Mathematical models of agricultural spread use distances between birthplaces of parents and their children (often called “birthplace distances”). However, the difficulty to find those distances for pre-industrial farmers has often led to the use of other kinds of distances. One example is the distance between the birthplace and the place of residence of each individual (“residence distances”). Another example is the separation between the birthplaces of parents (“mating distances”). It is poorly known to what extent the latter two distances are valid approximations to birthplace distances. In order to address this question, we have prepared a database with the three distances for a specific pre-industrial agricultural population (the Yanomamö). For the spread of the Neolithic in Europe, all three kinds of distances yield spread rates consistent with the archaeological data, as well as cultural effects below 50% (so demic diffusion was more important than cultural diffusion). The three kinds of distances also yield estimations for the percentage of early farmers who interbred with hunter-gatherers that are consistent with the corresponding estimation from genetics. There is wide agreement for the cultural and demic effects in other expansions of agriculture and/or herding (the spread of the Neolithic in Asia, Bantu, and Khoikhoi expansions; the spread of rice in Asia, etc.) and using distances measured for other populations. We conclude that estimates are largely insensitive to the kind of distances used. This implies that the conclusions drawn so far in the literature using these three kinds of distances are robust.

农业传播的数学模型使用父母及其子女的出生地之间的距离（通常称为“出生地距离”）。然而，工业化前的农民很难找到这些距离，因此常常导致使用其他类型的距离。一个例子是每个人的出生地和居住地之间的距离（“居住距离”）。另一个例子是父母出生地之间的距离（“交配距离”）。人们很少知道后两个距离在多大程度上是出生地距离的有效近似值。为了解决这个问题，我们准备了一个数据库，其中包含特定前工业化农业人口（Yanomamö）的三个距离。对于新石器时代在欧洲的传播，三种距离的传播率均与考古数据一致，文化效应均低于50%（因此人口扩散比文化扩散更重要）。这三种距离还得出了对早期农民与狩猎采集者杂交的百分比的估计，这与相应的遗传学估计是一致的。对于农业和/或畜牧业的其他扩张（新石器时代在亚洲的传播、班图语和科伊科伊人的扩张；稻米在亚洲的传播等）以及使用距离测量来衡量其他农业和/或畜牧业的文化和流行效应，存在广泛的共识。人口。我们得出的结论是，估计值很大程度上对所使用的距离类型不敏感。这意味着迄今为止文献中使用这三种距离得出的结论是稳健的。