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 ...

Locations of the 30 sampled regions labelled according to precolonial evidence of moralizing gods. The area of each circle is proportional to social complexity of the earliest polity with moralizing ...

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) ...

Termites did not evolve complex societies by adding new genetic features. Instead, scientists found that they became more social by shedding genes tied to competition and independence. A shift to ...

Animal social behavior is an extremely complex phenomenon that is shaped by evolution. Animals, whether social bird species or solitary hunters, have an extremely wide range of social behaviours.

Humans across the globe use supernatural beliefs to explain the world around them. This article explores whether cultural groups invoke the supernatural more to explain natural phenomena (for example, ...

FOR almost all of human existence, our species has been roaming the planet, living in small groups, hunting and gathering, moving to new areas when the climate was favourable, retreating when it ...

A key mechanistic hypothesis for the evolution of division of labour in social insects is that a shared set of genes co-opted from a common solitary ancestral ground plan (a genetic toolkit for ...

People have been getting drunk for millennia. Historical records show that alcohol was an integral part of many early civilizations, from ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt to ancient Greece, China, and ...