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Yeah, the situation with the European neolithic transition is one where there's a substantial amount of population discontinuity and people are partial to repla
by AlotOfReading 3y ago
Yeah, the situation with the European neolithic transition is one where there's a substantial amount of population discontinuity and people are partial to replacement specifically, though there's still some debate as to the exact nature and timeline of that replacement. For example, I've excavated areas with centuries of coexistence between foragers and early sedentary farmers during the neolithic transition, which makes the more universally violent replacement theories look a bit suspect. This is very a feature particular to Europe and older theories (~70s-90s) though and not common to modern Asian, or Americanist archaeologists.
As an aside, Cavalli-Sforza was a legendary figure, but a lot of this stuff has benefited from powerful new tools like eDNA and effective aDNA that he never had much of a chance to speak on.
For Kohler's paper, I'd point to the summary as a better example of what I was trying to communicate:
Evidently, though, powerful blending forces were also at work. These included local exogamy, which, on the borders of linguistic groups, led to blending, movement of traders among increasingly sedentary groups, movements forced on populations increasingly reliant on agriculture by changing climates, and movements forced on increasingly large and sedentary groups by anthropogenic depression of local resources. One of my goals in this article has been to add convergent evolution to this list. This would have been driven by adaptive considerations, possibly bootstrapped by additional blending processes such as indirectly biased cultural transmission across groups (Mesoudi and O’Brien 2008). Together, these blending forces created the Pueblo culture area and Sprachbund.
The Pueblo cultural area isn't particularly unique in this respect. There's been a broad complexification of transition theories in archaeology, where specific common explanations are subsumed by everything everywhere all at once. Population replacement in particular has gone from being the default explanation for every new archaeological horizon to being a much more localized, one-of-many explanation.
- wolverine876 3y agoThank you for sharing your expertise!