Measuring Changes in Societal Scale

= < societal scale has increased in a roughly linear fashion over the past 12,000 years > [1]

Peter Peregrine:

"Societal Scale: Changes in societal scale are perhaps best measured by the Urbanization and Population Density variables. Graphs showing the means of these variables at 1000-year intervals for the last 12,000 years are given in Figures 2.A.4 and 2.A.5. Means have clearly increased over time, and in a roughly linear fashion; indeed, R-squared values for these two figures are 0.904 and 0.978, respectively. With these results one could argue that societal scale has increased in a roughly linear fashion over the past 12,000 years. That is, cultural evolution in terms of societal scale has taken a single, unilineal form (but see section 2.B below)."

(https://www.researchgate.net/publication/245534439_Atlas_of_Cultural_Evolution)