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Scale and information-processing thresholds in Holocene social evolution
Abstract
Throughout the Holocene, societies developed additional layers of administration and more information-rich instruments for managing and recording transactions and events as they grew in population and territory. Yet, while such increases seem inevitable, they are not. Here we use the Seshat database to investigate the development of hundreds of polities, from multiple continents, over thousands of years. We find that sociopolitical development is dominated first by growth in polity scale, then by improvements in information processing and economic systems, and then by further increases in scale. We thus define a Scale Threshold for societies, beyond which growth in information processing becomes paramount, and an Information Threshold, which once crossed facilitates additional growth in scale. Polities diverge in socio-political features below the Information Threshold, but reconverge beyond it. We suggest an explanation for the evolutionary divergence between Old and New World polities based on phased growth in scale and information processing. We also suggest a mechanism to help explain social collapses with no evident external causes.
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This implies that, rather than the extent of the economic system, the primary limitation to the development of information-processing technologies may be the degree of settlement clustering and intense daily interaction.
“This implies that, rather than the extent of the economic system, the primary limitation to the development of informationprocessing technologies (Flannery, 1972;Shin et al., 2020) may be the degree of settlement clustering and intense daily interaction.”
From Sociopolitical evolution, population clustering, and technology among early sedentary communities in northeastern andes, colombia (2024) · cites this paper as Shin et al., 2020
Such behavior reduced the need and possibility of developing information storage technologies such as common standards in symbolic representations of counting or writing systems.
“Such behavior reduced the need and possibility of developing information storage technologies such as common standards in symbolic representations of counting or writing systems (Shin et al., 2020).”
From Sociopolitical evolution, population clustering, and technology among early sedentary communities in northeastern andes, colombia (2024) · cites this paper as Shin et al., 2020
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Epigenetic control of melanoma cell invasiveness by the stem cell factor SALL4
Diener, J., Baggiolini, A., Pernebrink, M., Dalcher, D., Lerra, L., Cheng, P. F., Varum, S., Häusel, J., Stierli, S., Treier, M., et al. (2021) · Nature Communications · doi:10.1038/s41467-021-25326-8 · Cited by 34
Fajardo, S., & Argüello, P. (2024) · Journal Of Anthropological Archaeology · doi:10.1016/j.jaa.2024.101628 · Cited by 4
Metadata
- Authors
- Shin, J., Price, M. H., Wolpert, D. H., Shimao, H., Tracey, B., & Kohler, T. A.
- Venue
- Nature Communications
- Published
- 2020-05-14
- Volume
- 11
- Issue
- 1
- ISSN
- 2041-1723
- PMC
- PMC7224170
- Cited by
- 32
- References
- 1
- Language
- en
- Funders
- National Science Foundation (SMA-1620462)
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