serendipityoucity

One little article on DNA mapping got me looking up the following definitions, which would’nt you know it, led me serendipityously to technological determinism!  I was however just trying to tie this article in with notions of identity and home!  Lets see where this takes me!

Archeological diffusionists say that

cultures influenced one another and that certain artefact design styles moved from one society to another through trade, social links, migration or invasion, in a process of diffusion.

Indigenism

emphasises local invention together with diffusion of ideas, rather than people.

Paleolithic

was the first period in the development of human technology of the Stone Age. It began with the introduction of the first stone tools by hominids such as Homo habilis (around 2,000,000 years ago) and lasted until the introduction of agriculture. 

Mesolithic

was a period in the development of human technology between the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods of the Stone Age.

Neolithic

refers to a suite of behavioural and cultural characteristics including the use of (both wild and domestic) crops and the use of domesticated animals.

It is the tail end of the stoneage (a term - along with Bronze and Iron age - critiqued for its technological deterministic explanation of culture!).  It is the time characterized as the beginning of farming and ending with the development of metal tools.  Depending on geography, between 4500 and 7000 BC.

Some geneticists have mapped/plotted gene frequency patterns with the spread agricultural patterns and found that they match.  Data supporting the diffusionists.

It also seems that people can leave their ideas & tools overtime but not their genes.  Yup, it seems that the Palaeolithic populations of Europe came up with their own form of agriculture, but did not leave a genetic trace.  Seems like a study of the DNA from 7,500-year-old skeletons of the first European farmers yielded some surprises,

the scientists found that a quarter of the skeletons yielded a very rare DNA type that is hardly found at all among modern Europeans.

What is also interesting, is assumptions of who were farmers.  Once scientist was suggesting that only males farmed and this genetic study of the female line was flawed. 

Dunno! Thought threads!