“An ambitious analysis of a vast trove of data from 800 societies around the world concludes that there’s safety in numbers.
The Great Holocene Transformation: What Complexity Science Tells Us about the Evolution of Complex Societies Peter Turchin Beresta Books (2025)
When Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés arrived in Mexico in 1519, he found monarchs, cities, roads, markets, schools, astronomers, law courts and much else that also existed in his native Spain. Put another way, two cultural experiments had been running in parallel for 15,000 years, and when they came into contact, each recognized the other’s institutions.
It wasn’t just the civilizations of the Americas and Europe that resembled each other by that time. As biologist-turned-historian Peter Turchin observes in his tenth book, The Great Holocene Transformation, more than half of the world’s population in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries lived in five or six large societies with political systems that were remarkably structurally similar. His argument is that this was not a coincidence; although every society is unique, they have features in common that make them comparable.
This might not seem like a radical statement, but to some scholars it is. They argue that each society’s history is unique and that no meaningful comparison is possible. Others think it is possible in theory, but are uncomfortable with the translation of historical knowledge into binary categories or numbers, saying that it glosses over the inherent difficulty of interpreting the past from the ever-shifting vantage point of the present.
The small army of archaeologists, economists and other social scientists who work with Turchin on that gargantuan task of translation is convinced that this problem is tractable, and that such quantification will reveal patterns in history. The more data you collect, the more clearly the signal will emerge from the noise, they say. Equipped with large databases, powerful computational and analytical tools and artificial intelligence (AI), scholars can find these patterns and even predict how they might shape societies in the future.
In this book, Turchin sets out to answer what he calls “perhaps the biggest question in historical social science”: why, over the past 10,000 years — the epoch known as the Holocene — small collectives of foragers and farmers grew by seven orders of magnitude to become the societies familiar to Cortés and his Aztec adversary, Moctezuma II.
His answer, depressingly and paradoxically, is war. It was war that made us “ultrasocial”, to use his word, ratcheting up the size and complexity of those collectives until they became the states and empires that existed on the eve of the Industrial Revolution — the point at which his analysis ends. Ultrasociality was the secret of survival in this perpetual arms race, making it the ultimate military technology — or war the ultimate social technology.
He addressed the same question in his 2015 book, Ultrasociety, but that was written for a non-mathematically minded audience. This time, he shows his workings, and he has more data and better tools.
The Great Holocene Transformation is the culmination of more than 20 years’ work, during which he and others built the Seshat database — a storehouse of historical and archaeological information on more than 800 societies around the globe. This and similar databases that have emerged in the past decade form the basis of his cross-cultural and cross-temporal comparisons.
Social benefits
Scientific progress is usually the whittling down of theories to a few, and ultimately to one, through testing them against data. But where the Holocene transformation is concerned, theories have proliferated. The time has come, Turchin writes, “to create a killing field for theories and start retiring them to the cemetery of theories”.
His starting point is that, ten millennia being too short for biological evolution to have driven notable change, the mechanisms that fuelled this societal shift must have been cultural. Among the theories assessed are that agriculture, internal conflict, warfare or external conflict, and religion were the main drivers of societal complexification. Some ideas are dismissed, some are found to be useful but wanting, and the story that emerges, in a nutshell, goes as follows.
Before the Holocene, cumulative cultural evolution — the capacity of humans to build on the advances of their ancestors — produced technologies that allowed communities to adapt to their environment and increase in size. The threat of war between expanding groups drove the shift to agriculture — because agriculture could sustain more people than foraging could for a given patch of land — and further developments in military technology.
But agriculture is not possible in every biome, and in those that did not lend themselves to it — notably the steppe — humans took up herding or other subsistence models instead. Competition, usually in the form of warfare, was most intense at steppe frontiers, and it drove societies to expand further and to centralize. They became hierarchical and eventually bureaucratic. A by-product of this process was religion, specifically belief systems that enshrined social justice, family values and the rule of law, because it promoted social cohesion, shoring up the expanding societies.
Discarded theories
This brief synopsis hides the demise of a lot of theories. Among the casualties are philosopher Karl Marx’s idea that inequality and class conflict drive societies towards greater complexity. Turchin finds that they do the opposite, by diluting social cohesion and increasing societies’ vulnerability to external threat. Also stood down is an influential theory according to which ecological barriers are the ultimate drivers of social evolution, because they force expanding populations into conflict to obtain the resources they need.
Meanwhile, economic historian Philip Hoffman’s theory of why Europe took off around 1500, racing ahead of other regions in terms of societal scale and reach, survives relatively intact. Hoffman put Europe’s growth spurt down to its ability to sustain rapid technological change, notably in gunpowder weapons and ocean-faring ships. Turchin agrees, but finds that it was pressure exerted by the steppe frontier that fuelled that technological progress.
Not all theories have gone quietly to the spacious graveyard that Turchin has dug for them. A row broke out in 2019, after his group reported that the bulk of the shift to social complexity occurred before the emergence of moralizing religion, rather than being propelled by it, as cultural historians including Joseph Henrich and Edward Slingerland had argued. Henrich and Slingerland countered that the finding was an artefact of Seshat’s data-management systems. Turchin’s group retracted the paper, added more data and applied other statistical methods. The team got the same result, but it remains controversial.
The meaning of the Anthropocene: why it matters even without a formal geological definition
As a biologist spearheading this fresh treatment of the past, Turchin anticipates disputes. He insists on an interdisciplinary approach, invites his critics to collaborate and has furnished ample proof of his willingness to see his own theories challenged. He gives a lot of space in this book to the 2020 finding, reported by Jaeweon Shin, a mathematician at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and colleagues, that a society’s scale and its computational capacity — the ways it processes information, from the bureaucratic to the technological — reinforce each other (J. Shin et al. Nature Commun. 11, 2394; 2020). That insight had escaped Turchin.
Ironically, this more transparent treatment of this subject, complete with equations, is likely to further repel most of the conventional historians whom Turchin has consistently failed to win over. He thinks that they are haunted by spurious nineteenth-century efforts to find laws in history, such as social Darwinism — which applies ‘survival of the fittest’ ideas to societies — and paradigms proposing that societies evolve through fixed stages, which were debunked long ago.
The context has also changed. Researchers now know that complex systems such as swarms, stock markets and societies are shaped by feedback loops that produce nonlinear and even chaotic behaviours. Increasingly, the camp that looks short on humility is not the one that thinks it’s possible to understand those behaviours with data and computers, but the one that thinks it’s possible without.” [1]
1. Nature 645, 845-847 (2025) Laura Spinney
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