  Farming and herding were introduced to Europe from the Near East and
Anatolia; there are, however, considerable arguments about the mechanisms of
this transition. Were it people who moved and outplaced the indigenous hunter-
gatherer groups or admixed with them? Or was it just material and information
that moved-the Neolithic Package-consisting of domesticated plants and animals
and the knowledge of its use? The latter process is commonly referred to as
cultural diffusion and the former as demic diffusion. Despite continuous and
partly combined efforts by archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists,
paleontologists and geneticists a final resolution of the debate has not yet
been reached. In the present contribution we interpret results from the Global
Land Use and technological Evolution Simulator (GLUES), a mathematical model
for regional sociocultural development embedded in the western Eurasian
geoenvironmental context during the Holocene. We demonstrate that the model is
able to realistically hindcast the expansion speed and the inhomogeneous
space-time evolution of the transition to agropastoralism in Europe. GLUES, in
contrast to models that do not resolve endogenous sociocultural dynamics, also
describes and explains how and why the Neolithic advanced in stages. In the
model analysis, we uncouple the mechanisms of migration and information
exchange. We find that (1) an indigenous form of agropastoralism could well
have arisen in certain Mediterranean landscapes, but not in Northern and
Central Europe, where it depended on imported technology and material, (2) both
demic diffusion by migration or cultural diffusion by trade may explain the
western European transition equally well, (3) [...]
