By Peter Turchin*
I am very happy to announce that my latest book, The Great Holocene Transformation, has been published! You can now purchase it on Amazon.
This book was a long time in the making. The origins go back to 2011, when I together with my colleagues launched Seshat Databank. It took many years of data collection before we started publishing articles based on the analysis of the Seshat data. But starting with a 2018 PNAS paper, we published more than a dozen meaty, data-rich papers (for a list, see here).
Our crowning achievement (in my humble opinion) was the Science Advances article published in 2022, Disentangling the Evolutionary Drivers of Social Complexity: A Comprehensive Test of Hypotheses. We used the Seshat data to test 17 special hypotheses falling into five general classes of theories. We found strong support for the role of agriculture (not too surprising), but the most important driver was interpolity competition, taking the form of warfare. This result implicated Cultural Multilevel Selection, a theory that continues to be controversial, as the major driver of increasing social scale and complexity during the Holocene.
Once this article came out, I had all the pieces lined up to start seriously working on The Great Holocene Transformation book. And now, three years later, it is finally published. Below, see a short and non-technical description of the book.
Want to learn more about Peter’s new book and research? You won’t want to miss this amazing article on Nature by Laura Spinney:”What drove the rise of civilizations? A decades-long quest points to warfare.”
The Great Holocene Transformation
What Complexity Science Tells Us about the Evolution of Complex Societies
Author: Peter Turchin
Publisher: Beresta Books
Publication Date: September 17, 2025
Available in paperback and eBook on Amazon
Why do 99.9% of humanity live in large-scale societies organized as states?
During the Holocene (the last 10,000 years), human societies have been transformed utterly: from small groups of nomadic foragers to our current interconnected world of large-scale societies organized as states. Population numbers, agricultural productivity, technological development, political and social complexity have all seen spectacular growth. This shift—the Great Holocene Transformation—deserves to be seen as a “Major Evolutionary Transition,” as momentous as the appearance of multicellular life, or the emergence of complex cognition in humans during the Paleolithic era.
Why and how did this transformation take place? Past thinkers and modern social scientists have developed myriad theories, and new ones continue to be proposed. Yet we still don’t have a widely accepted answer to the puzzle. The Great Holocene Transformation argues that we are now in a unique position: the tools of complexity science (computational models and big data analytics) coupled with more abundant evidence spanning world history and prehistory now allow us to adjudicate successfully between rival hypotheses, rejecting those that lack empirical and theoretical support.
The book provides extensive support for a theory known as Cultural Multilevel Selection (CMLS). CMLS proposes that it was competition between societies that pushed them to scale up and evolve more sophisticated institutions, increasing our capacity to cooperate within ever-larger groups of people. This process led both to oppression and inequality within societies, but also to the development of institutions and ideologies that promote prosociality and enhance welfare: in short, to the large-scale, complex societies that now dominate the globe.
* Peter Turchin originally published this article in Cliodynamica, his Substack newsletter.
