The agricultural “express train”

One model for the spread of the agricultural way of life into Europe is of inexorable “demic diffusion” via a “wave of advance” of farming populations met by a land surplus. Conceptually and analytically it’s an elegant model. It’s also fundamentally methodologically individualistic, and so in keeping with the spirit of the age. There’s no need to appeal to higher order social structure or organization, farmers who have a specific cultural toolkit drive the dynamic through endogenous growth in pre-state cultures through the production of large families.

This growth washes over the frontier of the advance, and the original locus of the demographic pulse synthesizes across a transect with the indigenous substrate.
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Gene Expression