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 and institutions that facilitate large-scale organisation 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 organise and synthesise alternative hypotheses and shed light on the ways ecological and social processes have interacted to shape the complex social world we live in today.
Highlights
The size and complexity of modern human societies is on a scale unmatched in other species
The strong geographic patterns noted above suggest that ecology may play an important role yet a number of other factors have been proposed to be important in driving the evolution of social complexity such as the development and productivity of agriculture (Diamond, 1997; Nielsen, 2004), information processing (Morris, 2013), warfare (Turchin et al, 2013), the geography of continental land masses (Diamond, 1997), technology (Morris, 2013), and religion (Norenzayan et al, 2014)
It is not surprising that the importance of distance from the steppe is more strongly affected by the inclusion of distance from first empires as both hypotheses involve similar processes
Summary
The size and complexity of modern human societies is on a scale unmatched in other species. For much of our evolution humans lived in small-scale, internally undifferentiated groups, and it is only in the last several thousand years that larger-scale societies with more complex forms of organisation began to develop resulting in what we can label “macrostates” or “empires” involving millions of individuals. Understanding how and why humans are able to form functioning societies on such a scale, and why large, complex societies have tended to form more readily in certain places are questions of long-standing interest across a range of disciplines (Carneiro, 2003; Flannery and Marcus, 2012; Sanderson, 2015). We employ modern cultural evolutionary theory to systematically develop and empirically test a range of alternative hypotheses involving the socio-ecological factors that may promote or inhibit the formation of large, complex human societies
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