Duration of agriculture and distance from the steppe predict the evolution of large-scale human societies in Afro-Eurasia
Duration of agriculture and distance from the steppe predict the evolution of large-scale human societies in Afro-Eurasia
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DOI：
10.1057/s41599-020-0516-2
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发表时间：
2020-07-14
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Gavrilets, Sergey
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Currie, Thomas E.;Turchin, Peter;Gavrilets, Sergey
理解为什么大型、复杂的人类社会在世界某些地区比其他地区更容易出现并持续存在，这是一个长期争论的问题。在这里，我们系统地测试涉及社会和生态因素的不同假设，这些因素最终可能促进或抑制大型、复杂的人类社会的形成。我们使用3000年历史上最大人类群体的地理和时间分布数据进行空间显式统计分析。研究结果支持两个相辅相成的假说的预测，表明大规模社会更普遍地发展在以下地区：(I)农业实践时间较长(从而为促进大规模组织的规范和制度提供了更多时间)，以及(Ii)战争更激烈(以与欧亚草原的距离为代表)，从而为社会扩大规模创造了更大的选择压力。我们发现没有人支持这样一种有影响力的观点，即大规模社会在那些自然具有较高农业生产潜力的地区更为普遍。我们的研究突出了现代文化进化理论如何被用来组织和综合可供选择的假说，并阐明生态和社会过程如何相互作用，塑造我们今天生活的复杂社会世界。
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.