The earliest islanders of the eastern Adriatic

The introduction of farming into the Mediterranean was a complex process marked by regional variability. In the case of the Eastern Adriatic, the islands may have played a crucial role by providing footholds for seaborne travellers. The original islanders were bands of hunter-gatherers, who were pushed out of the north Adriatic plain by the marine transgression of the early Holocene. Farming was introduced around 6000 B.C. Several lines of evidence suggest that this involved at least some population movement from southern Italy, possibly along a chain of islands that span the central Adriatic. The details of interaction between the immigrant and the autochthonous population remain elusive, due to the patchy character of the currently available data.