Eleven years ago we launched the Seshat project with the goal of collecting data that would enable us to test the many theories aiming to explain the evolution of large-scale complex human societies over the past 10,000 years. We now have a bunch of papers, some already published, oth

The brilliant atomic physicist Enrico Fermi was notorious for unnerving PhD candidates during their oral examinations by asking ‘How many piano tuners are there in the city of Chicago?’ The point of the question, besides the psychological effect, was to gauge how well the candidate co

Nine years ago I made one of the most consequential decisions of my life—I switched to the so-called Paleo Diet (“paleo” is a bit misleading, as I explain in the post). Had I not done so, I would certainly have contributed to the rising obesity statistics for the United States. Within

Some years ago I had a discussion with Ian Morris about the approach he took to quantify the social development of East versus West in his book, The Measure of Civilization. So I asked him: Which pre-industrial society was the richest in terms of energy use per capita? I have an answe

My reading of the month is Unearthly Powers by an Oxford historian Alan Strathern. It’s a very interesting and thought-provoking book. Highly recommended. There is much that I like in the book. Strathern avoids the ideological extremes that preoccupy today’s humanities, such as an ave

Question: What was the word for “two” used by people living in the Pontic-Caspian steppes (modern Ukraine and Southern Russia) 5,000 years ago? Answer: *dwóH₁ This is how historical linguists reconstruct “two” in the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language (see Indo-European vocabulary on

As long-time readers of this blog know, I am not only a scientist, but also a scientific publisher. I founded and indie imprint Beresta Books in 2015 to publish academic and popular non-fiction books that do not fit comfortably within traditional disciplinary boundaries. The main, but

In my previous post, Historians and Historical Databases, I discussed how the Seshat Databank would be impossible without a close collaboration with historians and other humanities scholars. Today I want to give a specific example of how this collaboration works. For those who have no

A guest post by Harvey Whitehouse and Pieter Francois This is an interesting moment in the development of history as an academic discipline. We stand on the brink of a sea change, not necessarily in the way historical evidence is gathered and documented, but in the way the resulting d

Our recent article in Nature, Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history has been generally very well received, but this week we got slammed with two critical articles, both published as preprints on PsyArchive. It will take us some time to carefully evaluate t