One of my favorite big-think papers of recent years tries to explain humanity’s societal evolution, “The computational power of a human society: a new model of social evolution” by David H. Wolpert ...

Comparative archaeology : a commitment to understanding variation / Robert D. Drennan ... [et al.] -- Approaches to comparative analysis in archaeology / Michael E. Smith and Peter Peregrine -- ...

Drawing on 10,000 years of data, Peter Turchin explains how competition was central in the evolution of states and civilizations The Great Holocene Transformation (Beresta Books, September 2025) ...

A global study of 186 traditional societies found evidence supporting the theory that low-alcohol fermented beverages played a role in the evolution of political complexity, contributing to the ...

Human societies have become incredibly big and complex over the past few thousand years, and they have done so primarily because of agriculture and warfare. That is the claim made by a large ...

The researchers think the pattern they observed in ants reflects a more universal trend in the evolution of societal ...

Would you rather fight a horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses? The famous question, though implausible, reflects a ...

He was right. But Churchill never imagined a government that would add 10,000 year after year. That’s what we have in America. We have 160,000 pages of rules from the feds alone. States and localities ...