Open AccessThe Epipalaeolithic-Neolithic as the pivotal transformation of human history
Author(s) -
Trevor Watkins
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
documenta praehistorica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.587
H-Index - 17
eISSN - 1854-2492
pISSN - 1408-967X
DOI - 10.4312/dp.45.2
Subject(s) - economic geography , foraging , politics , inflection point , diversity (politics) , urbanism , scale (ratio) , geography , social evolution , transformation (genetics) , history , sociology , anthropology , archaeology , ecology , political science , cartography , biology , architecture , biochemistry , geometry , mathematics , gene , law
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.