The Neolithic transition in Southwest Asia and its subsequent spread toward Europe poses some of the most relevant questions in human history. Shennan proposes a Darwinian approach to the origin and spread of farming by locating fertility and child survival at the center of the system, linking them to farming as the main source of calorie income. The translation from this theoretical background to the interpretation of archaeological data is not explicit in this book, but it can be extracted from its consistent structure. Shennan considers genetic data—together with a (debated) population proxy (namely, summed radiocarbon probability distributions)—combining them with archaeobotanical and archaeozoological data in order to formulate theories about the peaks and troughs of the radiocarbon curve in each particular region. Thus, the book synthetically integrates with admirable command diverse types of data and methodologies.
The book is structured chronologically and geographically, starting with the beginnings of farming in...