Biweekly Colloquium: “Dispersal 2.0: Population History and the Spread of Early Farming in Europe”
Dec 07, 2020 from 04:15 PM to 05:45 PM
virtual meeting
Marc Vander Linden • University of Cambridge
Dispersal 2.0: Population History and the Spread of Early Farming in Europe
Despite extensive coverage in academic and popular media, the reports of the solution to the spread of farming have been greatly exaggerated. Namely, whilst recent aDNA research has indeed demonstrated the long-suggested link between population movement and the introduction of plant and animal domesticates across Europe, our understanding of how this process actually happened remains surprisingly limited. What factors were shaping the demographic expansion of this population? How much ecological and environmental parameters did influence this expansion and the known spatio-temporal in agricultural practices? To what extent local foraging communities were involved? This lecture will tackle some of these questions by focusing on the early Holocene sequence in the western Balkans and Adriatic basin, by discussing results gained from fieldwork, synthetic appraisal of museum collections and literature, and computational approaches undertaken as part of a recently completed ERC project.
