Coevolution of landesque capital intensive agriculture and sociopolitical hierarchy.

ABSTRACT: One of the defining trends of the Holocene has been the emergence of complex societies. Two essential features of complex societies are intensive resource use and sociopolitical hierarchy. Although it is widely agreed that these two phenomena are associated cross-culturally and have both contributed to the rise of complex societies, the causality underlying their relationship has been the subject of longstanding debate. Materialist theories of cultural evolution tend to view resource intensification as driving the development of hierarchy, but the reverse order of causation has also been advocated, along with a range of intermediate views. Phylogenetic methods have the potential to test between these different causal models. Here we report the results of a phylogenetic study that modeled t

SUBMITTER: Sheehan O 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5889631 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature