How human connections shaped the spread of farming among ancient communities

By Javier Rivas, Senior Lecturer in Economics, University of Bath
Alfredo Cortell, Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

If you’ve ever wondered how farming spread far and wide, our research on past human societies offers one explanation: contact between different groups often drives change.

In a recent paper, together with our colleagues Enrico R. Crema, Stephen Shennan and Oreto García-Puchol among others, we used a mathematical model to analyse what happens when communities with different cultures interact.

We used a model from predator-prey equations that usually describe how animal populations compete. Our…

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