Acknowledgements

The incentive for this collective volume came from a symposium entitled “The language of the first farmers”, organized by Martine Robbeets at the 49th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea in Naples, September 2–3, 2016. We thank all participants who contributed their papers to the symposium: Alexander Francis-Ratte, George Starostin, Anna Berge, Koen Bostoen, Joseph Koni Muluwa, Tom Güldemann, Anne-Maria Fehn, Antoinette Schapper, Nicholas Emlen, Willem Adelaar, Brian Joseph, Martin Kümmel, Laurent Sagart, Romain Garnier, Adam Hyllested and Russell Gray.

We are grateful to the authors in the volume for submitting and revising their papers and for respecting our strict schedule in spite of their busy agendas. A heartfelt word of thanks also goes to Yanjun Liu, who is currently involved in the eurasia3angle project as a student assistant for her dedicated work as an Assistant Editor. We further acknowledge our other team members of the eurasia3angle project for their critical but supportive comments on Farming/Language Dispersal. Our gratitude also goes to our colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, notably Annette Günzel and Moritz Zauleck for their graphic support and to Anne Gibson for her English editing.

The realization of this volume has received generous funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 646612), granted to Martine Robbeets.

We would also like to thank Kees Vaes for his enthusiasm in publishing this volume and for his help in seeing this project through. Finally, we hope that many readers will click the URL, providing open access to this volume, as Kees promised to consider the publication of an interdisciplinary linguistic journal if our volume is widely consulted online.