The Diffusion of People and Cultures in the Course of the Spread of Farming

Abstract

The spread of farming into Europe some 9000–5000 years ago involved not only the advent of new plants and animals, but also of people, tools, technologies, and knowledge. While they all can be assumed to follow Fickian diffusion gradients, the mechanisms of spread can be quite different: when people migrate, there is mass balance in the number of people, but not in the knowledge and technologies brought along. Tools, plants, and animals could also travel by exchange, knowledge, and technology by communication; there might even be local resistance to adoption of novelty. This chapter discusses these different diffusion mechanisms in the context of numerical trait- and agent-based socio-environmental modeling of the spread of farming.