Rudzinski, Anna; (2020) Model-based approaches to investigating spread and productivity of Neolithic domesticates. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

The domestication of plants and animals during the Neolithic transition marks one of the most important changes in human ecology in the last 300,000 years. Whilst there is a considerable literature on the archaeology of domestic plants and animals, analyses tend to be descriptive and formal model-based inference on the processes of spread and the economic value of those domesticates are less common. In this research, I developed a model-based approach to inferring the location of origin of a population, based upon the expected monotonic decrease in genetic diversity with distance from origin location, and applied this method to data from broomcorn millet across Eurasia, African pearl millet, taro in Africa, the Pacific rat and three endemic species from the island of Sulawesi. I also developed two approaches to analysing age-at-death data from caprines. The first uses the Dirichlet distribution to infer caprine herd sustainability parameters. The second is a full Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo method for inferring herd sustainability and economic productivity of caprine herds. Under the assumptions of the latter model, I infer a general improvement in the economic productivity of caprine herd slaughter management strategies throughout the Neolithic and into the Middle Ages

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