Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, United States of America.
Department of Anthropology, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2020 Jul 2;15(7):e0234615. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0234615. eCollection 2020.
Human societies exhibit a diversity of social organizations that vary widely in size, structure, and complexity. Today, human sociopolitical complexity ranges from stateless small-scale societies of a few hundred individuals to complex states of millions, most of this diversity evolving only over the last few hundred years. Understanding how sociopolitical complexity evolved over time and space has always been a central focus of the social sciences. Yet despite this long-term interest, a quantitative understanding of how sociopolitical complexity varies across cultures is not well developed. Here we use scaling analysis to examine the statistical structure of a global sample of over a thousand human societies across multiple levels of sociopolitical complexity. First, we show that levels of sociopolitical complexity are self-similar as adjacent levels of jurisdictional hierarchy see a four-fold increase in population size, a two-fold increase in geographic range, and therefore a doubling of population density. Second, we show how this self-similarity leads to the scaling of population size and geographic range. As societies increase in complexity population density is reconfigured in space and quantified by scaling parameters. However, there is considerable overlap in population metrics across all scales suggesting that while more complex societies tend to have larger and denser populations, larger and denser populations are not necessarily more complex.
人类社会表现出多样化的社会组织形式，在规模、结构和复杂性上差异很大。如今，人类的社会政治复杂性范围从没有国家的几百人的小规模社会到拥有数百万人口的复杂国家，这种多样性的大部分都是在过去几百年中才演变而来的。了解社会政治复杂性如何随时间和空间演变一直是社会科学的核心关注点。然而，尽管人们对此长期关注，但对于文化之间社会政治复杂性的变化，还没有形成一个定量的理解。在这里，我们使用标度分析来研究跨越多个社会政治复杂性层次的全球一千多个人类社会的样本的统计结构。首先，我们表明社会政治复杂性的水平是自相似的，因为相邻的司法层级的人口规模增加了四倍，地理范围增加了两倍，因此人口密度增加了一倍。其次，我们展示了这种自相似性如何导致人口规模和地理范围的标度。随着社会复杂性的增加，人口密度在空间上重新配置，并通过标度参数进行量化。然而，在所有尺度上的人口指标都有相当大的重叠，这表明虽然更复杂的社会往往拥有更大和更密集的人口，但更大和更密集的人口并不一定更复杂。
