Physics News Update
The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News
Number 408
(Story #2), December 23, 1998 by Phillip F. Schewe and
Ben Stein
THE NEOLITHIC TRANSITION IN EUROPE.
Human behavior is much more complicated than the behavior of atoms, liquids,
or planets. Nevertheless, physicists and mathematicians have attempted
to apply their equations in the social sphere; recent examples recounted
in Physics News Update include such topics as the arms race (Update
403), economics (Update
395), bird flocking (Update
395), and the making of group decisions (Update
385). Now two Spanish physicists have applied diffusion/reaction equations---
governing, say, the diffusion of one fluid through another with due allowance
for chemical reactions along the way---to the diffusion of agricultural
technology into Europe in the early centuries of the Neolithic epoch roughly
10,000 years ago. Such an effort had been tried before, but the model predictions
poorly matched the observed anthropological, linguistic, and genetic data.
According to Joaquim Fort of the University of Girona (jfort@watt.udg.es,
011-34-972-418-490), a much better match can be achieved by using equations
with additional "time-delay" terms of the type used successfully to model
the spread of forest fires and epidemics. In the case of human migration
a time delay factor would reflect the fact that generally the offspring
of migrating farmers must grow to adulthood before they themselves "diffuse"
outwards. Fort believes that mathematical modeling will become even more
important to anthropology and history, but only in concert with high-quality
data from fieldwork. (Fort
and Mendez, Physical Review Letters, 25 Jan 1999; see also Scientific
American, Oct 1990; see figure
at Physics News Graphics.)
