Multiple sources of the European Neolithic: Mathematical modelling constrained by radiocarbon dates

Modelling the Neolithic transition in a heterogeneous environment

“…In the current model, the same diffusion constant was used for both farmers and hunter-gatherers, despite some reasons for expecting a higher value for hunter-gatherers (see Section 3). Davison et al (2009) adopted D ¼ U 2 /(4g) z 90 km 2 /yr for huntergatherers using the speed of the spread of pottery making in Eastern Europe, U ¼ 1.6 km/yr (Dolukhanov et al, 2005;Davison et al, 2009) and the growth rate g ¼ 0.007 yr À1 . This value is 15 times larger than that used here (Table 1), and 7 times larger than the diffusivity usually adopted for the Neolithic farming populations in Western Europe.…”

The Spread of the Neolithic in the South East European Plain: Radiocarbon Chronology, Subsistence, and Environment

“…More sophisticated procedures are required, but there are no universally adopted procedures of this kind. The approach used in this paper is detailed below (see Davison et al 2009 for a detailed discussion).…”

Trends in Archaeological Simulation

“…As already noted, in the 1990s several researchers extended this approach to model population growth and dispersal across lattices (Young and Bettinger 1995;Steele et al 1996Steele et al , 1998. Since 2000 this approach 5 has been applied to the Neolithic spread of agriculture in Europe in at least nine studies (Pinhasi et al 2005;Davison et al 2006;Ackland et al 2007;Fort et al 2008;Davison et al 2009;Patterson et al 2010;Pérez-Losada and Fort 2011;Fort 2012;Fort et al 2012). Other applications include the late glacial recolonisation of northern Europe (Fort et al 2004), the colonisation of the western Pacific (Fort 2003), the diffusion of Clovis projectiles in late glacial North America (Hamilton and Buchanan 2007), and the rather more recent spread of European American settlers (Campos et al 2006;Fort and Pujol 2007).…”