The earliest farmers in Europe

Some 9000 years ago the first European farmers established themselves in the empty plains of Thessaly, the only region in Greece that provided a reasonably assured harvest and was large enough for significant population growth. They flourished there and after more than a thousand years spread to the Balkans and beyond. The recognition that their success may have depended on the natural irrigation of river and lake floodplains leads us to a modified version of the wave-of-advance model of demic diffusion.