Nice review in Nature, When did societies become modern? ‘Big history’ dashes popular idea of Axial Age Humanity’s supposed singular transition to modernity in the first millennium BC was much messier than previously thought, finds sweeping study of historical data. I blogged an earlier paper with a smaller version of the dataset that the book, Seshat History of the Axial Age, is based on.

My inclination is to believe that the authors are on the right trail. It’s rather like the thesis that the Industrial Revolution wasn’t a revolution, but a gradual affair which ramped up in the 19th-century (the “long fuse”). The human mind likes to transform continuities into singular events. We create categories and classes. For various plausible reasons the “Axial Age” happening around the centuries focused on 500 BC does make sense. But like an English paper, once you have the hypothesis, all experiments prove your preconception.

One of William H. McNeill’s last books was The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History. McNeill argued that over time interactions across the Eurasian oikoumene threaded together the whole zone so that civilization became more robust to external shocks. The results from the Seshat database seem to confirm that insight. Instead of independent illuminations, the emergence of Axial characteristics can be thought of as a creative and integrated synthesis.

It also seems clear now that common trends and patterns were occurring across human societies during the Holocene, and much of what we see around us is not contingent and arbitrary. A technological literate world civilization with religions such as the Roman numina and Japanese kammi seems unlikely (Japanese Shinto only exists as a substrate coexistent with Buddhism). Animism of this sort of is primal and universal. As per Paul Bloom and others, it is likely that it’s a basic and atomic unit of religious expression. But as societies become more complex, dense, and literate, new forms of religiosity emerge with common themes.* It’s inevitable.

What Seshat and other projects are doing with formalism and data to me is analogous to what happened with evolutionary biology in the early 20th-century. History has many great ideas. But now they’re being tested systematically.

* Local gods give way to universal gods and principles. Ethics and metaphysics become deeply intertwined with religion and an explicit relationship between cult and state emerge.