The spread of farming into Central Europe and its consequences: evolutionary models

Introduction The use of Darwinian evolutionary models to understand patterns of social, economic and cultural change in the prehistoric past is becoming increasingly well established [e.g. 35, 22, 11, 21, 23, 15, 32]. However, it remains the subject of many misconceptions [e.g. 19], both because of the erroneous assumptions that those unfamiliar with evolutionary theory bring to their reading of the evolutionary literature, and also because of the inherent complexity of the whole endeavour. The complexity is unsurprising in the light of the history of biology over the past 150 years where the substantive and philosophical implications of Darwinism continue to ramify [e.g. 16]. In the case of the application of these ideas to the study of human societies and their history we are far nearer the beginning of the process of developing appropriate theory and the subject matter is more complex (although there are increasing suggestions that the complexity of inheritance in animal populations has been underestimated [e.g. 20, 10, 16]. Moreover, different topics call on different aspects of evolutionary theory.