The Great Holocene Transformation: Cultural Macroevolution of Social Scale and Complexity

During the Holocene the scale and complexity of human societies increased dramatically. Generations of scholars have proposed different theories explaining this evolution, which range from functionalist explanations, focusing on the provision of public goods, to conflict theories, emphasizing the role of internal class struggle or external warfare. I use a general dynamical model, based on the theoretical framework of cultural macroevolution (CME), and data in Seshat: Global History Databank to quantitatively test these theories. The best-supported model indicates a strong causal role played by a combination of increasing agricultural productivity and intensity of interpolity warfare, proxied by invention/adoption of military technologies. Overall, these empirical results provide support for two major theoretical ideas in CME: cumulative cultural evolution and (still controversial) cultural multi-level selection.