A new study out of the Complexity Science Hub concludes that social disintegration and violent conflict played a crucial role in shaping the population dynamics of early farming societies in Neolithic Europe:
Complexity scientist Peter Turchin and his team at CSH, working as part of an international and interdisciplinary collaboration, may have added a meaningful piece to a long-standing puzzle in archeology. Scholars have long tried to understand why Neolithic farmer populations go through boom-bust cycles, including "collapses" when whole regions are abandoned. According to one common explanation, climate fluctuations are the main driver, but empirical tests do not fully support this claim. In a new paper, published in the latest issue of Nature Scientific Reports, Turchin and his team seem to have come up with a new piece of information.
"Our study shows that periodic outbreaks of warfare — and not climate fluctuations – can account for the observed boom-bust patterns in the data," argues Turchin, who's a project leader at the Complexity Science Hub (CSH).
[...] Turchin has been applying mathematical models of social integration and disintegration to analyze the rise and fall of complex societies, such as agrarian empires in history or modern nation-states. He admits he wasn't convinced that such ideas would also apply to prehistory, such as the European Neolithic, where most of the time people lived in small-scale farming communities with no deep social inequalities and limited political organization beyond local settlements.
"I confess that until recently I thought that such societies were quite resilient and not susceptible to social disintegration and collapse," says Turchin. "There is no state or nobles to rebel against and, in any case, what's there to 'collapse'?," adds the complexity scientist.
Turchin, however, now holds a different view. Increasing evidence suggested that "simple" Neolithic farmers' societies also collapsed. "In fact, such cases are much more profound than the social and political breakdown of more recent societies, because archaeology indicates that substantial regions were depopulated."
[...] "Since we don't see consistent large-scale political organization during this time, it would be easy to imagine that things were static, such that people settled in a village and lived there for three or four thousand years without much happening in between. That doesn't seem to be the case. Sadly, this also means that this period was more violent than previously thought."
[...] "Additionally, the study indicates that humans and their interactions, whether friendly or violent, form a complex system, regardless of their political or economic organization. It doesn't matter if you don't want to organize into a state, you are still affected by your neighbors and their neighbors as well," adds Kondor.
Journal Reference:
Dániel Kondor, James S. Bennett, Detlef Gronenborn, et al., Explaining population booms and busts in Mid-Holocene Europe, Sci. Rep., 13, 9310 (2023) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-35920-z
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Friday September 15 2023, @11:44AM (6 children)
Maybe trade networks? Not toxic worldwide globalists like we have now, but simple trade stuff like salt for food preservation.
Imagine a static stable situation. Suddenly, "for whatever rando reason" the coasties stop sending as much salt inland. The inlanders die because they can't salt preserve their excess meat for the winter or lean times in general. The inlanders, being dead, can't grow grain and trade it to the coasties to keep them alive in the lean times, so more coasties die resulting in even less salt being traded inland, and the cycle repeats until they're all pretty much wiped or at best dropped back to hunter-gatherer levels, which in that climate might be essentially zero people per sq mile.
Repeat for whatever other rando reasons.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 15 2023, @12:51PM
And, when stressed by lack of food, people will stop behaving politely and try to come and steal the salt, and grain, and revenge kill for atrocities committed by the other on their last raid, etc. Does war cause stress, or does stress cause war? Yes.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by gznork26 on Friday September 15 2023, @01:57PM (1 child)
What you've described also sounds like some of the dynamics in The Game of Life, where some of the active patterns persist for a period of time, either in place or by moving, before encountering a random situation that freezes the action. Shifting the context, bits of social ecosystems arise between or among communities which persist until some random event kneecaps the dynamic which had kept the ecosystem alive. At that point, the groups that composed the system are isolated and do not survive as they were. It's evolution on a different scale,
Khipu were Turing complete.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 15 2023, @05:25PM
Whites alone have been doing the right thing by the planet and mankind in general, reproducing below replacement. Globally, they are the endangered minority.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by krishnoid on Friday September 15 2023, @04:32PM (1 child)
When you're on the coast, you can "harvest" fish year-round to survive. I think cities and towns were founded next to running/bodies of water for this reason.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday September 15 2023, @05:05PM
That's kind of optimistic. Even domesticated livestock isn't really continuous except under unusual circumstances or with the help of modern logistics.
Many fish have weird lifecycles. Infinite salmon in the late summer, not so much salmon the other three seasons.
Also maybe the boat breaks so they are landlocked until they fix the boat, or the weather is awful and they run out of dried cod, or whatever.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 16 2023, @11:41AM
"Toxic worldwide globalists" who are helping [soylentnews.org] almost all of humanity to achieve a variety of things we take for granted in the developed world: developed world standard of living, peace, low pollution, etc. Sorry, if that's inconvenient for your narrative.
Otherwise, you present a good scenario for how widespread collapses can propagate then and now.