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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, Insightful) by VLM on Friday September 15 2023, @11:48AM (6 children)
My understanding of the situation is this is based mostly on the noble savage stereotype with a side dish of minimal evidence from a small amount of skeletal remains.
It's possible that assumption is wrong, or at least the new evidence weakens the old assumption.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 15 2023, @12:56PM (3 children)
I still believe that 99+% of what is written about these ancient civilizations is fantasy fiction with the flimsiest basis in actual evidence.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by OrugTor on Friday September 15 2023, @04:22PM
Pretty much the definition of "pre-history".
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Friday September 15 2023, @06:05PM (1 child)
Bingo.
A mathematician has to prove his work, whether something new and innovative, or centuries old math.
Anthropoligists can lie beside a stream with some foot prints and some arrowheads nearby, and fantasize about what he thinks the foot prints and arrowheads mean. No proof required.
Oh, for a time machine, so that we can go back and prove that more than 80% of what we "know" about the past, is utter bullshit.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 15 2023, @09:10PM
Yes, that "80%" figure sounds very mathematical.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 15 2023, @05:21PM (1 child)
This line is particularly jarring:
As if villages aren't totally based on family hierarchies and a village chief whose word is law and who passes it onto his son.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 16 2023, @04:00PM
Bollocks. You're describing a monarchy. In village situations, the head is the one who actually knows how to get shite done.
There's been shitloads of modern hesperian studies of extant 'primitive' societies. Heriditary rule authorized by kinship shows up in societies a bit larger than a village.