dc.contributor.author | Currie, T | |
dc.contributor.author | Turchin, P | |
dc.contributor.author | Turner, E | |
dc.contributor.author | Gavrilets, S | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2020-07-07T13:41:16Z | |
dc.date.issued | 2020-07-14 | |
dc.description.abstract | Understanding why large, complex human societies have emerged and persisted more readily in
certain regions of the world than others is an issue of long-standing debate. Here we
systematically test different hypotheses involving the social and ecological factors that may
ultimately promote or inhibit the formation of large, complex human societies. We employ
spatially explicit statistical analyses using data on the geographical and temporal distribution of
the largest human groups over a 3000 year period of history. The results support the predictions
of two complementary hypotheses indicating that large-scale societies developed more
commonly in regions where i) agriculture has been practiced for longer (thus providing more
time for the norms & institutions that facilitate large-scale organization to emerge), and ii)
warfare was more intense (as proxied by distance from the Eurasian steppe), thus creating a
stronger selection pressure for societies to scale up. We found no support for the influential idea
that large-scale societies were more common in those regions naturally endowed with a higher
potential for productive agriculture. Our study highlights how modern cultural evolutionary
theory can be used to organize and synthesize alternative hypotheses and shed light on the ways
ecological and social processes have interacted to shape the complex social world we live in
today. | en_GB |
dc.description.sponsorship | European Union Horizon 2020 | en_GB |
dc.description.sponsorship | Tricoastal Foundation | en_GB |
dc.description.sponsorship | John Templeton Foundation | en_GB |
dc.description.sponsorship | National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis | en_GB |
dc.description.sponsorship | University of Tennessee, Knoxville | en_GB |
dc.description.sponsorship | US Army Research Laboratory | en_GB |
dc.description.sponsorship | US Army Research Office | en_GB |
dc.identifier.citation | Vol. 2020 (7), article 34. | |
dc.identifier.doi | 10.1057/s41599-020-0516-2 | |
dc.identifier.grantnumber | 716212 | en_GB |
dc.identifier.grantnumber | EF-0830858 | en_GB |
dc.identifier.grantnumber | W911NF-14-1-0637 | en_GB |
dc.identifier.grantnumber | W911NF-17-1-0150 | en_GB |
dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10871/121816 | |
dc.language.iso | en | en_GB |
dc.publisher | Nature Research | en_GB |
dc.relation.url | https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/8TP2S7 | en_GB |
dc.rights | © The Author(s) 2020. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. | |
dc.title | Duration of agriculture and distance from the steppe predict the evolution of large-scale human societies in Afro-Eurasia | en_GB |
dc.type | Article | en_GB |
dc.date.available | 2020-07-07T13:41:16Z | |
dc.description | This is the final version. Available from Nature Research via the DOI in this record. | en_GB |
dc.description | Data availability:
Data, R code, and sources used in these analyses are openly available at Harvard Dataverse
https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/8TP2S7 | en_GB |
dc.identifier.eissn | 2662-9992 | |
dc.identifier.journal | Humanities and Social Sciences Communications | en_GB |
dc.rights.uri | http://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved | en_GB |
dcterms.dateAccepted | 2020-06-10 | |
exeter.funder | ::European Commission | en_GB |
rioxxterms.version | VoR | en_GB |
rioxxterms.licenseref.startdate | 2020-06-10 | |
rioxxterms.type | Journal Article/Review | en_GB |
refterms.dateFCD | 2020-07-07T12:05:08Z | |
refterms.versionFCD | AM | |
refterms.dateFOA | 2020-07-14T16:12:22Z | |
refterms.panel | A | en_GB |