Great Holocene Transformation

* Book: The Great Holocene Transformation. What Complexity Science Tells Us about the Evolution of Complex Societies? Peter Turchin. Beresta Books, 2025.

URL = https://berestabooks.com/books/the-great-holocene-transformation

Description

“Why do the 99.9% of humanity live in large-scale societies organized as states?

During the Holocene (the last 10,000 years), the scale and complexity of human societies have undergone a dramatic transformation, so spectacular that it deserves to be called a 'Major Evolutionary Transition.' Past thinkers and modern social scientists have proposed a multitude of theories attempting to explain this transition. Theories have multiplied, and new ones continue to be proposed; yet, curiously, we still don’t have a generally agreed upon answer to how and why human societies have been transformed in such a comprehensive way.

The goal of 'The Great Holocene Transformation' is to show that we are now in a good position to systematically contrast predictions from different theories against each other, using data as arbiter. This development is a result of both better theories (with many more translated into formal models, compared even to a decade ago), better and more abundant data, and more robust statistical approaches. This combination of methods and data allows us to reject many logically incoherent and, especially, empirically inadequate hypotheses.“