Migrationism explains cultural change in terms of human migration, while diffusionism relies on explanations based on trans-cultural diffusion of ideas rather than populations (pots, not people[1]).
[5] Historian Alex Woolf notes that "in the minds of some scholars, immobilism was charged with a left-wing caché [sic]; those who showed too much interest in the ethnic or racial origin of the people they studied were, it was hinted, guilty of racist tendencies.
Thus, the mainstream position on the Neolithic Revolution in Europe as developed (notably by the German archaeologist Jens Lüning) since the 1980s, posits that "a small group of immigrants inducted the established inhabitants of Central Europe into sowing and milking" in a process spreading "in swift pace, in a spirit of 'peaceful cooperation'"[7] Migration was generally seen as being a slow process, involving family groups moving into new areas and settling amongst the native population, described as "demic diffusion" or "wave of advance", in which population would be essentially sedentary but expand by the colonisation of new territory by succeeding generations.
In several cases, that has led to a revival of the "invasionist" or "mass migration" scenario (in the case of the Neolithic Revolution in Europe[7]) or at least suggested that the extent of prehistoric migration had been underestimated (e.g. in the context of Indo-European expansion, it was estimated that the people of the Yamnaya culture in Eastern Europe contributed to 73% of the ancestry of individuals pertaining to the Corded Ware culture in Germany, and to about 40–54% to the ancestry of modern Central & Northern Europeans.
[10] This has moderated recently partly due to genetic studies of British populations with most scholars in Britain have returned to a more migrationist perspective and noted that the scale of both the settlement of the Anglo-Saxons and the survival of the Romano-Britons likely varied regionally.