Last week, Turchin et al posted a reply to critiques of their Nature paper that argued that social complexity precedes moralizing gods. This goes against the big gods hypothesis that the presence of moralizing gods in human social networks allowed the growth of larger and more complex communities. Instead, Turchin et al argue that larger…
Understanding the visceral reaction to Laura’s Spinney’s History as a giant data set
This week, Laura Spinney covers recent developments in the use of big data in history, the potential it has for illuminating the present, and for helping us prepare for the future. The online reaction from at least some of the history, archaeology, and social science community, has been visceral. Spinney simply ran headlong into the…
We don’t need better hypotheses and models, we need them to be more diverse
This week, Paul Smaldino of UC Merced invites us to reflect on the importance of good theory. “The thing is”, he says, “we don’t just want science to be reproducible”, which requires better methods, “we want it to help us make better sense of the world. For that, we must create better hypotheses – and…
The moralizing gods debacle takes a turn for the worse
Savage et al. (2019) have posted their response to Beheim et al.’s (2019) critique of their Nature paper (Whitehouse et al. 2019a) which argues that moralizing gods appear as a consequence of social complexification, rather than as its precursor, which the Big Gods hypothesis requires. I discussed the original controversy here and here. The Seshat…
Evaluating the claim of 16k year old remains at Cooper’s Ferry: A comment on Davis et al 2019
Sixteen thousand years seems to be the new target for earliest archaeological remains in the Americas. The team at Gault recently made the claim, along with the team at the associated Friedkin site. Now a team working at Cooper’s Ferry in Idaho have joined in. Let me start with my standard disclaimer: I have no…
ArcheoThoughts 