The UMMAA Brown Bag Lecture Series is pleased to present a lecture by Dr. Albert Ammerman, Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, Venice, Italy. Ammerman’s lecture, The Neolithic Transition in Europe at 50 Years, will be held on Thursday, January 18, 12-1 p.m. in Room 2225 in the School of Education Building.
The research that would bring archaeology and human genetics together for the first time began with a seminar at the University of Pavia in 1970. Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Dr. Ammerman measured the average rate of spread of early farming over Europe and published it in 1971. They then put forward the wave of advance model (after R. A. Fisher) and the hypothesis of demic diffusion to explain the long and slow expansion of agro-pastoralism from Anatolia to Scandinavia. Between 1972 and 1977, they both taught in the new Program in Human Biology at Stanford University and initiated a wide range of studies leading to their book, The Neolithic Transition in Europe (1984). A second book, The Widening Harvest, appeared in 2004. In 2005, they measured the rate of spread again and came up with the same result. But, on the genetic side, the research was extremely expensive and moved at a slow pace until the just right bone (rich in DNA) was found in 2013.
Text is available at https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2012.11713
The Museum's Brown Bag Lecture Series is free and open to the public.
