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Book: Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth
Quotes of Book: Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years
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  1. Peter Turchin _ Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years

    Again, the uncertainty in the estimate pales into insignificance when we look at the overall trend. Over the 11,000 years separating Göbekli Tepe from the International Space Station, the scale of cooperation, when measured by the labor costs of the most impressive building project, went up by four orders of magnitude-from 300 to 3,000,000. This is a huge-indeed, an astronomic-increase. And, of course, it was paralleled by an equally enormous increase in the scale of human societies. ·•·
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  2. Peter Turchin _ Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years

    These windows were dedicated to the patron saints of the guilds and often showed the donors at work: furriers displaying a fur robe, money-changers testing their coin, butchers killing oxen. Even the common laborers, who somehow managed to pool their meager resources, donated a window, which was dedicated to Adam, "who first dug the earth by the sweat of his brow."5
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  3. Peter Turchin _ Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years

    the Asian War Complex, appeared in Alaska. It spread rapidly through the continent-east to Greenland and south to California and the American southwest. The central innovation of the package was the recurved bow, backed with sinew. This was a much more powerful weapon than the wooden self bow already known to the Native Americans, and came with body armor often made from slats of wood or bone. Clearly, it wasn't just a hunting tool: it was used for war. Indeed, the appearance of the Asian War Complex in an area is usually followed by signs of intense warfare, such as a profusion of barbed bone arrowheads found embedded in human vertebrae.21
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  4. Peter Turchin _ Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years

    Our behavior and decisions are based on a mixture of calculation, emotions, and internalized norms, with calculation often a minor component of the cocktail.
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  5. Peter Turchin _ Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years

    Humans are uniquely good throwers. No other species even comes close. Monkeys and apes can throw branches, rotten fruit, and excrement {I still remember an encounter with an irate troop of howler monkeys in Costa Rica . . .}, but they do not use projectiles as lethal weapons in hunting or combat. Our closest relatives, chimpanzees, are quite pathetic at throwing.94 Imagine
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  6. Peter Turchin _ Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years

    In fact, the most important influence predicting a person's level of generalized trust is the attitude of his parents.84 And that would make generalized trust a culturally transmitted trait. Lorenzo
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  7. Peter Turchin _ Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years

    Cultural traits, however, are a more general category than memes, because they also include quantitative {smoothly-varying} characteristics that cannot be easily represented as discrete alternatives: for example, the inclination to trust strangers. {More on that below.}
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  8. Peter Turchin _ Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years

    Ranged weapons, together with the mastery of fire, literally made us human. They also defined what may be called the "human way of war." The distinguishing characteristic of human combat is the ability to strike from a distance coupled with mobility.
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  9. Peter Turchin _ Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years

    In other words, the important statistic is the risk of violent death for each person. To illustrate this point, there were 49 homicides in Denmark in 2012 {population: 5.6 million}, so the chance of any particular Dane being murdered that year was less than one in 100,000. But in a typical small-scale society, with a population of, say, 1,000, 49 homicides would translate into one chance in 20 of being murdered. As
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  10. Peter Turchin _ Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years

    For example, the populations of both the Roman Empire and Han China grew to 50–60 million people at the peak. This is the point when we surpassed the social insects. During the past two millennia no other animal anywhere has rivaled human societies in size and complexity. ·•· In
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  11. Peter Turchin _ Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years

    The first cities and states arose 5,000 years ago. One of these archaic states, the Old Kingdom of Egypt {2650–2150 BCE}, the one that built the Great Pyramid of Giza, had a population of between one and two million, which is beginning to approach the social scale of the most complex social insects, ants and termites. The"
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  12. Peter Turchin _ Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years

    call this the "bottom-up" theory of the evolution of social complexity, because it treats social complexity as a sort of "superstructure" on the material resource base. In other words, if you stir enough resources into your evolutionary pot, social complexity will inevitably bubble up. The problem with the bottom-up theory is that in several places where we can date the key stages in this process, we see a different sequence of events. The two sites with early monumental architecture that we discussed in Chapter 1, Göbekli Tepe and Poverty Point, arose before agriculture. So here we have an inverted sequence of events. First, a fairly large-scale society arises, with quite sophisticated ritual activities and buildings requiring the mobilization of large numbers of workers. Only later comes agriculture. Has the standard theory reversed cause and effect? Second, hunter-gatherer societies share food.
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