DOCSLIB.ORG

THE SPARK of CIVILISATION 3 × 53 Min

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
THE SPARK of CIVILISATION 3 × 53 Min and archaeologist Abigail Levine. Here, Turchin believes that war sparked civilisa- they investigate the ruins of villages that tion, and that he can prove this theory on show signs of becoming states. They a global scale. evolved in different places around the HISTORY globe at different times as the precursers Judith Burkhart, an anthropologist at the to civilisation. These scientists say that war University of Zurich, believes humans have triggered the transformation from state a unique form of cooperation, unlike any to civilisation. Without war, there would other living creature, and it was this trait be no complex societies. that lead us on the path to civilisation. Episode 2 closes with a conundrum. War, She sets out to prove it through experi- says Levine, is actually a form of human ments where the behavior of children is cooperation. compared to our closest primate relatives. EP03: A CHANGE OF MIND Why do we say that some cultures are In this episode, the war-and-coopera- civilised and others are not? tion-theory is put to the test using a futuristic scientific method. And scientists Which leads us to Filipe Fernandez- think they’ve found the spark of civilisa- Armesto’s all encompassing new theory of tion inside our minds! civilisation. The hunter-gatherers that some of us were, and some of us still are, Historian Filipe Fernandez-Armesto leaves the societies with different belief systems, us with a theory that could blow the in all environments across the globe all meaning of civilisation out of the water. have one thing in common. Without He reminds us how the idea of civilisation exception, they have all civilised nature. has been used to justify wars, brutal colonization and genocide. Civilisation has What sparked civilisation? Can we ever always been an us-and-them situation, know which of these theories, or any he says. future theories are correct? Peter Turchin thinks so. He tells us that mathematics will Peter Turchin is a Professor at the help us find a grand unifying theory of University of Connecticut in the history. A law that rules how societies rose Departments of Ecology and Evolutionary from small groups to complex societies in Biology, Anthropology, and Mathematics. their millions. He and his colleagues have designed a computer game of civilisation that uses A spark that changed us all. mathematical models and the world’s largest database of historical facts. THE SPARK HISTORY OF CIVILISATION 3 × 53 min. Written and directed by Ruth Berry 4K, 5.1 and Stereo Executive producers: Martin Mészáros, Sabine Holzer www.terramater.com Terra Mater Factual Studios GmbH, Wambachergasse 2, 1130 Vienna / Austria, phone +43-1-87003-0, fax +43-1-87003-27609, [email protected] “To seek the origins of civilisation is to embark on a series of HISTORY dangerous excavations.” Historian Lucien Fabre he Spark of Civilisation’ is a flagship Steven Mithen, Professor of Early Prehistory at series that immerses the viewer in one Reading University believes agriculture was an of humanity’s most important investiga- accident. His theory is inspired by a chance tions; the mystery of how civilisation discovery at Göbekli Tepe. Within sight of the Temerged. It questions the very meaning of monument stands a mountain range where civilisation through ground-breaking new wheat was domesticated 1,000 years after evidence. Göbekli Tepe was built. Mithen sees a connec- tion. He sets out to prove that the religious The most popular theory for the rise of civilisa- worship practices of the hunter-gatherers of tion is the advent of agriculture. It states that Göbekli Tepe lead to the chance domestication agriculture happened approximately 10,000 of wild plants. years ago because of favourable growing conditions at the end of the last ice age, or an Acclaimed South African rock art specialist increase in population. Agriculture transformed Professor David Lewis-Williams says it was not us from nomadic hunter-gatherers to sedentary religion itself, but a change of religion that farmers and this was the first step towards sparked civilisation. By comparing Göbekli civilisation. Tepe’s art and burial practices to those found in ‘The Spark of Civilisation’ challenges this caves used thousands of years before, he enduring theory. identifies a dramatic change. Solving the mystery of civilisation is traditionally Professor Giulio Magli, an astrophysicist and the domain of historians. ’The Spark of archaeoastronomer from Milan takes the new Civilisation’ introduces a new trend, the involve- religion theory one step further. He presents ment of internationally acclaimed scientists who evidence of the arrival of a new star linking it to use the latest breakthroughs in disciplines like the time of Göbekli Tepe’s construction and its genetics, microbiology and mathematics to find unique architecture. answers. Their investigations have uncovered exciting, and even strange new possibilities that EP02: HUMANITY RISING will be presented together for the first time in We traditionally envisage civilisation through this series. monuments, cities, hieroglyphics, temples, vast fields of grain, sophisticated canal systems. The The evidence is empirical and sometimes unconventional historian Fernández-Armesto peculiar — the sex life of the fruit fly, the wild questions this criteria. We now know that nature of yeast, the behaviour of marmosets, monuments were being built before the rise of the domestication of foxes. This is civilisation as civilisation, and some civilisations did not have it has never before been presented, thanks to writing. Can there even be a definition? science. In Episode 2, the domestication of dogs, climate ‘The Spark of Civilisation’ is epic in scope, and war lead scientists to pursue new theories creatively visual, and unafraid to present new, of what sparked civilisation. compelling ways to question traditional views about what it means to be human. Greger Larson is Director of the Palaeogenomics at Oxford University and an expert in animal EP01: THE DAY IT ALL BEGAN domestication. He believes that this success Opening with Felipe Fernández-Armesto, paved the way for domesticating plants and Professional fellow, Queen Mary University of other animals. London and member of the Modern History Faculty at Oxford; an unconventional historian At the same time that we were domesticating with a mild, unassuming manner and a reputa- dogs, the world was in the grip of an ice age. tion for thinking out of the box. Climatologist Nick Brooks and archaeologist History books say that 10,000 years ago there Joanne Clarke dispute that the melting of the was a revolution known as the Neolithic (new ice ushered in better times which lead to the stone age) or the agricultural revolution. The rise of agriculture and civilisation. Civilisation, scientists in this episode ask: ‘if agriculture then they say, was a last resort, sparked by deterio- why?’, replacing the traditional viewpoint with rating climate conditions brought on by a severe new reasons: alcohol, an accident, a change of weather change that happened 5,000 years ago. religion and a new star. The strongest clues lay buried in the sands of the Western Sahara. Professor Patrick McGovern from Pennsylvannia museum uses microbiology to prove that In another desolate landscape in the Chinca alcohol was being brewed before large-scale Valley Peru, we meet Charles Stanish, Director agriculture took hold. of the Costen Institute of Archaeology UCLA .
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Universita Degli Studi Di Milano [email protected] World
    Population Dynamics and World-Systems Analysis Daniela Danna Universita degli Studi di Milano [email protected] Abstract World-systems analysis has given scant attention to population dynamics. Overlooked are large­ scale macrohistorical population trends and their microhistorical foundation on procreative decisions-decisions which are taken by a historically changing subject of procreation: local elders or other authorities, head(s) of the household, couples, and women. The discipline of demography is also not as helpful as it could be, given its basis in modernization theory, which fails to recognize intentionality in reproduction in pre-capitalist societies. It assumes a model of "demographic transition" from a state of "natural fertility" to a state of conscious family planning, while also treating mortality as independent of fertility Marxism recognized the importance of population as a source of labor for profit and capital accumulation. With its tools Sydney Coontz developed a demand for labor theory explaining in particular the decrease in the birth rate in England and the United States at the turn of the century This theory was f urther developed by anthropologists of the "mode of product ion and population pat terns " who, with other authors, offer useful theories and insights to advance world-historical research on population. This article explores connections between population dy namics and world-systems analysis . I explore six key questions at different levels of analysis , including : 1) A re there world-systems '
    [Show full text]
  • Dynamical Effects of Plant Quality and Parasitism on Population Cycles of Larch Budmoth
    UC Santa Barbara UC Santa Barbara Previously Published Works Title Dynamical effects of plant quality and parasitism on population cycles of larch budmoth Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3q39z2cn Journal Ecology, 84(5) Authors Turchin, Peter Wood, Simon N Ellner, Stephen Paul et al. Publication Date 2003 DOI 10.1890/0012-9658(2003)084[1207:DEOPQA]2.0.CO;2 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Ecology, 84(5), 2003, pp. 1207±1214 q 2003 by the Ecological Society of America DYNAMICAL EFFECTS OF PLANT QUALITY AND PARASITISM ON POPULATION CYCLES OF LARCH BUDMOTH PETER TURCHIN,1 SIMON N. WOOD,2 STEPHEN P. E LLNER,3 BRUCE E. KENDALL,4 WILLIAM W. M URDOCH,5 ANDREAS FISCHLIN,6 JEÃ ROME CASAS,7 EDWARD MCCAULEY,8 AND CHERYL J. BRIGGS9 1Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut 06269 USA 2Mathematical Institute, North Haugh, St. Andrews Fife, KY16 9SS, UK 3Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Corson Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853 USA 4School for Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106 USA 5Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106 USA 6Institute of Terrestrial Ecology, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich ETHZ, CH-8952 Schlieren/Zurich, Switzerland 7University of Tours, IRBI-CNRS UPRESA 6035, F-37200 Tours, France 8Ecology Division, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada T2N 1N4 9Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720 USA Abstract. Population cycles have been remarkably resistant to explanation, in part because crucial experiments are rarely possible on appropriate spatial and temporal scales.
    [Show full text]
  • Curriculum Vitae
    Turchin CV, Page 1 June 2017 Curriculum Vitae Peter Turchin Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269-3043 tel: 860-486-3603; fax: 860-486-6364 e-mail: [email protected] Web site: http://PeterTurchin.com Education: 1985 Ph.D. Duke University Zoology (minor: mathematics) 1980 B.A. New York University Biology (cum laude) 1975–7 Moscow State University Biology Professional Positions: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut 2002– Professor 1997–02 Associate Professor 1994–97 Assistant Professor School of Anthropology, University of Oxford 2013– Research Associate The Evolution Institute 2010– Founding Member of the Board of Directors; Vice-President (2010–2017) Institute for Advanced Studies in Toulouse 2015 Visiting Fellow Religion, Cognition, and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark 2013–4 Distingushed Fellow and Visiting Professor Santa Fe Institute 2007–8 Visiting Professor Southern Forest Experiment Station, Forest Service Research 1990–94 Supervisory Ecologist 1988–90 Ecologist Department of Zoology, University of Washington 1988 Lecturer 1985–88 Postdoctoral Research Associate Department of Zoology, Duke University 1983–85 Teaching Assistant Professional Activities: Symposia, workshops, and working groups organized 2017 Explaining Institutional Change in History. June 2017, Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, France (with Mohamed Saleh) 2016 Examining Social Complexity, Religion and Prosociality with Seshat: Global History Databank. August 2016; Complexity Institute, Nanyang Technical University, Singapore (with Daniel Mullins) 2016 Seshat Workshop on North China: Social Complexity, Warfare, and Ritual. January 2016; Tampa, Florida (with Daniel Hoyer) 2015 Strüngmann Forum on Evolutionary Economics. February 2015, Frankfurt, Germany (with David S. Wilson, Ulrich Witt, Alan Kirman, and Eric Beinhocker) 2013 Evolution of Institutions.
    [Show full text]
  • Ultrasociety How Cultural Evolution Helps Us Understand the Rise of Complex Societies in Human History
    Ultrasociety How Cultural Evolution Helps Us Understand the Rise of Complex Societies in Human History Peter Turchin University of Connecticut and Evolution Institute Clio Seshat International Space Station • Built by Roscosmos, NASA, ESA, JAXA, CSA • Cost: $150 bln • 3 mln people-years • >1 bln citizens in participating countries Humans are capable of cooperating in huge groups of strangers Empire State Building, 1930 Amiens Cathedral 1220 Great Pyramid of Giza, 2540 BC Göbekli Tepe, 9th millennium BC A Social Scale Social scale Polity Time (people) Types (kya) 10s Foraging bands 200 100s Farming villages 10 1,000s Simple chiefdoms 7.5 10,000s Complex chiefdoms 7 100,000s Archaic states 5 1,000,000s Macrostates 4.5 10,000,000s Mega-empires 2.5 100,000,000s Large nation-states 0.2 Social scale of a leaf cutter ant colony: 1,000,000s A Social Scale Social scale Polity Time (people) Types (kya) 10s Foraging bands 200 100s Farming villages 10 1,000s Simple chiefdoms 7.5 10,000s Complex chiefdoms 7 100,000s Archaic states 5 1,000,000s Macrostates 4.5 10,000,000s Mega-empires 2.5 100,000,000s Large nation-states 0.2 Humans are champion cooperators – an “ultrasocial species” The Puzzle of Ultrasociality • Ultrasociality: extensive cooperation among very large numbers of genetically unrelated individuals • Ultrasociality was a key glue holding together historical mega-empires • But cooperation is fragile and is easily destroyed by “free-riding” • How did it evolve? • This is one of the unresolved Grand Questions of social science Achaemenid
    [Show full text]
  • UC Riverside Cliodynamics
    UC Riverside Cliodynamics Title Involvement of a Capitalist Crisis in the 1900-30 Inequality Trend Reversal Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/42p5m46m Journal Cliodynamics, 8(1) Author Alexander, Michael Allen Publication Date 2017 DOI 10.21237/C7clio8133347 Supplemental Material https://escholarship.org/uc/item/42p5m46m#supplemental License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 4.0 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution Involvement of a Capitalist Crisis in the 1900–30 Inequality Trend Reversal Michael Allen Alexander Abstract This paper proposes a supplemental secular cycle formulation for a modern capitalist society that employs financial, economic, and political metrics in place of population and sociopolitical violence. It makes use of Thomas Piketty’s (2014) hypothesis that excess investment return relative to economic growth causes inequality. In a capitalist society, the investing class can be considered as a proxy for elites. Inequality as measured by the ratio of financial to wage gains over time agrees with other economic measures. Rising inequality led to a reduction in capital productivity (output per person per unit of capital). This created instability in financial markets that generated the 1929 stock market crash. Application of a simplified version of the demographic structural theory to inequality trends shows political stress peaking in 1929. The depression that began with the stock market crash in that year resulted in a devastating political defeat for the ruling party in 1932 which brought in the political coalition that engineered the inequality trend reversal. This series of events can be considered as a modern version of the state collapse and reconstitution that was typically a key feature of premodern secular cycles.
    [Show full text]
  • Long-Term Population Cycles in Human Societies
    THE YEAR IN ECOLOGY AND CONSERVATION BIOLOGY, 2009 Long-Term Population Cycles in Human Societies Peter Turchin Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, USA Human population dynamics are usually conceptualized as either boundless growth or growth to an equilibrium. The implicit assumption underlying these paradigms is that any feedback processes regulating population density, if they exist, operate on a fast-time-scale, and therefore we do not expect to observe population oscillations in human population numbers. This review asks, are population processes in historical and prehistorical human populations characterized by second-order feedback loops, that is, regulation involving lags? If yes, then the implications for forecasting future population change are obvious—what may appear as inexplicable, exogenously driven reverses in population trends may actually be a result of feedbacks operating with substantial time lags. This survey of a variety of historical and archeological data indicates that slow oscillations in population numbers, with periods of roughly two to three centuries, are observed in a number of world regions and historical periods. Next, a potential explanation for this pattern, the demographic-structural theory, is discussed. Finally, the implications of these results for global population forecasts is discussed. Key words: human; population; cycles; history; dynamics; global Introduction would be as pronounced in Western Europe, except for a masking effect of immigration),
    [Show full text]
  • Modeling Social Pressures Toward Political Instability Peter Turchin University of Connecticut
    Cliodynamics: the Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History Modeling Social Pressures Toward Political Instability Peter Turchin University of Connecticut Structural-demographic theory is a conceptual tool for understanding and explaining long-term social pressures that can lead to revolutions, civil wars, and other major outbreaks of socio- political instability. This article develops a general modeling framework for quantifying such structural pressures toward instability. Following the basic premises of the structural- demographic theory, the approach adopted here decomposes pressures toward instability into three components, dealing with the general population, elites, and the state, respectively. Several feedback loops affecting the dynamics of these components are modeled explicitly, including the effect of labor oversupply on real wages and on elite overproduction. I apply the modeling framework to two empirical case studies: investigating structural- demographic dynamics during the nineteenth century (with a focus on the period preceding the American Civil War) and during the twentieth century (with a focus on the contemporary period). Introduction In Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World Jack Goldstone wrote that the causes of revolutions and major rebellions are in many ways similar to processes that cause earthquakes (Goldstone 1991: 35). In both revolutions and earthquakes it is useful to distinguish the structural conditions (pressures, which build up slowly) from triggers (sudden releasing events, which immediately precede a social or geological eruption). Specific triggers of political upheavals, such as the self-immolation of a fruit vendor, which triggered the Arabic Spring in Tunisia, are very hard, perhaps impossible, to predict. On the other hand, structural pressures build up slowly and predictably, and are amenable to analysis and forecasting.
    [Show full text]
  • Turchin, P. 2012. “Dynamics of Political Instability in the United
    journal of pR eaceESEARCH Journal of Peace Research 1–15 Dynamics of political instability in the ª The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permission: United States, 1780–2010 sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0022343312442078 jpr.sagepub.com Peter Turchin Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut Abstract This article describes and analyses a database on the dynamics of sociopolitical instability in the United States between 1780 and 2010. The database was constructed by digitizing data collected by previous researchers, supple- mented by systematic searches of electronic media archives. It includes 1,590 political violence events such as riots, lynchings, and terrorism. Incidence of political violence fluctuated dramatically over the 230 years covered by the database, following a complex dynamical pattern. Spectral analysis detected two main oscillatory modes. The first is a very long-term – secular – cycle, taking the form of an instability wave during the second half of the 19th century, bracketed by two peaceful periods (the first quarter of the 19th century and the middle decades of the 20th century, respectively). The second is a 50-year oscillation superimposed on the secular cycle, with peaks around 1870, 1920, and 1970. The pattern of two periodicities superimposed on each other is characteristic of the dynamics of political instability in many historical societies, such as ancient Rome and medieval and early-modern England, France, and Russia. A possible explanation of this pattern, discussed in the article, is offered by the structural-demographic the- ory, which postulates that labor oversupply leads to falling living standards and elite overproduction, and those, in turn, cause a wave of prolonged and intense sociopolitical instability.
    [Show full text]
  • A Theory for Formation of Large Empires*
    Journal of Global History (2009) 4, pp. 191–217 ª London School of Economics and Political Science 2009 doi:10.1017/S174002280900312X A theory for formation of large empires* Peter Turchin Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06235, USA E-mail: [email protected] Abstract Between 3000 BCE and 1800 CE there were more than sixty ‘mega-empires’ that, at the peak, controlled an area of at least one million square kilometres. What were the forces that kept together such huge pre-industrial states? I propose a model for one route to mega-empire, motivated by imperial dynamics in eastern Asia, the world region with the highest concentra- tion of mega-empires. This ‘mirror-empires’ model proposes that antagonistic interactions between nomadic pastoralists and settled agriculturalists result in an autocatalytic process, which pressures both nomadic and farming polities to scale up polity size, and thus military power. The model suggests that location near a steppe frontier should correlate with the fre- quency of imperiogenesis. A worldwide survey supports this prediction: over 90% of mega- empires arose within or next to the Old World’s arid belt, running from the Sahara desert to the Gobi desert. Specific case studies are also plausibly explained by this model. There are, however, other possible mechanisms for generating empires, of which a few are discussed at the end of the article. Introduction Understanding the rise and fall of empires (large territorial states) is one of the most import- ant research directions in world history. Beginning with Gibbon,1 most theoretical efforts have been directed to the second part – the causes of imperial disintegration and fragmenta- tion.2 The first part of the question, however, is theoretically more challenging, because large territorial empires are a comparative rarity in the historical record before the Indus- trial Revolution.
    [Show full text]
  • Richerson, Peter J
    UC Riverside Cliodynamics Title A Dynamic Analysis of American Socio-Political History. A Review of Ages of Discord: A Structural Demographic Analysis of American History by Peter Turchin (Beresta Books, 2016) Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3861g21r Journal Cliodynamics, 8(2) Author Richerson, Peter J. Publication Date 2017 DOI 10.21237/C7clio8237156 License CC BY 4.0 eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution A Dynamic Analysis of American Socio-Political History A Review of Ages of Discord: A Structural Demographic Analysis of American History by Peter Turchin (Beresta Books, 2016) Peter J. Richerson University of California, Davis These days it is a commonplace of news and opinion pieces that politics in the United States has become more polarized over the past half century. A few of these commentators note that the present scene resembles the years just before the Civil War. No one I have read or heard has a sensible causal account of this pattern, with the exception of Turchin’s Age of Discord (AD). AD applies his and colleagues’ Structural-Demographic Theory (SDT) to understanding the political history of the United States 1780–present. The theory has been applied heretofore to agrarian states such as China, France and England. The US was a somewhat peculiar agrarian state up until about the Civil War, after which it transitioned to an industrial state, so accounting for its political dynamics is a fresh challenge for SDT. For readers who are new to Turchin’s oeuvre two bits of background are useful to understand AD.
    [Show full text]
  • Download Download
    JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH ISSN: 1076-156X | Vol. # 21 No. 2 | http://dx.doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2015.23 | jwsr.org Review of SergeyVol. A. 1 Nefedov’s | DOI 10.5195/JWSR.1 Factor Analysis of Historical Process New articles in this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 United States License. This journal is published by the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Sergey A. Nefedov. 2008. Faktornyy analiz istoricheskoho processa. Istoriya Vostoka. [Factor analysis of historical process. The History of the East]. Moscow: Territoriya Budushchego. 752 pages; ISBN 978-5911290269 Hardcover (not currently available); A PDF of the book is also available online at no cost: http://www.prognosis.ru/lib/Nefedov.pdf. In this epic book, Sergey Nefedov elaborates his three-factor model of historical process embracing interconnected geography, demography, and technology, and tests the theory by applying it to the military history of ancient, medieval, and early modern Asian and Northern African empires. Nefedov, a Russian historian with a background in mathematics, is one of the major modern contributors to the neo-Malthusian study of demographic cycles. His population studies advance within the lines of the demographic-structural perspective of Jack Goldstone. Nefedov belongs to the academic circle of Russian macrohistorians who apply mathematical modeling to historical social change, which they refer to as global dynamics or cliodynamics. This intellectual network involves such scholars as Leonid Grinin, Andrey Korotayev, Sergey Malkov, and Peter Turchin, who co-author and edit a book series titled History & Mathematics (e.g.
    [Show full text]
  • Evolution of Complex Hierarchical Societies
    Evolution of Complex Hierarchical Societies Peter Turchin University of Connecticut Sergey Gavrilets University of Tennessee ABSTRACT One of the greatest puzzles of human evolutionary history concerns the how and why of the transition from small-scale, ‘simple’ socie- ties to large-scale, hierarchically complex ones. This paper re- views theoretical approaches to resolving this puzzle. Our discus- sion integrates ideas and concepts from evolutionary biology, an- thropology, and political science. The evolutionary framework of multilevel selection suggests that complex hierarchies can arise in response to selection imposed by intergroup conflict (warfare). The logical coherency of this theory has been investigated with mathematical models, and its predictions were tested empirically by constructing a database of the largest territorial states in the world (with the focus on the preindustrial era). INTRODUCTION During most of their evolutionary history humans lived in small- scale societies of a few hundred individuals. The first complex state-level societies arose in Mesopotamia and Egypt five thousand years ago and, since then, the social scale of the largest societies has been increasing. A particularly big breakthrough occurred dur- ing the Axial Age, c. 800–200 B.C. (Jaspers 1953), with the rise of the great empires, such as the Achaemenid Persia and Han China, which ruled over tens of millions of subjects. Today there are states encompassing hundreds of millions (and in one case, over a bil- lion) of humans. Social Evolution & History, Vol. 8 No. 2, September 2009 167–198 2009 ‘Uchitel’ Publishing House 167 168 Social Evolution & History / September 2009 Why and how the transition from small-scale to large-scale so- cieties occurred is not well understood (Richerson and Boyd 1998).
    [Show full text]