Data Geeks Say War, Not Agriculture, Spawned Complex Societies

[Mosby]

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Cliodynamics is a field of study created by Peter Turchin in the early 2000s. The idea is to use data as a means of predicting the future, but also as a way of testing theories about what happened in the past. You build a model that seeks to explain history, and then you test this model using real historical data.

The movement’s latest aim is to analyze the origins of complex societies. In a paper published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Turchin and a trans-disciplinary team from the University of Connecticut, University of Exeter, and the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis attempt to overturn the long standing belief that large-scale states are the product of agriculture.

Early humans were hunter-gatherers. They had relatively simple social structures, which consisted of perhaps a few dozen people, all of whom knew each other, and they didn’t engage in complex cooperative tasks. But eventually, complex societies evolved — complete with governments, armies, agriculture, education, and other large scale, cooperative projects. With their paper, Turchin and his collaborators analyzed the spread of the social norms that allowed societies to expand across millions of people.

“You cannot have a large state without bureaucrats, but bureaucrats are expensive. You have to pay them,” he says. “So the big question is how do complex societies evolve when they are so expensive?”

The standard theory, which Turchin calls the “bottom up” theory, is that humans invented agriculture around 10,000 years ago, providing resource surpluses that freed people up for other ventures. But what Turchin and his team have found is that the bottom-up theory is wrong, or at least incomplete. “Competitions between societies, which historically took the form of warfare, drive the evolution of complex societies,” he says.

To test the two competing theories, Turchin and company designed two mathematical models for predicting the spread of complex societies. One based only on agriculture, ecology and geography. The other included those three factors, plus warfare. Then, they used data from historical atlases to determine whether these models matched up with the way the different states and empires actually evolved.

The model that included warfare predicted about 65 percent of the historical variance, while the agricultural model explained only about 16 percent, suggesting that warfare was more important in the spread of social norms that lead to complex societies.

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http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/09/cliodynamics_war/


The research paper:

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/09/20/1308825110.full.pdf

[dkf]

1. Fascinating. Thanks for posting.

[Tumbulu]

2. Warfare after agriculture was a developed art

Not warfare vs agriculture. Agriculture is the still the foundation.

[Warpy]

3. That's my take as well, they came about independently

Still our domestic example of hunter-gatherer societies were some Indian tribes and they definitely knew warfare; they were not primarily agricultural tribes like the Mandan and Pueblo tribes, who didn't engage in much warfare, at all.

I'm not sure about the Kalahari !Kung people or the Australian aborigines, whether or not they also engaged in territorial squabbles.

My own take on tribes existing as hunter/gatherers is that they were more prone to territorial squabbles, while agricultural tribes in settled villages were not.

While warfare was technologically driven in Europe, very little of it spread to other endeavors. However, settled villagers were the ones most likely to develop other technologies like the production of ropes and textiles, which are key to becoming any sort of technological society.

That is what likely kept them from warfare, they were more important as trading hubs.

[SheilaT]

4. Interesting. And makes sense.

From what I know of the history of war and the 20th century alone it's only logical.

I read more than one s-f novel written in the 1930's, and their projections of things like airplanes supposedly in the 1950's or later were laughably behind what actually happened.

[GeorgeGist]

5. Did they consider the old maxim ...

'Winners write history'

[Yo_Mama]

6. Wouldn't agriculture have caused wars/raiding activities?

If you think about it, all human societies have gone through periods of hunger. Once agricultural settlements developed, there were storehouses of grains to be raided. It's a big incentive.

From there, it's relatively easy to see the natural progression into mutual defense unions and larger warring groups.

[greiner3]

7. I've thought about something like this.

This is a classic case of 'Evolutionary Arms Race'; "... is an evolutionary struggle between competing sets of co-evolving genes that develop adaptations and counter-adaptations against each other, resembling an arms race, which are also examples of positive feedback."

Replace genes with peoples who have and those that don't and you have the beginnings of human strife.

War was made possible, and inevitable knowing human nature, by Agriculture's development allowing larger and larger groups of people to live in close proximity.

Some people want what other people have.

[Orsino]

8. You mean military budgets get priority in advanced societies? I don't believe it.

(But seriously, thanks for posting this. Fascinating.)