A carregar...
Publicação
Neolithic transitions: can genetic data help us understand a major demographic event in human prehistory?
| Nome: | Descrição: | Tamanho: | Formato: | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10.76 MB | Adobe PDF |
Autores
Orientador(es)
Resumo(s)
The Neolithic transition is probably the most important cultural, economic
and demographic revolution in human prehistory. It profoundly
modified the distribution of human genes, languages and cultures worldwide.
However, the study of the transition from hunting and gathering
to farming societies has generated major controversies among archaeologists
and geneticists alike, with one side favouring demic diffusion
models and the other the cultural diffusion models. As a first approximation
two alternative demographic scenarios can be considered. Under
the cultural diffusion models the transition to agriculture is regarded essentially
as a cultural phenomenon, involving the movement of ideas
and practices, rather than people. In the demic diffusion models, a
movement of people is involved. It can be shown that both models
can be seen as special cases of an admixture model between Palaeolithic/
Mesolithic and Neolithic populations. In this thesis, I used nonequilibrium
and spatial admixture model approaches to help answer this
long-standing controversy. I showed that demic diffusion models better
explain the patterns of genetic diversity found in today’s European and
Japanese populations, but I do not rule out the role of cultural processes locally. (...)
Descrição
Dissertation presented to obtain the Ph.D degree in Biology
Palavras-chave
Contexto Educativo
Citação
Editora
Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Instituto de Tecnologia Química e Biológica