Intro:
Using data collected from ancient civilizations across the world, researchers identified the most significant factors in human development. War came out on top.
If you were to plot the development of human civilization — defined by population size as well as economic and cultural output, among other factors — you would find that development is not linear but exponential. For tens of thousands of years, people lived in the same basic social organization. But then, around 10,000 years ago, everything changed: In a small period of time, hunter-gatherers settled into villages. Those villages then grew into cities, those cities into kingdoms, and those kingdoms into nation-states…