Alan Covey

TL;DR: Analysis of records from 414 societies that span the past 10,000 years from 30 regions around the world reveals that moralizing gods follow—rather than precede—large increases in social complexity.

TL;DR: A database of historical and archaeological information from 30 regions around the world over the last 10,000 years revealed that characteristics, such as social scale, economy, features of governance, and information systems, show strong evolutionary relationships with each other and that complexity of a society across different world regions can be meaningfully measured using a single principal component of variation.

TL;DR: The Seshat: Global History Databank (Seshat) as discussed by the authors is a large-scale dataset of historical and archaeological data from the period from the Neolithic Revolution to the Industrial Revolution.

TL;DR: This article found that belief in morally concerned supernatural agents culturally evolved to facilitate cooperation among strangers in large-scale societies, and that moralizing gods followed the expansion of human societies and may have been preceded by doctrinal rituals that contributed to the initial rise of social complexity.

TL;DR: In this article , a corrected and extended version of a Letter published in Nature (Whitehouse et al., 2019) which set out to test the Big Gods hypothesis proposing that beliefs in moralizing punitive deities drove the evolution of sociopolitical complexity in world history is presented.