Hamilton, Marcus, Robert S. Walker, Briggs Buchanan, and David S. Sandeford. “Scaling major transitions in human sociopolitical complexity.” (2019).
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The human species is diverse in the size, structure and complexity of our social organizations. Today, human sociopolitical complexity ranges from stateless small-scale societies to complex states that integrate millions of individuals over vast geographic areas. Here, we explore major transitions across this range of complexity. In particular, we examine the statistical structure of these transitions using Horton-Strahler branching, generalized Horton Laws, and allometric spatial mixed-effect models. We show that all major transitions in sociopolitical complexity follow an invariant fractal-like growth process; with each transition there is an additional level of jurisdictional hierarchy, a four-fold increase in population size, a two-fold increase in population area, and therefore a doubling of population density. These statistics fully describe all transitions from the least to the most complex societies. However, these transitions are probabilistic, not deterministic in nature. This fact explains the asymmetry of human sociopolitical evolution: while more complex societies were necessarily once less complex, less complex societies do not necessarily become more complex.