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 ...

As societies become complex systems, the consequences of change intertwine and are often unexpected. From nomadic life to agricultural, from industrial urbanization to post-industrial societies, each ...

Termites did not evolve complex societies by adding new genetic features. Instead, scientists found that they became more ...

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 ...

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) ...

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

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 ...

A new comparative study of social and solitary wasp species, including these wasps of the species Protopolybia exigua, suggests that as social behavior evolved, the brain regions for central cognitive ...