15 November 2011

Post date: Nov 21, 2011 6:53:54 PM

Iza Romanowska, a PhD student in archaeology, described an agent-based model she had built to look at the out-of-Africa hypothesis. One of the driving questions in this area is the relative lack of early human sites in Eastern Europe but their relative abundance in Western Europe: this is problematic given an assumed expansion through what is now Turkey and the Caucasus. The model looked at the likely shape of the expansion front given varying assumptions about the speed of migration through different terrain types.