The Characteristic Time Scale of Cultural Evolution

Time series data from the Seshat: Global History Databank is shifted so that the overlapping time series can be fitted to a single logistic regression model for all 18 geographic areas under consideration. To analyse the endogenous growth of social complexity, each time series is restricted to a central time interval without discontinuous polity changes. The resulting regression shows convincing out-of-sample predictions and via bootstrapping, its period of rapidly growing social complexity can be identified as a time interval of roughly 800 years.