Category: Societies Over Time

We now discuss the advanced elaboration of the agricultural structure: advanced agrarian societies. You’ll instantly recognise this kind of society because its emergence marked the beginning of civilisation as we recognise it today. This type of society dominated from the beginning of the Common Era, through the Middle Ages, to the start of the industrial…

We continue our Societies Over Time series with a look at simple agrarian societies. Their emergence marks the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution, another critical juncture in human history whose impact cannot be overstated. Not only is agricultural technology a huge leap forward, it seems to make further key developments more likely, such as systems…

Let’s continue our Societies Over Time series with a quick summary of advanced horticultural societies, a more elaborate mutation of the simple horticultural structure. Simple and advanced horticultural societies are similar in many fundamental ways, though different enough to be noticeable, and thus to warrant separate treatment. The key technological difference between the two kinds…

The emergence of simple horticultural societies marks the time when humans transitioned from depending on hunting and gathering to horticulture: from foraging to cultivating, from hunting to herding. This wasn’t as large a jump as you may believe. Hunter-gatherers accumulated an immense amount of information on animals, edible plants, the cycles of plant growth and…

We begin our Societies Over Time series with a look at hunter-gatherer societies. This type dominated from around 100,000 to 8,000 BC, and marks the full biological emergence of our species, Homo sapiens. You might think this type of society is boring and not worth learning about, but we believe the opposite. It makes up…