Room 229
Department of Anthropology
University College London
14 Taviton St
London
WC1H 0BW
UNITED KINGDOM
Tel: +44 (0) 2076798781
Twitter: @TomCurrieEvo
 The Evolution of Socio-Political Complexity |
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The emergence of large-scale, complex societies from small groups of closely related individuals since the end of the last ice age has been described as “history’s broadest pattern”. I'm interested understanding the pattern and process of the evolution of socio-political complexity. |
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| I use phylogenetic comparative methods to trace the pathways of change in political organization in Austronesian-speaking societies of Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific. This work shows that changes in political complexity tend to follow the same sequence of incremental increases and that decreases in complexity also occur (see figure to the right). |
Likely pathways of political evolution in Austronesian-speaking societies |
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Relevant publications Currie, T.E., Greenhill, S.J., Gray, R.D., Hasegawa, T. & Ruth Mace (2010) Rise and fall of political complexity in island South-East Asia and the Pacific. Nature. 467: 801–804 Currie, T.E. & Mace, R. (2011) Mode and Tempo in the Evolution of Socio-Political Organization: Reconciling ‘Darwinian’ and ‘Spencerian’ Evolutionary Approaches in Anthropology. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. 366: 1108 - 1117 Currie, T.E. (in press) Using phylogenetic comparative methods to test hypotheses about the pattern and process of human social and political evolution. to appear in N.Minaka & H.Nakao Ed.s Currie, T.E. (2011) The Natural Order? A review of Human Evolution and the Origins of Hierarchies: The State of Nature by Benoît Dubreuil, Cambridge University Press. Journal of Evolutionary Psychology. 9: 195-200
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