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The earliest farmers in Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Tjeerd H. van Andel and
Curtis N. Runnels
Tjeerd H. van Andel
Affiliation:
Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EQ, England
Curtis N. Runnels
Affiliation:
Department of Archaeology, Boston University, 675 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston MA 02215, USA
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Some 9000 years ago the first European farmers established themselves in the empty plains of Thessaly, the only region in Greece that provided a reasonably assured harvest and was large enough for significant population growth. They flourished there and after more than a thousand years spread to the Balkans and beyond. The recognition that their success may have depended on the natural irrigation of river and lake floodplains leads us to a modified version of the wave-of-advance model of demic diffusion.

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Antiquity , Volume 69 , Issue 264 , September 1995, pp. 481 - 500
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Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd. 1995

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