DIFFERENCES IN THE MECHANISMS OF TRANSITION TO AGRICULTURE IN THE FOREST ZONE OF EUROPE AND NORTH AMERICA* Despite the similar natural conditions of the forest zone, the emergence and spread of productive farming in eastern North America and Europe occurred in different ways. To explain the differences in the timing, speed, and mechanisms of transition, we use the modeling system of global land use and technological evolution - a numerical model for modeling demography, innovation, domestication, migration, and trade in a geoecological context. It is shown that the European population received a complex of cultivated plant and animal species from other territories and quickly moved to a productive economy. Unlike in Europe, in the eastern part of North America, hunting-gathering and farming-pastoralism co-existed for a long time, and agriculture was slowly integrated into the already existing life support system. From this, it is concluded that there is a qualitative economic difference in the transition to agriculture in these regions: limited human resources in Europe and limited natural resources in eastern North America. Keywords: early agriculture, "Neolithic package", population of pre-Columbian America, adaptive dynamics, socio-technological model, human ecodynamics. The emergence of agriculture in the forest zone The first Neolithic revolution occurred in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Yangtze and Yellow River valleys of China between 10,000 and 8000 BC, when hunting and gathering were replaced by agriculture and cattle breeding as the main means of obtaining food (Willcox, 2005; Kuijt and Goring-Morris, 2002; Londo et al., 2006). Subsequently, almost every human community around the world moved to a productive economy at different times, at different speeds, and through different mechanisms. In some regions, this transition was not independent: management methods were adopted from the main agricultural and pastoral centers (see, for example, [Wen et al., ... Read more