The vulnerability of aging states: A survival analysis across premodern societies.

How states and great powers rise and fall is an intriguing enigma of human history. Are there any patterns? Do polities become more vulnerable over time as they age? We analyze longevity in hundreds of premodern states using survival analysis to help provide initial insights into these questions. This approach is commonly used to study the risk of death in biological organisms or failure in mechanical systems. The results reveal that the risk of state termination increased steeply over approximately the first two centuries after formation and stabilized thereafter. This provides the first quantitative support for the hypothesis that the resilience of political states decreases over time. Potential mechanisms that could drive such declining resilience include environmental degradation, increasing complexity, growing inequality, and extractive institutions. While the cases are from premodern times, such dynamics and drivers of vulnerability may remain relevant today.

Correlates of COVID-19 vaccination intentions and opinions about mandates among four groups of adults in South Africa with distinct vaccine intentions: evidence from a large national survey.

INTRODUCTION: Despite a high number of recorded COVID-19 infections and deaths in South Africa, COVID-19 vaccine coverage remained low in March 2022, ten months into the national vaccine roll-out. This study provides evidence on the correlates of vaccine intentions, attitudes towards vaccination and opinions about mandates. METHODS: We used data from the second COVID-19 Vaccine Survey (CVACS), a telephone survey conducted February-March 2022 among 3,608 South African adults who self-reported not being vaccinated against COVID-19. The survey instrument was designed in consultation with government, policymakers, and civil society; and segmented the sample into four distinct groups with different vaccine intentions (synonymous with vaccine hesitancy levels). Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney tests were used to examine the sociodemographic characteristics, attitudes and behaviours associated with the different vaccination intentions groups. Thematic coding of responses to open-ended questions elicited insights on reasons for not being vaccinated and attitudes towards mandates. RESULTS: Intentions to get vaccinated were greater among individuals with lower socio-economic status (Mann-Whitney Z = -11.3, p < 0.001); those believing the vaccine protects against death (Kruskal-Wallis Χ2 = 494, p < 0.001); and those who perceived themselves at risk of COVID-19-related illness (Χ2 = 126, p < 0.01). Vaccine intentions were lower among individuals who believed that the vaccine causes death (Χ2 = 163, p < 0.001); believed that the vaccine is unsafe for the babies of pregnant/breastfeeding mothers, or the chronically ill (Χ2 = 123, p < 0.01); those not trusting government health information about COVID-19 and the COVID-19 vaccine (Kendall's τ = -0.41, p < 0.01); and those in opposition to mandates (τ = 0.35, p < 0.001). Only 25% supported mandates, despite 48% thinking mandates would work well, with 54% citing individual rights as their main reason for mandate opposition. CONCLUSION: The profile of individuals not vaccinated against COVID-19 as of March 2022 varied markedly by self-reported vaccination intentions, underscoring the importance of tailored demand-creation efforts. This paper highlights several factors which differ significantly across these groups. These findings could inform the design of future vaccination campaigns, potentially increasing their likelihood of success. This is an important policy objective given widespread vaccine hesitancy, and further work is required on this topic. Mandates remain an option to increase coverage but need to be carefully considered given extensive opposition.

Wealth inequality in the prehispanic northern US Southwest: from Malthus to Tyche.

Persistent differences in wealth and power among prehispanic Pueblo societies are visible from the late AD 800s through the late 1200s, after which large portions of the northern US Southwest were depopulated. In this paper we measure these differences in wealth using Gini coefficients based on house size, and show that high Ginis (large wealth differences) are positively related to persistence in settlements and inversely related to an annual measure of the size of the unoccupied dry-farming niche. We argue that wealth inequality in this record is due first to processes inherent in village life which have internally different distributions of the most productive maize fields, exacerbated by the dynamics of systems of balanced reciprocity; and second to decreasing ability to escape village life owing to shrinking availability of unoccupied places within the maize dry-farming niche as villages get enmeshed in regional systems of tribute or taxation. We embed this analytical reconstruction in the model of an 'Abrupt imposition of Malthusian equilibrium in a natural-fertility, agrarian society' proposed by Puleston et al. (Puleston C, Tuljapurkar S, Winterhalder B. 2014 PLoS ONE 9, e87541 (doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0087541)), but show that the transition to Malthusian dynamics in this area is not abrupt but extends over centuries This article is part of the theme issue 'Evolutionary ecology of inequality'.

Lockdown stringency and employment formality: evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa.

In response to COVID-19 most governments used some form of lockdown policy to manage the pandemic. This required making iterative policy decisions in a rapidly changing epidemiological environment resulting in varying levels of lockdown stringency over time. While studies estimating the labour market effects of lockdown policies exist in both developed and developing countries, there is limited evidence on the impact of variation in lockdown stringency, particularly in developing countries. Such variation may have large heterogenous effects both on aggregate and between worker groups. In this paper, we estimate the causal effect of lockdown stringency on employment probabilities, adopting a quasi-experimental design on unique labour force panel data from South Africa. South Africa is a useful case study given its upper-middle-income status and relatively small informal sector, thus serving as an example to a variety of developing and developed country economies. We find that the negative employment effects of the country's lockdown policy were driven by effects on the informal sector. Furthermore, we observe important effect heterogeneity by employment formality as the stringency of the country's lockdown regulations changed over time. We find that more stringent lockdown levels negatively affected informal, but not formal sector employment, while less stringent levels negatively affected formal, but not informal sector employment. From a policy perspective, evidence of such heterogeneity can inform decisions around the optimal targeting of support as the pandemic progresses and lockdown policies are reconsidered.

Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios.

Prudent risk management requires consideration of bad-to-worst-case scenarios. Yet, for climate change, such potential futures are poorly understood. Could anthropogenic climate change result in worldwide societal collapse or even eventual human extinction? At present, this is a dangerously underexplored topic. Yet there are ample reasons to suspect that climate change could result in a global catastrophe. Analyzing the mechanisms for these extreme consequences could help galvanize action, improve resilience, and inform policy, including emergency responses. We outline current knowledge about the likelihood of extreme climate change, discuss why understanding bad-to-worst cases is vital, articulate reasons for concern about catastrophic outcomes, define key terms, and put forward a research agenda. The proposed agenda covers four main questions: 1) What is the potential for climate change to drive mass extinction events? 2) What are the mechanisms that could result in human mass mortality and morbidity? 3) What are human societies' vulnerabilities to climate-triggered risk cascades, such as from conflict, political instability, and systemic financial risk? 4) How can these multiple strands of evidence-together with other global dangers-be usefully synthesized into an "integrated catastrophe assessment"? It is time for the scientific community to grapple with the challenge of better understanding catastrophic climate change.

Longitudinal changes in COVID-19 vaccination intent among South African adults: evidence from the NIDS-CRAM panel survey, February to May 2021.

BACKGROUND: COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy has threatened the ability of many countries worldwide to contain the pandemic. Given the severe impact of the pandemic in South Africa and disruptions to the roll-out of the vaccine in early 2021, slower-than-expected uptake is a pressing public health challenge in the country. We examined longitudinal changes in COVID-19 vaccination intent among South African adults, as well as determinants of intent to receive a vaccine. METHODS: We used longitudinal data from Wave 4 (February/March 2021) and Wave 5 (April/May 2021) of the National Income Dynamics Study: Coronavirus Rapid Mobile Survey (NIDS-CRAM), a national and broadly representative panel survey of adults in South Africa. We conducted cross-sectional analyses on aggregate and between-group variation in vaccination intent, examined individual-level changes between waves, and modeled demographic predictors of intent. RESULTS: We analysed data for 5629 (Wave 4; 48% male, mean age 41.5 years) and 5862 (Wave 5; 48% male, mean age 41.6 years) respondents. Willingness to get a COVID-19 vaccine significantly increased from 70.8% (95% CI: 68.5-73.1) in Wave 4 to 76.1% (95% CI: 74.2-77.8) in Wave 5. Individual-level analyses indicated that only 6.6% of respondents remained strongly hesitant between survey waves. Although respondents aged 18-24 years were 8.5 percentage points more likely to report hesitancy, hesitant respondents in this group were 5.6 percentage points more likely to change their minds by Wave 5. Concerns about rushed testing and safety of the vaccines were frequent and strongly-held reasons for hesitancy. CONCLUSIONS: Willingness to receive a COVID-19 vaccine has increased among adults in South Africa, and those who were entrenched in their reluctance make up a small proportion of the country's population. Younger adults, those in formal housing, and those who trusted COVID-19 information on social media were more likely to be hesitant. Given that stated vaccination intent may not translate into behaviour, our finding that three-quarters of the population were willing to accept the vaccine may reflect an upper bound. Vaccination promotion campaigns should continue to frame vaccine acceptance as the norm and tailor strategies to different demographic groups.

Loss of resilience preceded transformations of pre-Hispanic Pueblo societies.

Climate extremes are thought to have triggered large-scale transformations of various ancient societies, but they rarely seem to be the sole cause. It has been hypothesized that slow internal developments often made societies less resilient over time, setting them up for collapse. Here, we provide quantitative evidence for this idea. We use annual-resolution time series of building activity to demonstrate that repeated dramatic transformations of Pueblo cultures in the pre-Hispanic US Southwest were preceded by signals of critical slowing down, a dynamic hallmark of fragility. Declining stability of the status quo is consistent with archaeological evidence for increasing violence and in some cases, increasing wealth inequality toward the end of these periods. Our work thus supports the view that the cumulative impact of gradual processes may make societies more vulnerable through time, elevating the likelihood that a perturbation will trigger a large-scale transformation that includes radically rejecting the status quo and seeking alternative pathways.

How can evolutionary and biological anthropologists engage broader audiences?

OBJECTIVES: With our diverse training, theoretical and empirical toolkits, and rich data, evolutionary and biological anthropologists (EBAs) have much to contribute to research and policy decisions about climate change and other pressing social issues. However, we remain largely absent from these critical, ongoing efforts. Here, we draw on the literature and our own experiences to make recommendations for how EBAs can engage broader audiences, including the communities with whom we collaborate, a more diverse population of students, researchers in other disciplines and the development sector, policymakers, and the general public. These recommendations include: (1) playing to our strength in longitudinal, place-based research, (2) collaborating more broadly, (3) engaging in greater public communication of science, (4) aligning our work with open-science practices to the extent possible, and (5) increasing diversity of our field and teams through intentional action, outreach, training, and mentorship. CONCLUSIONS: We EBAs need to put ourselves out there: research and engagement are complementary, not opposed to each other. With the resources and workable examples we provide here, we hope to spur more EBAs to action.

Survival of the Systems.

Since Darwin, individuals and more recently genes, have been the focus of evolutionary thinking. The idea that selection operates on nonreproducing, higher-level systems including ecosystems or societies, has met with scepticism. But research emphasising that natural selection can be based solely on differential persistence invites reconsideration of their evolution. Self-perpetuating feedback cycles involving biotic as well as abiotic components are critical to determining persistence. Evolution of autocatalytic networks of molecules is well studied, but the principles hold for any 'self-perpetuating' system. Ecosystem examples include coral reefs, rainforests, and savannahs. Societal examples include agricultural systems, dominant belief systems, and economies. Persistence-based selection of feedbacks can help us understand how ecological and societal systems survive or fail in a changing world.

Future of the human climate niche.

All species have an environmental niche, and despite technological advances, humans are unlikely to be an exception. Here, we demonstrate that for millennia, human populations have resided in the same narrow part of the climatic envelope available on the globe, characterized by a major mode around ∼11 °C to 15 °C mean annual temperature (MAT). Supporting the fundamental nature of this temperature niche, current production of crops and livestock is largely limited to the same conditions, and the same optimum has been found for agricultural and nonagricultural economic output of countries through analyses of year-to-year variation. We show that in a business-as-usual climate change scenario, the geographical position of this temperature niche is projected to shift more over the coming 50 y than it has moved since 6000 BP. Populations will not simply track the shifting climate, as adaptation in situ may address some of the challenges, and many other factors affect decisions to migrate. Nevertheless, in the absence of migration, one third of the global population is projected to experience a MAT >29 °C currently found in only 0.8% of the Earth's land surface, mostly concentrated in the Sahara. As the potentially most affected regions are among the poorest in the world, where adaptive capacity is low, enhancing human development in those areas should be a priority alongside climate mitigation.

Scale and information-processing thresholds in Holocene social evolution.

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.

Corrigendum: Greater post-Neolithic wealth disparities in Eurasia than in North America and Mesoamerica.

This corrects the article DOI: 10.1038/nature24646.

Greater post-Neolithic wealth disparities in Eurasia than in North America and Mesoamerica.

How wealth is distributed among households provides insight into the fundamental characters of societies and the opportunities they afford for social mobility. However, economic inequality has been hard to study in ancient societies for which we do not have written records, which adds to the challenge of placing current wealth disparities into a long-term perspective. Although various archaeological proxies for wealth, such as burial goods or exotic or expensive-to-manufacture goods in household assemblages, have been proposed, the first is not clearly connected with households, and the second is confounded by abandonment mode and other factors. As a result, numerous questions remain concerning the growth of wealth disparities, including their connection to the development of domesticated plants and animals and to increases in sociopolitical scale. Here we show that wealth disparities generally increased with the domestication of plants and animals and with increased sociopolitical scale, using Gini coefficients computed over the single consistent proxy of house-size distributions. However, unexpected differences in the responses of societies to these factors in North America and Mesoamerica, and in Eurasia, became evident after the end of the Neolithic period. We argue that the generally higher wealth disparities identified in post-Neolithic Eurasia were initially due to the greater availability of large mammals that could be domesticated, because they allowed more profitable agricultural extensification, and also eventually led to the development of a mounted warrior elite able to expand polities (political units that cohere via identity, ability to mobilize resources, or governance) to sizes that were not possible in North America and Mesoamerica before the arrival of Europeans. We anticipate that this analysis will stimulate other work to enlarge this sample to include societies in South America, Africa, South Asia and Oceania that were under-sampled or not included in this study.

Prehistoric mitochondrial DNA of domesticate animals supports a 13th century exodus from the northern US southwest.

The 13th century Puebloan depopulation of the Four Corners region of the US Southwest is an iconic episode in world prehistory. Studies of its causes, as well as its consequences, have a bearing not only on archaeological method and theory, but also social responses to climate change, the sociology of social movements, and contemporary patterns of cultural diversity. Previous research has debated the demographic scale, destinations, and impacts of Four Corners migrants. Much of this uncertainty stems from the substantial differences in material culture between the Four Corners vs. hypothesized destination areas. Comparable biological evidence has been difficult to obtain due to the complete departure of farmers from the Four Corners in the 13th century CE and restrictions on sampling human remains. As an alternative, patterns of genetic variation among domesticated species were used to address the role of migration in this collapse. We collected mitochondrial haplotypic data from dog (Canis lupus familiaris) and turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) remains from archaeological sites in the most densely-populated portion of the Four Corners region, and the most commonly proposed destination area for that population under migration scenarios. Results are consistent with a large-scale migration of humans, accompanied by their domestic turkeys, during the 13th century CE. These results support scenarios that suggest contemporary Pueblo peoples of the Northern Rio Grande are biological and cultural descendants of Four Corners populations.

Twenty-first century approaches to ancient problems: Climate and society.

By documenting how humans adapted to changes in their environment that are often much greater than those experienced in the instrumental record, archaeology provides our only deep-time laboratory for highlighting the circumstances under which humans managed or failed to find to adaptive solutions to changing climate, not just over a few generations but over the longue durée Patterning between climate-mediated environmental change and change in human societies has, however, been murky because of low spatial and temporal resolution in available datasets, and because of failure to model the effects of climate change on local resources important to human societies. In this paper we review recent advances in computational modeling that, in conjunction with improving data, address these limitations. These advances include network analysis, niche and species distribution modeling, and agent-based modeling. These studies demonstrate the utility of deep-time modeling for calibrating our understanding of how climate is influencing societies today and may in the future.