 3000 feet in height. We analyse completions of both the Munros themselves, and the Munro Tops, a difficult and time‐consuming extension of the Munros. The classic Bass diffusion model incorporates the imitation of others as a part of the behavioural rules used by consumers in making choice. We extend the Bass model to be able to apply it to long‐term case studies where substantial changes over time in the population making choices at any given point have to be taken into account. The Munros are a particular illustration of this, but the extension can be used in other situations where such population changes are important. Our results show that Top completions are dominated by the ‘fashion’ component, suggesting there was a cohort among which Tops completions became fashionable, but which has not been sustained. Both our extended model and the standard model can account for this. In contrast, our extension is needed to explain why Munro completions have remained close to their peak level for a decade now, a fact for which the standard Bass model is unable to account.

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