Edward Turner

TL;DR: A model that uses cultural evolution mechanisms to predict where and when the largest-scale complex societies should have arisen in human history supports theories that emphasize the role of institutions in state-building and suggests a possible explanation why a long history of statehood is positively correlated with political stability, institutional quality, and income per capita.

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: Seshat: The Global History Databank as mentioned in this paper is a large-scale dataset of historical and archaeological information about past human societies that has not been systematically organized and, therefore, remains inaccessible for empirically testing theories about cultural evolution and historical dynamics.

TL;DR: The results support the predictions of two complementary hypotheses, indicating that large-scale societies developed more commonly in regions where agriculture has been practiced for longer and warfare was more intense, thus creating a stronger selection pressure for societies to scale up.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors use a variety of sources to map the spread of mounted warfare to different parts of Eurasia and Africa during the Ancient and Medieval eras, and to the Americas during the Early Modern period.