{"id":39208,"date":"2011-03-29T22:01:17","date_gmt":"2011-03-30T06:01:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=10629"},"modified":"2011-03-29T22:01:17","modified_gmt":"2011-03-30T06:01:17","slug":"the-day-of-the-farmer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2011\/03\/29\/the-day-of-the-farmer\/","title":{"rendered":"The day of the farmer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>About five months ago I read Peter Bellwood&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0631205667\/geneexpressio-20\">First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies<\/a>. Bellwood&#8217;s thesis is simple: <strong>that the first adopters of farming entered into a period of rapid demographic expansion and by and large replaced non-farming groups.<\/strong> The populations which dominate the world today in this model are then the descendants of the very small set of cultures which ~10,000 years ago triggered the Neolithic Revolution. When Bellwood presented his thesis in the mid-2000s many would have dismissed it out of hand. Today I believe we have to take this model seriously.<\/p>\n<p>There are two primary reasons from my perspective why I am now thinking about Bellwood&#8217;s thesis a great deal. First, the archaeogenetic inferences based on distributions of modern allele frequencies which suggested that the Neolithic Revolution in Europe was a matter of cultural diffusion seem\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/2010\/11\/european-man-of-many-faces-cain-vs-abel\/\">far shakier<\/a>. With such genetic models no longer taken for granted the recent historical, semi-historical, and ethnographic evidence, on farming transitions must be given much more weight. The case of the Bantu expansion in Africa seems to be semi-historical. The Bantu farmers themselves were not literate but their wave of advance was in historical time. Tellingly, the Bantu speaking populations &#8230;<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/GeneExpressionBlog\/~4\/cC8DWbL3HUg\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>About five months ago I read Peter Bellwood&#8217;s First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies. Bellwood&#8217;s thesis is simple: that the first adopters of farming entered into a period of rapid demographic expansion and by and large replac&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[101,9,912,4,82,793],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agriculture","category-anthroplogy","category-farmers","category-genetics","category-genomics","category-neolithic-revolution"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39208"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39455,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39208\/revisions\/39455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}