The Great Holocene Transformation

In 'The Great Holocene Transformation,' Peter Turchin draws on two decades of data from the Seshat Databank to argue that the dramatic increase in the scale and complexity of human societies during the Holocene—the last 10,000 years—was primarily driven by competition between societies, especially warfare.

The book uses computational models and big data analytics to test and compare theories of social evolution, concluding that Cultural Multilevel Selection (CMLS) is the most supported explanation for this transformation.

Turchin positions this shift as a 'Major Evolutionary Transition,' comparable in significance to the emergence of multicellular life or complex cognition, and discusses both the benefits and costs of this societal scaling, including increased cooperation, inequality, and the development of institutions that shape the modern world.