Information processing tied to emergence of hierarchy in human societies
Using case studies and ethnographic examples, anthropologists have for some time proposed that the emergence of hierarchical structures in human societies was in part a product of attempting to overcome cognitive limits in the number of people any one person can deal with simultaneously without hitting information processing challenges. The building of a vast new dataset that goes beyond these case studies and attempts to track variables describing all societies throughout human history and pre-history is now allowing social theories to be tested on a much larger number of examples.