ABSTRACT
Four main competing theoretical schools of thought will be discussed. Although fitting the most influential reviews of the subject into just four categories must inevitably involve some simplification of differences between them, this does not seem to represent too unfair a procedure. The four categories adopted are:
1 Agriculture is inherently superior to gathering-hunting, therefore its adoption was automatic if the ecological setting was favourable, and if the Mesolithic population was ‘culturally ready’. Those gatherer-hunter groups who were not on the starting blocks were simply swept aside. The most important recent version of this approach is the ‘wave of advance’ model, which proposes that there was a steady spread of farming (and farmers) across Europe. As others have pointed out, this strongly implies that existing gatherer-hunter (Mesolithic) populations were passive, reacting to events rather than bringing them about.
