ArticleNature human behaviour2020
Climate shaped how Neolithic farmers and European hunter-gatherers interacted after a major slowdown from 6,100 BCE to 4,500 BCE.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Climate-associated natural selection in the human mitochondrial genome.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Modeling the European Neolithic expansion suggests predominant within-group mating and limited cultural transmission.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Local increases in admixture with hunter-gatherers followed the initial expansion of Neolithic farmers across continental Europe.Science advances · 2025Article
- Reconstruction of the human amylase locus reveals ancient duplications seeding modern-day variation.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2024Article
- Interbreeding between farmers and hunter-gatherers along the inland and Mediterranean routes of Neolithic spread in Europe.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Socio-cultural practices may have affected sex differences in stature in Early Neolithic Europe.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Population genomics of post-glacial western Eurasia.Nature · 2024Article
- Explaining population booms and busts in Mid-Holocene Europe.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Dairying and the evolution and consequences of lactase persistence in humans.Animal frontiers : the review magazine of animal agriculture · 2023Article
- The transmission of pottery technology among prehistoric European hunter-gatherers.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
- Long-term trends in human body size track regional variation in subsistence transitions and growth acceleration linked to dairying.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Bayesian analyses of direct radiocarbon dates reveal geographic variations in the rate of rice farming dispersal in prehistoric Japan.Science advances · 2022Article
- Holocene vegetation, fire and land use dynamics at Lake Svityaz, an agriculturally marginal site in northwestern Ukraine.Vegetation history and archaeobotany · 2022Article
- Evolution of Lactase Persistence: Turbo-Charging Adaptation in Growth Under the Selective Pressure of Maternal Mortality?Frontiers in physiology · 2021Article
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13 authors.
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Abstract
The Neolithic transition in Europe was driven by the rapid dispersal of Near Eastern farmers who, over a period of 3,500 years, brought food production to the furthest corners of the continent. However, this wave of expansion was far from homogeneous, and climatic factors may have driven a marked slowdown observed at higher latitudes. Here, we test this hypothesis by assembling a large database of archaeological dates of first arrival of farming to quantify the expansion dynamics. We identify four axes of expansion and observe a slowdown along three axes when crossing the same climatic threshold. This threshold reflects the quality of the growing season, suggesting that Near Eastern crops might have struggled under more challenging climatic conditions. This same threshold also predicts the mixing of farmers and hunter-gatherers as estimated from ancient DNA, suggesting that unreliable yields in these regions might have favoured the contact between the two groups.
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