The Epipalaeolithic-Neolithic as the pivotal transformation of human history

Bibliographic Data

ID50294
AuthorsTrevor Watkins (0000-0002-6491-9847, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume45
Pages14-29
Publication date2019-01-03
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueDocumenta Praehistorica (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1408-967X • E-ISSN: 1854-2492
PublisherUniversity of Ljubljana (PUBLISHER • SI)
DOI10.4312/dp.45-2
OpenAlexW4246725457
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited22

The objective of this paper is to set the Epipalaeolithic-Neolithic transformation (ENT) within the truly long-term of human evolutionary history. The Epipalaeolithic-Neolithic transformation take us out of the world of Palaeolithic mobile foraging into a new world, in which the scale and organisation of the social group and the tempo of socio-cultural evolution were transformed. The scale and diversity of cultural innovation and social organization can be seen to be linked in co-evolutionary feedback loops that have been characterised as 'cumulative culture', 'ratcheting' effects, or 'runaway' cultural evolution. The up-scaling of communities and the intensification of their interaction and networking enabled the emergence of super-communities that became the first large-scale societies, an inflection point on an accelerating curve of complex cultural, social and economic development, en route to emergent socio-political hierarchies, urbanism, kingdoms and empires

Archaeology · Biology · Cartography · Diversity (politics · Economic geography · Foraging · Geography · Inflection point · Political science · Politics · Prehistory · Scale (ratio · Social evolution · Sociology · Transformation (genetics · Urbanism · Anthropology · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · History · Language and cultural evolution · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology · Architecture · Ecology

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