During the past 10,000 years—the Holocene—human societies became larger and ever more complex. An international team of scientists led by Peter Turchin from the Complexity Science Hub Vienna (CSH) set out to test various theories on what drove this process. According to its analyses of data from Seshat: Global History Databank, the best explanation for…
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Wealth inequality is a research topic typically reserved for humans. Now, research from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln suggests that studying wealth inequality in animals can help shed light on social evolution. Adapting approaches from the study of wealth inequality in humans, the researchers show how wealth—in the…
From hunter-gatherer encampments to modern cities, permanent human settlements tend to densify as the population grows, while mobile human settlements do the opposite. Pygmy hunter-gatherers in the Congo Basin [Credit: JMGRACIA100/Wikipedia] New research in Current Anthropology by SFI’s Luís Bettencourt and Scott Ortman, with co-authors José Lobo, Todd Whitelaw, Polly Wiessner, and Michael E. Smith,…
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New research from the University of Warwick, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Reichman University, Universitat Pompeu Fabra and the Barcelona School of Economics challenges the conventional theory that the transition from foraging to farming drove the development of complex, hierarchical societies by creating agricultural surplus in areas of fertile land. Reconstruction of Neolithic Catalhoyuk in…
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Peter Turchin from the Complexity Science Hub Vienna (CSH) and an interdisciplinary team of colleagues set out to test competing theories about what drove the evolution of war machines throughout world history. Their study, published in the journal The invention of bit and bridle eventually led to the evolution of armed mounted warriors like the…
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It is not just the environment and the economy that are threatened by a warmer climate, but also culture and traditions around the word. Researchers at Lund University in Sweden and the University of Queensland in Australia have mapped what little is known about how climate change is eroding local knowledge and cultural heritage. Members…
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In a new study, University of Maine researchers found that culture helps humans adapt to their environment and overcome challenges better and faster than genetics. Credit: University of Maine After conducting an extensive review of the literature and evidence of long-term human evolution, scientists Tim Waring and Zach Wood concluded that humans are experiencing a…
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An individual human can maintain stable social relationships with about 150 people. This is the proposition known as ‘Dunbar’s number’ – that the architecture of the human brain sets an upper limit on our social lives. A new study from Stockholm University indicates that a cognitive limit on human group sizes cannot be derived in…
Indiana Jones and Lara Croft have a lot to answer for. Public perceptions of archaeology are often thoroughly outdated, and these characterisations do little to help. Archaeology as practiced today bears virtually no resemblance to the tomb raiding portrayed in movies and video games. Indeed, it bears little resemblance to even more scholarly depictions of…
It is at the confluence of different experiences that new theories come into being. Writing in this week’s “Perspectives” in the journal Samal man fixing nets for fishing in Mindanao, Philippines [Credit: Kim Hill] A collaboration of these two particular researchers is not unexpected but reflects how the practical and theoretical combine to create new…
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