A revolution in archaeology is transforming our picture of past populations

> Today it seems very possible that another 2,000 years of world governance by ‘powerful extractive elites’ could lead to the destruction of most life on Earth.

While it is difficult to assign a probability, the possibility of modern civilization suffering catastrophic collapse in a relatively short time is not unthinkable. The combination of ever advancing technological capabilities and stagnant sociopolitical maturity should be prompting any thinking person to ponder how we could possibly learn and evolve long-term sustainable social structures.

The underlying 'freedom vs empire' theme that permeates the article is too simplistic. E.g., in the modern era empires fragmented into national states, granting "freedom" to populations self-identifying as "one people" yet the local extractive elites did not disappear, they persisted and promptly collaborated in a variety of supranational cartels.

The human society "equation" that would guide us how to reach a desirable stable state has never been written down. If it is close to anything it is highly complex and non-linear system, admitting a variety of solutions as "N" (our numbers) and "C" (the collective cultural imprints in our brains) keep cumulating, but "P", our planet, remains fixed.

Oppressive hierarchical societies seem to have been a relatively stable state in various phases of human development. This does not make them natural or inevitable under all conditions. Even a simple linear string will admit different solutions depending on boundary conditions.

I've thought about this idea a lot. It seems like the idea we have of the centralized empires of the past is mostly based on movies and fiction - and maybe from the actions of the last remaining empires in the 19-20th century. I think we take for granted advancements in communications and transportation that allowed for the governance of large areas of land in more recent history.

Are maps of ancient empires even accurate? What do they even mean. If you went back in time to some backwater village on the edges of some Empire map and asked the villagers who was the emperor could they even tell you? Or would they still name some king from 50 years ago?

Like these guys' fascinating book, The Dawn of Everything, this article introduces but over-interprets some exciting new data.

A lot of what we're told about is new locations for urban life. But the claim that they weren't empires is arguing from absence of evidence. We mostly don't know what they were.

For an interesting pairing, see Bryan Ward-Brown on the fall of Rome, interviewed here by Razib Khan (https://www.razibkhan.com/p/bryan-ward-perkins-the-material-...). There we do know what happened when an empire ended, and it was very bad for the people in it. That's because big empires are usually not replaced by anarchy, or by democratic nation-states, but by small empires, which have fewer economies of scale and therefore more taxation and exploitation.

There are interesting ideas here, but also a lot of presumption. Just because a people lacked stone writing and centralisation doesn't mean they were free of local tyrants and internecine tribal warfare.

Surely it's all just about organising people on a larger and larger scale that has benefits? Perhaps an empire is a way to do that which works in the sense that some controlling centre has to be chosen and that's going to happen initially by war and conquest.

The rulers of tribes are going to want "freedom" so they can stay in the game of possibly building their own empire but that doesn't mean their people in the end wouldn't find some consolation in the stability of being under e.g. Roman rule.

I'm sure nobody wants to be under Russian or Chinese rule but if the rest of us cannot organise ourselves on a larger scale than they can .... it might eventually happen.

> archaeologists working in the inland delta of the Middle Niger revealed evidence for a prosperous urban civilisation with no discernible signs of rulership or central authority

I don't have access to this article, but I'm skeptical. How would you conclusively determine that the ruins of a city without writing indicate a lack of rulership or central authority? Likewise, the fact that various archaeological finds are turning up more organized societies in previously unexpected places tells us nothing about how state-like and hierarchical they were, while all our evidence of cities from places where we have written historical records is of states that function on the basis of organized violence. This feels like ideologically-motivated wishful thinking. The author wants to believe that empires are not just bad, but "unnatural."

> What, exactly, were ancient empires ‘successful’ at, if extraordinary levels of violence, destruction and displacement were required to keep them afloat?

It comes down to whether you are with Hobbes or Rousseau. This author is clearly with Rousseau, and believes the natural state of humanity is to be free and happy and that empires are a kind of unnatural cancer. If you are a Hobbesian, and believe that violence and exploitation are endemic to human life, than what empires succeed at is to push the violence to the periphery, and allow those inside the orbit of the empire to enjoy a relatively peaceful existence.

> Or maybe, by then, none of it will really matter very much, because the past will itself have been automated. Instead of historians, we’ll have ‘history machines’ based on algorithms and databanks: more facts on file, designed by survivors of the final bureaucratic assault on what was once fondly called ‘the humanities’.

Honestly, I can't imagine that a machine like that won't devolve into a Ministry of Truth.