Examining the farming/language dispersal hypothesis

Part I Introduction. 'The Emerging Synthesis': the Archaeogenetics of Farming/Language Dispersals and other Spread Zones (Colin Renfrew); Farmers, Foragers, Languages, Genes: the Genesis of Agricultural Societies (Peter Bellwood). Part II Setting the Scene for the Farming/Language Dispersal Hypothesis. The Expansion Capacity of Early Agricultural Systems: a Comparative Perspective on the Spread of Agriculture (David R Harris); The Economies of Late Pre-farming and Farming Communities and their Relation to the Problem of Dispersals (Mark Nathan Cohen); What Drives Linguistic Diversification and Language Spread? (Lyle Campbell); Inference of Neolithic Population Histories using Y-chromosome Haplotypes (Peter A Underhill); Demic Diffusion as the Basic Process of Human Expansions (Luca Cavalli-Sforza); The DNA Chronology of Prehistoric Human Dispersals (Peter Forster & Colin Renfrew); What Molecules Can't Tell Us about the Spread of Languages and the Neolithic (Hans-Jyrgen Bandelt, Vincent Macaulay & Martin Richards). Part III Regional Studies. A. Western Asia and North Africa. The Natufian Culture and the Early Neolithic: Social and Economic Trends in Southwestern Asia (Ofer Bar-Yosef); Archaeology and Linguistic Diversity in North Africa (Fekri A Hassan); The Prehistory of a Dispersal: the Proto-Afrasian (Afroasiatic) Farming Lexicon (Alexander Militarev); Transitions to Farming and Pastoralism in North Africa (Graeme Barker); Language Family Expansions: Broadening our Understandings of Cause from an African Perspective (Christopher Ehret); Language and Farming Dispersals in Sub-Saharan Africa, with Particular Reference to the Bantu-speaking Peoples (David W Phillipson). B. Asia and Oceania. An Agricultural Perspective on Dravidian Historical Linguistics: Archaeological Crop Packages, Livestock and Dravidian Crop Vocabulary (Dorian Fuller); The Genetics of Language and Farming Spread in India (Toomas Kivisild et al); Languages and Farming Dispersals: Austroasiatic Languages and Rice Cultivation (Charles Higham); Tibeto-Burman Phylogeny and Prehistory: Languages, Material Culture and Genes (George van Driem); The Austronesian Dispersal: Languages, Technologies and People (Andrew Pawley); Island Southeast Asia: Spread or Friction Zone? (Victor Paz); Polynesians: Devolved Taiwanese Rice Farmers or Wallacean Maritime Traders with Fishing, Foraging and Horticultural Skills? (Stephen Oppenheimer & Martin Richards); Can the Hypothesis of Language/Agriculture Co-dispersal be Tested with Archaeogenetics? (Matthew Hurles); Agriculture and Language Change in the Japanese Islands (Mark Hudson). C. Mesoamerica and the US Southwest. Contextualizing Proto-languages, Homelands and Distant Genetic Relationship: Some Reflections on the Comparative Method from a Mesoamerican Perspective (Ssren Wichmann); 26 Proto-Uto-Aztecan Cultivation and the Northern Devolution (Jane H Hill); The Spread of Maize Agriculture in the U.S. Southwest (R G Matson); Conflict and Language Dispersal: Issues and a New World Example (Steven A LeBlanc). D. Europe. Issues of Scale and Symbiosis: Unpicking the Agricultural 'Package' (Martin Jones); Demography and Dispersal of Early Farming Populations at the MesolithicNeolithic Transition: Linguistic and Genetic Implications (Marek Zvelebil); Pioneer Farmers: The Neolithic Transition in Western Europe (Chris Scarre); Farming Dispersal in Europe and the Spread of the Indo-European Language Family (Bernard Comrie); DNA Variation in Europe: Estimating the Demographic Impact of Neolithic Dispersals (Guido Barbujani & Isabelle Dupanloup); Admixture and the Demic Diffusion Model in Europe (Lounes Chikhi); Complex Signals for Population Expansions in Europe and Beyond (Kristiina Tambets et al); Analyzing Genetic Data in a Model-based Framework: Inferences about European Prehistory (Martin Richards, Vincent Macaulay & Hans-Jyrgen Bandelt). Postscript. Concluding Observations (Peter Bellwood & Colin Renfrew).