Before cities, what exists are these great regional systems. Archaeologists have never known quite what to call them. They are kind of like these great hospitality zones where people share similar ways of making houses and burying their dead forms of quisine. And they're so extensive that actually, when you do get cities first appearing, it doesn't really look like scaling up. It almost looks like a contraction of human populations into one place. After the end of the last, i sa, the beginning of the holosene, you get more of them, and they start getting a bit small er. Eventually, over time, you wind up with nation states, which are often tiny compared to these earlier