BEAN: Bridging the European and Anatolian Neolithic

Demographic processes, including migration, population growth and decline, and admixture have been shown not only to affect patterns of genetic variation, but also the accumulation and distribution of culturally inherited traits. It is therefore to be expected that both genetic and cultural data contain information on the shared population histories and processes that have shaped them. Recent advances in modelling cultural evolutionary processes have drawn heavily on the "neutral model" in population genetics, and have been widely applied to explain typological variation in many archaeological and cultural datasets. Furthermore, through the application of newly developed statistical inference methods such as approximate Bayesian computation (ABC), which rely on comparisons of simulated and observed datasets, and models that incorporate both genetic and cultural processes, it is possible to infer population histories and evolutionary trajectories, and to explicitly compare different competing hypotheses. Critically, this latter approach allows the formal integration of both cultural and biological data on an equal footing in a coherent statistical framework for the first time.

By considering genetic (Bradley and Burger) and cultural (Shennan and Karul) data generated by network partners, the ESR in this project will test a range of different hypotheses on the spread of Neolithic people and lifeways from the Near East to Europe around 7,000 years ago. Genetic data will include both ancient and modern human DNA, and cultural data will include information on the frequencies of different pottery and other artefact styles through time. Genetic variation will be analysed using serial coalescent approaches, which allows the incorporation of ancient DNA data from different time periods with modern genetic data. The distribution of culturally inherited traits through time will be studied using a newly developed neutral model. This approach uses a generation time-independent Moran process to overcome many of the unrealistic assumptions of previous neutral models of cultural change and incorporates factors such as population size and structure. In addition to looking at changes in the frequencies of specific artefact types through time, we will also consider archaeological proxies for overall accumulation of cultural complexity using the cultural transmission model described by Powell et al.. We will generate expectations of genetic and cultural data under the same range of demographic scenarios and compare these different hypotheses using ABC, which rests on the ability to generate simulated data from models that describe realistic demographic scenarios. The model will incorporate genetic and cultural data generated by partner ESRs and ERs, and the predictions of the model will be used to test the strength of the correlation between the genetic and material culture correlates of the Neolithic expansion.