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Cet ouvrage est dédié à Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel, anthropologue biologiste, l’un des pères fondateurs de la paléodémographie en France, disparu en 2018. Mondialement connu et reconnu, il a contribué au développement de nouvelles techniques d’estimation de l’âge au décès d’assemblages de squelettes et promu la mise en place des estimateurs en paléodémographie. Il a également participé à l’émergence de la démographie spatiale et de la modélisation de type-multi-agent en particulier des agriculteurs néolithiques. Nous lui devons une avancée considérable dans la compréhension des processus démographiques liés aux grandes transitions qu’ont vécu les hommes en différents points du globe avec la découverte de la signature de la transition démographique impliquée dans le passage des sociétés d’une économie de collecte à une économie agricole. Cet ouvrage offre un voyage au cœur de sa vie de chercheur, reprenant tour à tour, dans une démarche diachronique et pluridisciplinaire, la démographie anthropologique de la Préhistoire jusqu’à la période contemporaine. Il brosse également un portrait généreux de cet homme engagé qui n’a eu de cesse d’œuvrer pour sa discipline, que ce soit à travers une approche réflexive sur l’histoire des sciences et l’épistémologie ou la transmission de ses savoirs auprès de jeunes générations. Cet ouvrage convie ainsi le lecteur à une expérience originale et innovante aux confins d’une discipline rare, la paléodémographie. This book is dedicated to Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel, anthropologist and biologist, one of the founding fathers of palaeodemography in France, who died in 2018. Known and recognised worldwide, he contributed to the development of new techniques for estimating the age at death of skeletal assemblages and promoted the introduction of estimators in palaeodemography. He also participated in the emergence of spatial demography and multi- agent modelling, particularly of Neolithic farmers. We owe him a considerable advance in the understanding of demographic processes linked to the great transitions that humans have experienced in different parts of the world with the discovery of the signature of the demographic transition implied in the passage of societies from a collection economy to an agricultural economy. This book offers a journey to the heart of his life as a researcher, taking in turn, in a diachronic and multidisciplinary approach, anthropological demography from prehistory to the contemporary period. It also paints a generous portrait of this committed man who has never ceased to work for his discipline, whether through a reflective approach to the history of science and epistemology or the transmission of his knowledge to younger generations. This book invites you to an original and innovative experience on the borders of a rare discipline, paleodemography.

The diffusion of the farming way-of-life into environments occupied by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in Europe has been associated with two major demographic events: the migrations of farmers originating from the Near-East and an unprecedented population increase, the “Neolithic Demographic Transition” (NDT). The Mesolithic-Neolithic transformations in the Danube Gorges provide a context of particular importance for tackling issues of Neolithization, due to its location, temporal depth, and highly contextualized osteo-anthropological record. This chapter compares complementary palaeodemographic proxies and bioarchaeological markers in order to assess the demographic response of local foragers to the Neolithic expansion. Interpreted together, these lines of evidence confirm the predictions of the NDT, and shed light on the relationships between subsistence intensification, sedentism and population growth, between migrations, cultural transmission and adaptations, and between dietary strategies, fertility and morbidity – i.e. on some mechanisms, benefits and costs of the farming transition – in the Central Balkans. La diffusion du mode de vie agro-pastoral en Europe, notamment dans des milieux occupés par des chasseurs-cueilleurs du Mésolithique, est associée à deux événements démographiques majeurs : les migrations d’agriculteurs originaires du Proche-Orient et un accroissement sans précédent de la population, la « Transition Démographique Néolithique » (TDN). Les sites mésolithiques-néolithiques des gorges du Danube constituent un contexte particulièrement important pour aborder les questions de néolithisation, en raison de leur localisation, de leur profondeur temporelle et de la découverte d’une série ostéo-anthropologique unique. Ce chapitre compare différents marqueurs paléo-démographiques et bioarchéologiques afin d’analyser la réponse démographique des chasseurs-cueilleurs locaux à l’expansion du Néolithique dans la région. Interprétées ensembles, les diverses sources de données examinées confirment les prédictions de la TDN et informent sur les relations entre intensification du mode de subsistance, sédentarisation et croissance démographique, entre migrations, et processus de transmission et d’adaptations culturelles, et entre stratégies alimentaires, fertilité et morbidité au cours du Néolithique ancien dans les Balkans.

Availability of palaeogenomic information depends on the survival of ancient DNA (aDNA) in human remains. Therefore, studies often include only a limited number of individuals or rely on pre-selected genomic sites that restrict further analysis and do not utilize full information potential of the samples despite destructive aDNA sampling. While this is changing with the availability of whole genome sequencing, aDNA analysis is still easily influenced by contamination, poor DNA preservation, sequencing errors and reference bias. Incorporating these uncertainties directly to the analysis through genotype likelihoods results in increased power and accuracy for population genetic inferences. Our suite of statistical tools, ATLAS, enables users to build complete customised analysis pipelines, takes into account diverse sources of error and accurately estimates genotype likelihoods and allele frequency spectra to be further used in explicit modelling.It also provides several standalone inference methods that - among others - include reference-free determination of genetic diversity within and between individuals and populations. These genetic measures can be, together with individual ancestral affinities, directly compared to archaeological distance measures and interpreted in relation to archaeologically associated cultural markers. We demonstrate the utility of these approaches on palaeogenomic data obtained from up to 9,000 years old samples from sites associated with Lepenski Vir culture, including the settlement at the eponymous site. Genetic and cultural affinities of individuals from Mesolithic, Transition and Neolithic periods provide insights into an active role of these fisher-hunter-gatherers during the Neolithisation of the area of Central Balkans and the structure of their sedentary society.

Background: The origin of Western African pastoralism, represented today by the Fulani nomads, has been a highly debated issue for the past decades, and has not yet been conclusively resolved. Aim: This study focused on Alu polymorphisms in sedentary and nomadic populations across the African Sahel to investigate patterns of diversity that can complement the existing results and contribute to resolving issues concerning the origin of West African pastoralism. Subjects and methods: A new dataset of 21 Alu biallelic markers covering a substantial part of the African Sahel has been analysed jointly with several published North African populations. Results: Interestingly, with regard to Alu variation, the relationship of Fulani pastoralists to North Africans is not as evident as was earlier revealed by studies of uniparental loci such as mtDNA and NRY. Alu insertions point rather to an affinity of Fulani pastoralists to Eastern Africans also leading a pastoral lifestyle. Conclusions: It is suggested that contemporary Fulani pastoralists might be descendants of an ancestral Eastern African population that, while crossing the Sahara in the Holocene, admixed slightly with a population of Eurasian (as evidenced by uniparental polymorphisms) ancestry. It seems that, in the Fulani pastoralists, Alu elements reflect more ancient genetic relationships than do uniparental genetic systems.

We sequenced Early Neolithic genomes from the Zagros region of Iran (eastern Fertile Crescent), where some of the earliest evidence for farming is found, and identify a previously uncharacterized population that is neither ancestral to the first European farmers nor has contributed substantially to the ancestry of modern Europeans. These people are estimated to have separated from Early Neolithic farmers in Anatolia some 46,000 to 77,000 years ago and show affinities to modern-day Pakistani and Afghan populations, but particularly to Iranian Zoroastrians. We conclude that multiple, genetically differentiated hunter-gatherer populations adopted farming in southwestern Asia, that components of pre-Neolithic population structure were preserved as farming spread into neighboring regions, and that the Zagros region was the cradle of eastward expansion.