ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
Quantitative historical analysis uncovers a single dimension of complexity that structures global variation in human social organization.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 43 papers.
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43 citing papers in PubMed, 279 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Big Epidemiology: The Birth, Life, Death, and Resurgence of Diseases on a Global Timescale.Epidemiologia (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
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- Formation of human kinship structures depending on population size and cultural mutation rate.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- The characteristic time scale of cultural evolution.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Cultural transmission, networks, and clusters among Austronesian-speaking peoples.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- The Climatic Resilience of the Sasanian Empire.Human ecology: an interdisciplinary journal · 2024Article
- Towards understanding human-environment feedback loops: the Atacama Desert case.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- The vulnerability of aging states: A survival analysis across premodern societies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Playing the political game: the coevolution of institutions with group size and political inequality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Modelling the role of environmental circumscription in the evolution of inequality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Supernatural explanations across 114 societies are more common for natural than social phenomena.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
- 1000 years of population, warfare, and climate change in pre-Columbian societies of the Central Andes.PloS one · 2023Article
- Impact of cultural and genetic structure on food choices along the Silk Road.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Disentangling the evolutionary drivers of social complexity: A comprehensive test of hypotheses.Science advances · 2022Article
- Dynamics of ranking.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Assessing different historical pathways in the cultural evolution of economic development.Evolution and human behavior : official journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society · 2022Article
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53 authors at 20 institutions in 10 countries.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Do human societies from around the world exhibit similarities in the way that they are structured, and show commonalities in the ways that they have evolved? These are long-standing questions that have proven difficult to answer. To test between competing hypotheses, we constructed a massive repository of historical and archaeological information known as "Seshat: Global History Databank." We systematically coded data on 414 societies from 30 regions around the world spanning the last 10,000 years. We were able to capture information on 51 variables reflecting nine characteristics of human societies, such as social scale, economy, features of governance, and information systems. Our analyses revealed that these different characteristics show strong relationships with each other and that a single principal component captures around three-quarters of the observed variation. Furthermore, we found that different characteristics of social complexity are highly predictable across different world regions. These results suggest that key aspects of social organization are functionally related and do indeed coevolve in predictable ways. Our findings highlight the power of the sciences and humanities working together to rigorously test hypotheses about general rules that may have shaped human history.
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