A quantitative analysis of intensification in the ethnographic record.

The intensification of food production plays a central role in the evolution of complex human societies. However, it is unclear whether the standard model of intensification is theoretically or empirically justified. This leaves social scientists unable to make reasonable inferences about the relationship between intensification and the evolution of social complexity in past societies. To remedy this problem, I derive a model of intensification from human macroecology, settlement scaling theory, human behavioural ecology, cultural evolutionary theory and niche construction theory. The standard and cultural niche construction models are formalized and their predictions are tested using a comprehensive ethnographic dataset that describes food production in 40 human societies, ranging in complexity from foraging bands to agricultural states. Analysis of the ethnographic record suggests that we reject the standard model and tentatively accept the cultural niche construction model. I attempt to demonstrate the broader utility of the cultural niche construction model as a framework that may help explain the transition from small-scale to large-scale complex societies.

Scaling human sociopolitical complexity.

Human societies exhibit a diversity of social organizations that vary widely in size, structure, and complexity. Today, human sociopolitical complexity ranges from stateless small-scale societies of a few hundred individuals to complex states of millions, most of this diversity evolving only over the last few hundred years. Understanding how sociopolitical complexity evolved over time and space has always been a central focus of the social sciences. Yet despite this long-term interest, a quantitative understanding of how sociopolitical complexity varies across cultures is not well developed. Here we use scaling analysis to examine the statistical structure of a global sample of over a thousand human societies across multiple levels of sociopolitical complexity. First, we show that levels of sociopolitical complexity are self-similar as adjacent levels of jurisdictional hierarchy see a four-fold increase in population size, a two-fold increase in geographic range, and therefore a doubling of population density. Second, we show how this self-similarity leads to the scaling of population size and geographic range. As societies increase in complexity population density is reconfigured in space and quantified by scaling parameters. However, there is considerable overlap in population metrics across all scales suggesting that while more complex societies tend to have larger and denser populations, larger and denser populations are not necessarily more complex.

Organizational complexity and demographic scale in primary states.

The relationship between organizational complexity and demographic scale is an enduring research problem at the intersection of the natural and social sciences and has far reaching implications for the study of social evolution, particularly the emergence and collapse of complex social organizations such as chiefdoms, states and empires. Anthropological models of social evolution universally assume that population growth plays a critical role in the development of organizational complexity; however, the relationship between organizational complexity and demographic scale has not been formalized and cross-culturally validated. There is a rich yet unsystematized body of diachronic organizational and demographic data describing the evolution of organizational complexity in 10 archaeologically known cases of primary state formation. Using this dataset, this essay proposes and tests a complex network model that describes state societies as discrete, self-similar, hierarchical social networks. The model accurately describes how organizational complexity and population scale in all cases. The complex network architecture of state societies suggests that further advances in our understanding of modern social organization may be found by a deeper investigation of the role of human nature in the evolution of human societies.