ArticleScience advances2022
Disentangling the evolutionary drivers of social complexity: A comprehensive test of hypotheses.
Article in Science advances, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Multifaceted ceramic analysis in the study of political expansion: Insights from the Zhou expansion in Shandong, China.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Economic inequality is fueled by population scale, land-limited production, and settlement hierarchies across the archaeological record.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Cliopatria - A geospatial database of world-wide political entities from 3400BCE to 2024CE.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Bridging theory and data: A computational workflow for cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Landscape of fear: indirect effects of conflict can account for large-scale population declines in non-state societies.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- Global musical diversity is largely independent of linguistic and genetic histories.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Institutional complexity emerges from socioecological complexity in small-scale human societies.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 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 Demographic-Wealth model for cliodynamics.PloS one · 2024Article
- Spread of the cycles: a feedback perspective on the Anthropocene.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Characteristic processes of human evolution caused the Anthropocene and may obstruct its global solutions.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- 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
- Article
- Tempo and Mode in Cultural Macroevolution.Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
17 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
During the Holocene, the scale and complexity of human societies increased markedly. Generations of scholars have proposed different theories explaining this expansion, which range from broadly functionalist explanations, focusing on the provision of public goods, to conflict theories, emphasizing the role of class struggle or warfare. To quantitatively test these theories, we develop a general dynamical model based on the theoretical framework of cultural macroevolution. Using this model and Seshat: Global History Databank, we test 17 potential predictor variables proxying mechanisms suggested by major theories of sociopolitical complexity (and >100,000 combinations of these predictors). The best-supported model indicates a strong causal role played by a combination of increasing agricultural productivity and invention/adoption of military technologies (most notably, iron weapons and cavalry in the first millennium BCE).
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.