Evidence for a Long Term Process Scale for Social Change in Modern Man Settled in Place via Agriculture and Engaged in Trade and War

GeoJournal 17.3 3 1 1 - 3 3 8 © 1988 by Kluwer Academic Publishers Evidence for a Long Term Process Scale for Social Change in Modem Man Settled in Place via Agriculture and Engaged in Trade and War Iberall, A., Scholar, UCLA, Oral Biology, 63-050 CHS, Los Angeles, CA 90024, USA; White, D., Prof. Dr., UC-Irvine, Comparative Culture, Irvine, CA 92717, USA Introduction We have initiated a model of human social systems by the following near standard physical strategy. Observing a typical human unit through time, as in any thermodynamic system, there comes a point where initial distinctive features are lost, dispersed, and (ignoring new features that arise in the mean- time) it comes to resemble its neighbors. This is the relaxation time at which locally distinctive features decay, whether through collision with neighbors or by an internal decay process. Over many observations, the effective average distance travelled by such groups in this time is their mean free path. In any conti- nuum-like physical field the mean free path and relaxation time are fundamental scale measures. We have suggested that the mean free path - relaxational time scaling for m o d e m biological man, homo sapiens sapiens, bound into hunter-gatherer social groups, was about 40 km (a daily roaming range) and 25 yr (a generation time) - (1). After diffusing in time at a scale measured by these parameters, man filled the earth's habitat available to him fairly uniformly in density (all land surfaces except the arctic regions and the most extreme arid areas) by perhaps 15,000 years before present (15 Kyp - Kyp will be used to denote thousands of years before present) - (1,2), almost certainly by 10 Kyp [1]. Subsequent growth in population and population density, for a long time effectively unchanged in rate (5), had to take place by some sort of process other than by freely diffusing hunter-gatherer band life. This required some sort of transition, in physical concepts a stability transition, a bifurcation among a very fimited range of new possibilities which even included the possibility of extinction (see (5,6) for discussion of stability transitions). Clearly, one can surmise that the processes elected were condensation in place via horticulture (or fishing), transforming into agricultural cultivation, active trade, and/or pastoralist or nomadic association, e.g., via transhumance, the latter perhaps only as a temporary but long time alternative [2]. A new size for larger social groupings (e.g., settled organi- zation), we estimated, had a space scale on the order of perhaps 300 km involving a dozen or so significant fixed centers engaged in convecting goods by trade ((1,8) - the physical process of developing macroscale ensemble flow patterns is known as con- vection), and an organized time scale on the order of 500 to 1000 years (5). The purpose of this fourth paper is to demonstrate experi- mentally that this long time scale of perhaps 500 years is compatible with cultural-political-economic organization (known mostly from archaeological evidence, but also extending up to modern times) in the post-condensational period after 10-15 Kyp. That is, we claim that significant reformations or reorgani- zations (as fluid-plastic-like changes in social patterns) have taken place and continue to take place from the earliest condensations in population onward (e.g., the earliest Meso- lithic cultures), and that these changes are to be found (a) either in settlement patterns, (b) political boundaries, (c) culture (belief structure or heritage), (d) ethnic groupings, or (e) economic modes (tool traditions, modes of production). Some introductory comments that may furnish a background to the goals of this paper, and the nature of its findings are in order. Clearly, a study of this sort owes its inspiration to Tylor's creation of m o d e m cultural-anthropological study, to Spencer's positive achievement in calling for and starting up an extensive systematic ethnographic inventory of cultures, and to Murdock's furthering attempt (9) to make it as exhaustive and systematic as possible. However the problems at hand are both an attempt to provide a physical theoretic for their results, which we have begun in (1,2,5), to test those theoretical predictions and to comprehend what they mean experimentally, and to offer some appreciation of the magnitude of the real task requiring study. In this paper, as very amateurish historians, we barely scratch the surface of the problem. Our theoretical studies have suggested that, beyond a hunter-gatherer stage in human existence, there was a transition to condensation in settlement or part settlement at increasing density to a state of culture and civilization involving social coherence and cooperativity at the 500-1000 year and perhaps 300 km scale. We found this very encouraging in its compati- bility with Murdock's conclusion (9) that appropriate scales for effective independence in cultures are separations of 1000 Years or 300 or so km. But then the necessary conservatism of the Ethnographic Atlas' inventory (it only purports to include well documented