The Dispersals of Established Food-producing Populations: (Rethinking the origins of Agriculture)

Abstract

This paper offers a perspective on the spread of early food-producing populations, with their crops, animals, other cultural attributes, languages, and genes. A multidisciplinary approach is taken in which perspectives from different disciplines (especially archaeology and comparative linguistics in this instance) are used for what L. Fogelin recently called "inference to the best explanation." It is suggested that once food production was firmly established in noncircumscribed circumstances in many parts of the world, with transportable domesticated crops and animals, human population dispersals would have occurred. These dispersals reorganized a great deal of human diversity in language and biology, especially in the Neolithic or Formative phases of regional prehistory. Show more