"Society" Blogs & Blog Posts

During the past 10,000 years—the Holocene—human societies became larger and ever more complex. An international team of scientists led by Peter Turchin from the Complexity Science Hub Vienna (CSH) set out to test various theories on what drove th...

Wealth inequality is a research topic typically reserved for humans. Now, research from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln suggests that studying wealth inequality in animals can help shed light on soci...

From hunter-gatherer encampments to modern cities, permanent human settlements tend to densify as the population grows, while mobile human settlements do the opposite.Pygmy hunter-gatherers in the Congo Basin [Credit: JMGRACIA100/Wikipedia]New resear...

New research from the University of Warwick, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Reichman University, Universitat Pompeu Fabra and the Barcelona School of Economics challenges the conventional theory that the transition from foraging to farming drove...

Here’s a new video for my playlist entitled “Thoughts on Current Affairs“. It’s an admittedly dim view of the world, perhaps for the right reasons. I offer clarifications on extra-terrestrials (spoiler alert, I think they’re...

Despite wide variety amongst hunger-gatherer cultures, a new analysis finds that a "small world" network configuration is common to the social structures of all such groups. These network structures are constrained by the flows of energy and informat...

Human civilizations depend on the climate. Changes in climate affect the production of food and other resources that support our populations and economies. Paul Hooper, alumnus and adjunct associate professor of anthropology at The University of New...