TITLE:  "Ecological and Evolutionary Modeling Shed Light into the Evolution and Spread of Human Agriculture"

SPEAKER: Carlos A. Botero, Washington University in Saint Louis

ABTRACT: Modern humans existed for at least 200K years as hunter-gatherers before developing agriculture. However, around 12KYA a few societies around the world figured out how to domesticate plants and animals, forever altering our ecology and way of life. My talk will cover how my team is taking advantage of recent advances in cultural phylogenetics, computational biology, and evolutionary ecology to quantitatively test a variety of mechanistic hypotheses related to the origin and spread of agriculture. Specifically, I will discuss how we (1) hindcasted population dynamics of hunter-gatherers to evaluate whether agriculture most likely originated in times of need versus surplus; (2) used climate niche modeling to evaluate whether the 11 to 19 areas of origin of agriculture were somehow different than other places concurrently inhabited by humans; (3) investigated how environmental and geographic barriers may have significantly delayed the spread of agriculture in Africa and the Americas as compared to Eurasia; and (4) used machine leaning to evaluate whether the rapid spread of agriculture was primarily enabled by war, cultural diffusion, or both.