2004/05/20 by Richard Cordaux, Deepa Edwin, H. Vishwanathan +1 · 4 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · #Agricultural economics #Agriculture #Archaeology #Biology #Diffusion #Economics #Forensic and Genetic Research #Geography
paper · doi:10.1126/science.1095819
openalex publication_date 2004/05/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23
The process by which agriculture diffused from the Fertile Crescent within the past 10,000 years has been widely discussed, but as yet there is no consensus: Was it mostly a demic diffusion (with massive spread of peo-ple) or rather a cultural diffusion (without substantial migration of people)? The demic diffusion model (1) predicts a substantial ge-netic input from migrating agriculturalists, whereas the cultural diffusion model (2) pre-dicts no major changes at the genetic level. Hence, a way to test these competing hypoth-eses would be to compare genetic variation in traditional agriculturalists, traditional hunter-gatherers, and recent agriculturalists (i.e.,