Research published today, Friday, 3 December 2010, inNew Journal of Physics, details a physical model, which can potentially explain how the spreading of Neolithic farmers was slowed down by thepopulationdensity of hunter-gatherers.
The researchers from Girona, in Catalonia, Spain, use a reaction-diffusion model, which explains the relation between population growth and available space, taking into account the directional space dependency of the established Mesolithic population density.
The findings confirm archeological data, which shows that the slowdown in the spreading of farming communities was not, as often assumed, the result of crops needing to adapt to chillier climates, but indeed a consequence of the struggle for space with prevalent hunter-gatherer communities.
In the future, the researchers' model could be used for further physical modeling of socioeconomic transitions in the history of humanity. As the researchers write,"Themodelpresented in this work could be applied to many examples of invasion fronts in which the indigenous population and the invasive one compete for space in a single biological niche, both in natural habitats and in microbiological assays."
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