Document Type
Article
Journal/Book Title
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Publication Date
9-17-2018
Publisher
National Academy of Sciences
Volume
115
Issue
40
First Page
9962
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Last Page
9967
Abstract
We conduct a global comparison of the consumption of energy by human populations throughout the Holocene and statistically quantify coincident changes in the consumption of energy over space and time—an ecological phenomenon known as synchrony. When populations synchronize, adverse changes in ecosystems and social systems may cascade from society to society. Thus, to develop policies that favor the sustained use of resources, we must understand the processes that cause the synchrony of human populations. To date, it is not clear whether human societies display long-term synchrony or, if they do, the potential causes. Our analysis begins to fill this knowledge gap by quantifying the long-term synchrony of human societies, and we hypothesize that the synchrony of human populations results from (i) the creation of social ties that couple populations over smaller scales and (ii) much larger scale, globally convergent trajectories of cultural evolution toward more energy-consuming political economies with higher carrying capacities. Our results suggest that the process of globalization is a natural consequence of evolutionary trajectories that increase the carrying capacities of human societies.
Recommended Citation
Jacob Freeman, Jacopo A. Baggio, Erick Robinson, David A. Byers, Eugenia Gayo, Judson Byrd Finley, Jack A. Meyer, Robert L. Kelly, John M. Anderies Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Oct 2018, 115 (40) 9962-9967; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1802859115
