Thomas E Currie
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 216220 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Thomas E Currie |
| PRENOMES | Thomas E |
| SOBRENOME | Currie |
| ASSINATURA | CURRIE T E |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Exeter |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9861-1341 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 22 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 50 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 22 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2009 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2024 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Governance characteristics and feelings of safety are associated with attitudinal success in community‐based natural resource management & conservation organizations in northern Kenya
For Community‐based Conservation (CBC) projects to be effective in the long‐term, they need to receive the support of the communities involved. Assessing whether CBC governance systems are working effectively is challenging, and it is important to evaluate both the characteristics of these governance systems, and the perceptions of community members. It is also important to understand how factors other than the governance features of individual C…
Willingness to cooperate in shared natural resource management is linked to group identification through perceived efficacy and group norms
Cooperative management of shared natural resources is one of the most urgent challenges the world is facing today. While there have been advances in understanding institutional design features that enable sustainable management, there are few field studies that provide theory-based insights into social psychological predictors of willingness to cooperate around shared resources. Here, we address this issue in the context of shared land management…
Assessing different historical pathways in the cultural evolution of economic development
A huge number of hypotheses have been put forward to explain the substantial diversity in economic performance we see in the present-day. There has been a growing appreciation that historical and ecological factors have contributed to social and economic development. However, it is not clear whether such factors have exerted a direct effect on modern productivity, or whether they influence economies indirectly by shaping the cultural evolution of…
An integrative approach to estimating productivity in past societies using Seshat
This article reports the results of a collaborative effort to estimate agricultural productivities in past societies using Seshat: Global History Databank. We focus on 30 Natural Geographic Areas (NGAs) distributed over 10 major world regions (Europe, Africa, Southwest Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Central Eurasia, North America, South America, and Oceania). The conceptual framework that we use to obtain these estimates combines th…
Duration of agriculture and distance from the steppe predict the evolution of large-scale human societies in Afro-Eurasia
Understanding why large, complex human societies have emerged and persisted more readily in certain regions of the world than others is an issue of long-standing debate. Here, we systematically test different hypotheses involving the social and ecological factors that may ultimately promote or inhibit the formation of large, complex human societies. We employ spatially explicit statistical analyses using data on the geographical and temporal dist…
New Era in the Study of Global History Is Born but It Needs to Be Nurtured
This article is a response to Slingerland et al. who criticize the quality of the data from Seshat: Global History Databank utilized in our Nature paper entitled “Complex Societies Precede Moralizing Gods throughout World History”. Their critique centres around the roles played by research assistants and experts in procuring and curating data, periodization structure, and so-called “data pasting” and “data filling”. We show that these criticisms …
Retracted Article
Dacura
New advances in computer science address problems historical scientists face in gathering and evaluating the now vast data sources available through the Internet. As an example we introduce Dacura, a dataset curation platform designed to assist historical researchers in harvesting, evaluating, and curating high-quality information sets from the Internet and other sources. Dacura uses semantic knowledge graph technology to represent data as comple…
A Systematic Assessment of "Axial Age" Proposals Using Global Comparative Historical Evidence
Proponents of the Axial Age contend that parallel cultural developments between 800 and 200 BCE in what is today China, Greece, India, Iran, and Israel-Palestine constitute the global historical turning point toward modernity. The Axial Age concept is well-known and influential, but deficiencies in the historical evidence and sociological analysis available have thwarted efforts to evaluate the concept's major global contentions. As a result, the…
Mapping the Spread of Mounted Warfare
Military technology is one of the most important factors affecting the evolution of complex societies. In particular, mounted warfare, the use of horse-riders in military operations, revolutionized war as it spread to different parts of Eurasia and Africa during the Ancient and Medieval eras, and to the Americas during the Early Modern period. Here we use a variety of sources to map this spread
A systematic assessment of 'Axial Age' proposals using global comparative historical evidence
Proponents of the Axial Age contend that parallel cultural developments between 800 and 200 BCE in what is today China, Greece, India, Iran, and Israel-Palestine constitute the global historical turning point towards modernity. While the Axial Age concept is well-known and influential, deficiencies in the historical evidence and sociological analysis available have thwarted efforts to evaluate the Axial Age concept's major global contentions. As …
Statistical universals reveal the structures and functions of human music
Significance Which features of music are universal and which are culture-specific? Why? These questions are important for understanding why humans make music but have rarely been scientifically tested. We used musical classification techniques and statistical tools to analyze a global set of 304 music recordings, finding no absolute universals but dozens of statistical universals. These include not only commonly cited features related to pitch an…
Seshat
The vast amount of knowledge about past human societies has not been systematically organized and, therefore, remains inaccessible for empirically testing theories about cultural evolution and historical dynamics. For example, what evolutionary mechanisms were involved in the transition from the small-scale, uncentralized societies, in which humans lived 10,000 years ago, to the large-scale societies with an extensive division of labor, great dif…
Agricultural productivity in past societies
Agricultural productivity, and its variation in space and time, plays a fundamental role in many theories of human social evolution. However, we often lack systematic information about the productivity of past agricultural systems on a large enough scale in order to be able to test these theories properly. The effect of climate on crop yields has received a great deal of attention resulting in a range of empirical and process-based models, yet th…
Driving Factors in the Colonization of Oceania
Migration is a key driver of human cultural and genetic evolution, with recent theoretical advances calling for work to accurately identify factors behind early colonization patterns. However, inferring prehistoric migration strategies is a controversial field of inquiry that largely relies on interpreting settlement chronologies and constructing plausible narratives around environmental factors. Model selection approaches, along with new statist…
Developing Scales of Development
Author(s): Currie, Thomas E | Abstract: A review essay on The Measure of Civilization by Ian Morris (Princeton University Press)
Inequality and Institutions
A Review Essay on Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson (Random House, 2012)
Cultural Evolution Branches Out
Recently there has been a movement in the social sciences to apply theories and methods developed originally in evolutionary biology to understand human behavior and cultural change. In this article, I highlight an ever growing branch of this research that analyzes cultural data using a suite of techniques based on evolutionary trees. These phylogenetic methods fall into two categories: (a) “tree-building” that is, inferring the historical relati…
Mesoudi, Alex
Anthropos , Seite 339 - 340
Tests in Time
The relative importance of the face and body in judgments of human physical attractiveness
The natural order
From the military chain of command to the multi-tiered organization of academic institutions, hierarchies are a pervasive feature of the modern world. Yet it was not always thus. From what we can tell from the archaeological record and contemporary hunter-gatherers, ancestral human groups were small in scale, broadly egalitarian and with only informal leadership roles, based largely on age or personal attributes. This change would be extraordinar…
A Systematic Assessment of "Axial Age" Proposals Using Global Comparative Historical Evidence
Proponents of the Axial Age contend that parallel cultural developments between 800 and 200 BCE in what is today China, Greece, India, Iran, and Israel-Palestine constitute the global historical turning point toward modernity. The Axial Age concept is well-known and influential, but deficiencies in the historical evidence and sociological analysis available have thwarted efforts to evaluate the concept's major global contentions. As a result, the…
Seshat
The vast amount of knowledge about past human societies has not been systematically organized and, therefore, remains inaccessible for empirically testing theories about cultural evolution and historical dynamics. For example, what evolutionary mechanisms were involved in the transition from the small-scale, uncentralized societies, in which humans lived 10,000 years ago, to the large-scale societies with an extensive division of labor, great dif…
Agricultural productivity in past societies
Agricultural productivity, and its variation in space and time, plays a fundamental role in many theories of human social evolution. However, we often lack systematic information about the productivity of past agricultural systems on a large enough scale in order to be able to test these theories properly. The effect of climate on crop yields has received a great deal of attention resulting in a range of empirical and process-based models, yet th…
Driving Factors in the Colonization of Oceania
Migration is a key driver of human cultural and genetic evolution, with recent theoretical advances calling for work to accurately identify factors behind early colonization patterns. However, inferring prehistoric migration strategies is a controversial field of inquiry that largely relies on interpreting settlement chronologies and constructing plausible narratives around environmental factors. Model selection approaches, along with new statist…
Cultural Evolution Branches Out
Recently there has been a movement in the social sciences to apply theories and methods developed originally in evolutionary biology to understand human behavior and cultural change. In this article, I highlight an ever growing branch of this research that analyzes cultural data using a suite of techniques based on evolutionary trees. These phylogenetic methods fall into two categories: (a) “tree-building” that is, inferring the historical relati…
Mapping the Spread of Mounted Warfare
Military technology is one of the most important factors affecting the evolution of complex societies. In particular, mounted warfare, the use of horse-riders in military operations, revolutionized war as it spread to different parts of Eurasia and Africa during the Ancient and Medieval eras, and to the Americas during the Early Modern period. Here we use a variety of sources to map this spread
A systematic assessment of 'Axial Age' proposals using global comparative historical evidence
Proponents of the Axial Age contend that parallel cultural developments between 800 and 200 BCE in what is today China, Greece, India, Iran, and Israel-Palestine constitute the global historical turning point towards modernity. While the Axial Age concept is well-known and influential, deficiencies in the historical evidence and sociological analysis available have thwarted efforts to evaluate the Axial Age concept's major global contentions. As …
The relative importance of the face and body in judgments of human physical attractiveness
Tests in Time
Inequality and Institutions
A Review Essay on Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson (Random House, 2012)
Cultural Evolution Branches Out
Recently there has been a movement in the social sciences to apply theories and methods developed originally in evolutionary biology to understand human behavior and cultural change. In this article, I highlight an ever growing branch of this research that analyzes cultural data using a suite of techniques based on evolutionary trees. These phylogenetic methods fall into two categories: (a) “tree-building” that is, inferring the historical relati…
Mesoudi, Alex
Anthropos , Seite 339 - 340
Developing Scales of Development
Author(s): Currie, Thomas E | Abstract: A review essay on The Measure of Civilization by Ian Morris (Princeton University Press)
Statistical universals reveal the structures and functions of human music
Significance Which features of music are universal and which are culture-specific? Why? These questions are important for understanding why humans make music but have rarely been scientifically tested. We used musical classification techniques and statistical tools to analyze a global set of 304 music recordings, finding no absolute universals but dozens of statistical universals. These include not only commonly cited features related to pitch an…
Seshat
The vast amount of knowledge about past human societies has not been systematically organized and, therefore, remains inaccessible for empirically testing theories about cultural evolution and historical dynamics. For example, what evolutionary mechanisms were involved in the transition from the small-scale, uncentralized societies, in which humans lived 10,000 years ago, to the large-scale societies with an extensive division of labor, great dif…
Agricultural productivity in past societies
Agricultural productivity, and its variation in space and time, plays a fundamental role in many theories of human social evolution. However, we often lack systematic information about the productivity of past agricultural systems on a large enough scale in order to be able to test these theories properly. The effect of climate on crop yields has received a great deal of attention resulting in a range of empirical and process-based models, yet th…
Driving Factors in the Colonization of Oceania
Migration is a key driver of human cultural and genetic evolution, with recent theoretical advances calling for work to accurately identify factors behind early colonization patterns. However, inferring prehistoric migration strategies is a controversial field of inquiry that largely relies on interpreting settlement chronologies and constructing plausible narratives around environmental factors. Model selection approaches, along with new statist…
Mapping the Spread of Mounted Warfare
Military technology is one of the most important factors affecting the evolution of complex societies. In particular, mounted warfare, the use of horse-riders in military operations, revolutionized war as it spread to different parts of Eurasia and Africa during the Ancient and Medieval eras, and to the Americas during the Early Modern period. Here we use a variety of sources to map this spread
A systematic assessment of 'Axial Age' proposals using global comparative historical evidence
Proponents of the Axial Age contend that parallel cultural developments between 800 and 200 BCE in what is today China, Greece, India, Iran, and Israel-Palestine constitute the global historical turning point towards modernity. While the Axial Age concept is well-known and influential, deficiencies in the historical evidence and sociological analysis available have thwarted efforts to evaluate the Axial Age concept's major global contentions. As …
Dacura
New advances in computer science address problems historical scientists face in gathering and evaluating the now vast data sources available through the Internet. As an example we introduce Dacura, a dataset curation platform designed to assist historical researchers in harvesting, evaluating, and curating high-quality information sets from the Internet and other sources. Dacura uses semantic knowledge graph technology to represent data as comple…
A Systematic Assessment of "Axial Age" Proposals Using Global Comparative Historical Evidence
Proponents of the Axial Age contend that parallel cultural developments between 800 and 200 BCE in what is today China, Greece, India, Iran, and Israel-Palestine constitute the global historical turning point toward modernity. The Axial Age concept is well-known and influential, but deficiencies in the historical evidence and sociological analysis available have thwarted efforts to evaluate the concept's major global contentions. As a result, the…
Retracted Article
Duration of agriculture and distance from the steppe predict the evolution of large-scale human societies in Afro-Eurasia
Understanding why large, complex human societies have emerged and persisted more readily in certain regions of the world than others is an issue of long-standing debate. Here, we systematically test different hypotheses involving the social and ecological factors that may ultimately promote or inhibit the formation of large, complex human societies. We employ spatially explicit statistical analyses using data on the geographical and temporal dist…
New Era in the Study of Global History Is Born but It Needs to Be Nurtured
This article is a response to Slingerland et al. who criticize the quality of the data from Seshat: Global History Databank utilized in our Nature paper entitled “Complex Societies Precede Moralizing Gods throughout World History”. Their critique centres around the roles played by research assistants and experts in procuring and curating data, periodization structure, and so-called “data pasting” and “data filling”. We show that these criticisms …
An integrative approach to estimating productivity in past societies using Seshat
This article reports the results of a collaborative effort to estimate agricultural productivities in past societies using Seshat: Global History Databank. We focus on 30 Natural Geographic Areas (NGAs) distributed over 10 major world regions (Europe, Africa, Southwest Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Central Eurasia, North America, South America, and Oceania). The conceptual framework that we use to obtain these estimates combines th…
Assessing different historical pathways in the cultural evolution of economic development
A huge number of hypotheses have been put forward to explain the substantial diversity in economic performance we see in the present-day. There has been a growing appreciation that historical and ecological factors have contributed to social and economic development. However, it is not clear whether such factors have exerted a direct effect on modern productivity, or whether they influence economies indirectly by shaping the cultural evolution of…
Willingness to cooperate in shared natural resource management is linked to group identification through perceived efficacy and group norms
Cooperative management of shared natural resources is one of the most urgent challenges the world is facing today. While there have been advances in understanding institutional design features that enable sustainable management, there are few field studies that provide theory-based insights into social psychological predictors of willingness to cooperate around shared resources. Here, we address this issue in the context of shared land management…
Governance characteristics and feelings of safety are associated with attitudinal success in community‐based natural resource management & conservation organizations in northern Kenya
For Community‐based Conservation (CBC) projects to be effective in the long‐term, they need to receive the support of the communities involved. Assessing whether CBC governance systems are working effectively is challenging, and it is important to evaluate both the characteristics of these governance systems, and the perceptions of community members. It is also important to understand how factors other than the governance features of individual C…
The natural order
From the military chain of command to the multi-tiered organization of academic institutions, hierarchies are a pervasive feature of the modern world. Yet it was not always thus. From what we can tell from the archaeological record and contemporary hunter-gatherers, ancestral human groups were small in scale, broadly egalitarian and with only informal leadership roles, based largely on age or personal attributes. This change would be extraordinar…
Sociology (11 obras) · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation (10 obras) · Geography (10 obras) · Political science (9 obras) · Economics (7 obras) · Culture, Economy, and Development Studies (6 obras) · Epistemology (6 obras) · Psychology (6 obras) · Computer Science (5 obras) · Ecology (5 obras)