Bret Devereaux

The short video focused on the role of community and information exchange in the spread of farming, using it as an analogy for "another peaceful transition" (8:50) to a non-earth-bound civilization we may make in the future. But that's not what happened! 2/6

But we have quite a bit of evidence now suggesting that it wasn't that the idea of farming spread, but that *farmers* spread, likely using their much higher population density to displace smaller numbers of non-farmers from resource-rich zones. 3/6

That process would obviously have been violent. I am quite sure that people do not voluntarily leave resource rich zones to go starve and struggle in the hill country or semi-arid zones without at least trying to resist. But they'd lose because the farmers had numbers. 4/6

Something which in turn answers a question the video poses but talks about (because it can't answer it): why shift to farming, when it is less healthy overall? The answer is "you shift to farming to get big enough group-size to defend your territory and resources." 5/6

And the hunter-gatherers and farmers extensively mixed and interbred across Europe (see Nature paper above) -- it doesn't seem to have been as crude as the farmers massacring and totally replacing the indigenes. Although, of course, there are ways of mixing that are not peaceful.