title: Space competition and time delays in human range expansions. Application to the neolithic transition.
abstract: Space competition effects are well-known in many microbiological and ecological systems. Here we analyze such an effect in human populations. The Neolithic transition (change from foraging to farming) was mainly the outcome of a demographic process that spread gradually throughout Europe from the Near East. In Northern Europe, archaeological data show a slowdown on the Neolithic rate of spread that can be related to a high indigenous (Mesolithic) population density hindering the advance as a result of the space competition between the two populations. We measure this slowdown from a database of 902 Early Neolithic sites and develop a time-delayed reaction-diffusion model with space competition between Neolithic and Mesolithic populations, to predict the observed speeds. The comparison of the predicted speed with the observations and with a previous non-delayed model show that both effects, the time delay effect due to the generation lag and the space competition between populations, are crucial in order to understand the observations.
authors.affiliation: Departament de Prehistòria, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain. Neus.Isern@uab.cat
authors.forename: Neus
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Isern
authors.forename: Joaquim
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Fort
authors.forename: Marc
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Vander Linden
mesh_terms: D003163:Competitive Behavior; D063426:Human Migration; D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical