Surfing with the Alien Simulating and Testing the Spread of Early Farming across the Adriatic Basin

The spread of animal and plant domesticates across Europe offers a good laboratory of the many fortunes of migration and mobility in archaeology. From all mighty deus ex machina during the culture-historical days, to conceptual monstrosity throughout the late twentieth century A.D., human mobility has experienced a recent revival under the impetus of new scientific techniques, especially stable isotopes (Sr, O), and ancient DNA. In this sense, if the-partial-link between the new domesticates and migrants is warranted in several instances, the scale and cultural impact (i.e., how much does this help us to understand the period) of early Neolithic human mobility remains extensively debated. After a brief review of the existing aDNA evidence and of the C-14 record, considered as an alternative population proxy, this paper assesses the temporal variation of the Early and Late Neolithic of the Adriatic basin. We first devise an agent-based model (ABM) simulating the spread of a population and concomitant changes in its cultural diversity. The results of this ABM provide as many hypotheses, which are then tested against the archaeological record, with a focus on zooarchaeological remains.