Document Type
Article
Publication Date
11-16-2017
Abstract
Do human societies from around the world exhibit similarities in the way that they are structured, and show commonalities in the ways that they have evolved? These are long-standing questions that have proven difficult to answer. To test between competing hypotheses, we constructed a massive repository of historical and archaeological information known as “Seshat: Global History Databank.” We systematically coded data on 414 societies from 30 regions around the world spanning the last 10,000 years. We were able to capture information on 51 variables reflecting nine characteristics of human societies, such as social scale, economy, features of governance, and information systems. Our analyses revealed that these different characteristics show strong relationships with each other and that a single principal component captures around three-quarters of the observed variation. Furthermore, we found that different characteristics of social complexity are highly predictable across different world regions. These results suggest that key aspects of social organization are functionally related and do indeed coevolve in predictable ways. Our findings highlight the power of the sciences and humanities working together to rigorously test hypotheses about general rules that may have shaped human history.
Recommended Citation
Turchin, Peter, Thomas E. Currie, Harvey Whitehouse, Pieter François, Kevin Feeney, Daniel Mullins, Daniel Hoyer, et al. 2017. “Quantitative Historical Analysis Uncovers a Single Dimension of Complexity That Structures Global Variation in Human Social Organization.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, December, 201708800. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1708800115.
Peer Reviewed
1
Copyright
The authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Included in
Community-Based Research Commons, Cultural History Commons, Digital Humanities Commons, Family, Life Course, and Society Commons, Other History Commons, Other Sociology Commons, Place and Environment Commons, Political History Commons, Public History Commons, Quantitative, Qualitative, Comparative, and Historical Methodologies Commons, Social History Commons, Sociology of Culture Commons
Comments
This article was originally published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in December 2017. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1708800115