Again, the uncertainty in the estimate pales into insignificance when we look at the overall trend. Over the 11,000 years separating Göbekli Tepe from the International Space Station, the scale of coo...
These windows were dedicated to the patron saints of the guilds and often showed the donors at work: furriers displaying a fur robe, money-changers testing their coin, butchers killing oxen. Even the...
Patrick Kirch concludes: By the time of initial contact with Europeans, Hawaiians had taken the older Polynesian concepts of chiefship and rank, and subjected them to a form of hypertrophy, the logica...
Our oversized brains evolved, in large part, to detect and resist manipulation by those who want to get ahead at our expense.
Find it difficult to believe that economic or information-processing advantages were the primary drivers of the transition to large-scale societies. Archaic-style states of which we have direct knowle...
Such perfection endures. For more than two millennia after horse-riding was invented, the warhorse remained the most important military technology bar none. A plentiful supply of horses was critical e...
Let’s step back from this debate and consider how it affects the question we are currently investigating, the role of war in the rise of archaic states. While there is confusion resulting from competi...
Cultural traits, however, are a more general category than memes, because they also include quantitative (smoothly-varying) characteristics that cannot be easily represented as discrete alternatives:...
Call this the bottom-up theory of the evolution of social complexity, because it treats social complexity as a sort of superstructure on the material resource base. In other words, if you stir enough...
Two very clear indicators are the appearance of lavishly furnished burials and large, elaborate private residences. Skeletons can tell us that one segment of population ate much higher-quality foods a...
The first cities and states arose 5,000 years ago. One of these archaic states, the Old Kingdom of Egypt (2650–2150 BCE), the one that built the Great Pyramid of Giza, had a population of between one...
The transition from egalitarian small-scale societies to archaic states did not happen as soon as people settled down in farming villages. Polynesians colonized Hawaii around 800 CE, and it took aroun...
The altruistic gene doesn’t help just any randomly chosen individual. In a sense, it helps copies of itself in a different individual. Generally speaking, full siblings share 50 percent of their genes...