Settlement patterns in the long term: Near Eastern origins of the European expansion model

Paleogenetic data are showing the relevance of the demic component of the farming expansion in Europe. The scheme of expansion seems to be based in sedentary farming communities who easily split and sentd subgroups to long distances in a leapfrog expansion model. However, how and when did this expansion model originated? For answering this question, the evolution of habitats during the Early Neolithic in the Fertile Crescent is analyzed. From the beginning of the 10th to the end of the 9th millennium cal BC, a continuous process of population growth and aggregation in more and more extended sites took place. At the end of the 9th and the beginning of the 8th millennium BC, during the Late PPNB, at the dawn of the Neolithic expansion into Europe, a new kind of settlement strategy is put forward, with more numerous and smaller sites. The existence of a crisis in the sustainability of big villages, which has also been called the PPNB collapse, is observed. Is this lack of sustainability explained in economic, social or environmental terms? Probably, all these failures of the PPNB civilization were interconnected. In anyway, the crisis and new re-equilibrium of the settlement model seems to have been crucial for the quick and successful expansion of farming into Europe.Peer reviewe