Tomenable;457845]Farming was "invented" just in a few hotspots scattered throughout the world. It later spread not only through migrations of farmers, but also through cultural exchange. Just like gunpowder reached Europe not because Chinese people with gunpowder colonized Europe, but because the Mongols got it from the Chinese, the Muslims got it from the Mongols, and the Crusaders got it from the Muslims.
The example of farmer-hunter interaction patterns that you give, is from the 20th century - right?
Human interactions are complex and different in each instance. They cannot be reduced to a simple repetitive pattern
No, not always, but in this case the genetics proves that the ancient pattern was the same as the modern one.
For the past hundred years many archaeologists held that agriculture spread in Europe because hunter gatherers adopted farming mainly through cultural diffusion, like adopting the use of gunpowder, as you say, and there was basically population continuity, but ancient dna proves that this wasn't the case. Farming was
not spread by cultural diffusion. It was spread by
people.
As I said above, the people in the European Neolithic communities were
totally different autosomally from the hunter-gatherers who had previously lived in those areas. Even the Neolithic men and women who carried hunter gatherer uniparental markers were autosomally Near Eastern farmers. A few hunter-gatherers were absorbed, and the rest died or fled to marginal land or lived in isolated communities. They didn't adopt farming. If they had we would be finding farming communities of autosomally Loschbour like people.
The ancient pattern is the same as the modern pattern. [/QUOTE]
And not just unwanted for sure.
Both exchanging females between 'tribes' and kidnapping females from other 'tribes' are practices dating back to prehistory.
Also 'expelling' excess males to other tribes is an ancient practice. Depending on mating patterns in local cultures, either 'excess' males or females leave a tribe and move to another tribe. The necessity of mixing 'blood' to avoid too much inbreeding was understood.
And I see no reason why farmers would exchange 'blood' only with other farmers and not with neighbouring hunters.
There are also many opportunities for cooperation between hunters and farmers - we could see that in the Americas.
HGs would trade animal-derived and 'gathered' products to farmers, in exchange for pottery, other items and food.
Yes, I know HGs would trade. The Amerindians would trade furs and sometimes food with the settlers for cloth and beads and metal tools and weapons. They still eventually got shunted on to marginal land, on the so called "reservations", or they lived as hangers on around European settlements. As to bride exchange, European settlers were certainly not eager to send their daughters to live in Indian camps, and even taking Indian women was only acceptable in the initial settlement periods when the settlers were often mostly men. Once the numbers started to really grow and women arrived, a type of apartheid started to be imposed. You see the same situation in places like South Africa as well as Latin America. When the Dutch arrived at the Cape they were mostly men. They took native women. Some of those children admixed with each other, forming the Coloured community. Some of them admixed into the thousands of Dutch settlers who started arriving. That's why you have "white" Afrikaners who find to their surprise that they carry an "African" mtDna or more rarely yDna, or a few percent of SSA autosomally. Admixture between the Dutch settlers and the "natives" became more and more rare.
None of us can know exactly what happened in pre-historic Europe, but we have the evidence of these kinds of interactions throughout history, and now we have ancient Dna, and they agree. Was there some incorporation of hunter gatherer dna? Yes, there was. I think it probably took place upon the initial encounter, but there's nothing to indicate that it was extensive and ongoing. Regardless, if there were a lot of hunter-gatherers around who adopted farming on their own there should be some sign of it in the form of communities of Loschbour like people who took up farming, and we haven't found it yet.
