On a three-component degenerate reaction-diffusion model for the population of farmers and hunter-gatherers

TL;DR

This paper analyzes a three-component reaction-diffusion model for farmer and hunter-gatherer populations, providing rigorous proofs of spreading patterns and estimates of spreading speed, advancing understanding of Neolithic transition dynamics.

Contribution

It offers the first rigorous mathematical analysis of spreading properties in a degenerate reaction-diffusion system modeling Neolithic transition.

Findings

Proved existence of two distinct expanding patterns.

Established a lower bound for the spreading speed.

Validated numerical observations with theoretical results.

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the expanding patterns and spreading speed of solutions of farmer and hunter-gatherer model which is a three-component degenerate reaction-diffusion system. Ecologically speaking, since the lifestyle of agriculture and settlement allows for a larger population, after an initially localized population of farmers migrated into a region occupied by hunter-gatherers, the Neolithic transition from hunter-gatherers to farmers happened. This model was proposed by J. Elias, K. Humayun and M. Mimura in 2018. By numerical simulations, a travelling wave solution with a certain speed, depending on the parameter values, is observed. Despite such observation and studying on the well-posedness of the system, no mathematically rigorous studies on the spreading properties have been made. The main difficulty comes from the fact that the comparison principle does not hold for the whole system. In this paper, we give theoretical proof of the existence of two different expanding patterns. Furthermore, we show a lower estimate for the spreading speed.