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Rise and fall of political complexity in island South-East Asia and the Pacific

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Abstract

There is disagreement about whether human political evolution has proceeded through a sequence of incremental increases in complexity, or whether larger, non-sequential increases have occurred. The extent to which societies have decreased in complexity is also unclear. These debates have continued largely in the absence of rigorous, quantitative tests. We evaluated six competing models of political evolution in Austronesian-speaking societies using phylogenetic methods. Here we show that in the best-fitting model political complexity rises and falls in a sequence of small steps. This is closely followed by another model in which increases are sequential but decreases can be either sequential or in bigger drops. The results indicate that large, non-sequential jumps in political complexity have not occurred during the evolutionary history of these societies. This suggests that, despite the numerous contingent pathways of human history, there are regularities in cultural evolution that can be detected using computational phylogenetic methods.

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Figure 1: Phylogenetic relationships and geographical location of 84 Austronesian societies.
Figure 2: Models of political evolution tested in this study.
Figure 3: Estimated rate parameters for transitions between different forms of political organization under the RJMCMC analysis.

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Acknowledgements

We thank R. Green, who passed away recently, for his advice and support of phylogenetic studies of cultural evolution. We thank R. Foley and M. Dunn for their comments during an earlier stage of this research, and R. Blust and A. Pawley for comments on the manuscript. T.C. was supported by an ESRC/NERC Interdisciplinary Studentship and a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Postdoctoral Fellowship. S.G. and R.G. were supported by the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund. R.M. was supported by a European Research Council grant.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Evolutionary Cognitive Science Research Center, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo 153-8902, Japan

    Thomas E. Currie & Toshikazu Hasegawa

  2. Department of Anthropology, Human Evolutionary Ecology Group, University College, London WC1H 0BW, United Kingdom,

    Thomas E. Currie & Ruth Mace

  3. Department of Psychology, University of Auckland, Auckland 1142, New Zealand,

    Simon J. Greenhill & Russell D. Gray

  4. Computational Evolution Group, University of Auckland, Auckland 1142, New Zealand ,

    Simon J. Greenhill

Authors
  1. Thomas E. Currie
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  2. Simon J. Greenhill
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  3. Russell D. Gray
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  4. Toshikazu Hasegawa
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  5. Ruth Mace
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Contributions

T.E.C. conceived and designed the study in conjunction with R.M. S.J.G. and R.D.G. collected the linguistic data and built the phylogenetic trees. T.E.C. collated the ethnographic data and conducted the phylogenetic comparative analyses. T.E.C., S.J.G., R.D.G., T.H. and R.M. wrote the paper and discussed the results and implications and commented on the manuscript at all stages.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Thomas E. Currie.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Supplementary Information

This file contains Supplementary Methods, a Supplementary Discussion, Supplementary Notes and References and Supplementary Figures 1-3 with legends and Supplementary Tables 1-4 (PDF 744 kb)

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Currie, T., Greenhill, S., Gray, R. et al. Rise and fall of political complexity in island South-East Asia and the Pacific. Nature 467, 801–804 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature09461

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