The international team of researchers – including Russian – revealed key factors that influenced the development of military technologies from Neolith to the start of the industrial revolution. Among them is the number of world population, the availability of the relationship between the regions and the most important technological breakthroughs are such as horses domestication and the development of iron metallurgy. The article of scientists was published in the magazine Plos One.
In their work, experts from the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of History, Archeology and Ethnology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Ural Federal University, together with colleagues from Austria, Great Britain and the United States used Seshat – a database containing historical and archaeological information about more than 500 pre-industrial societies For ten thousand years of world history.
With the help of new quantitative methods of modeling and statistical analysis, a number of previously proposed hypotheses on the development of military law technologies were tested on Seshat data. Some were true: so, the evolution of military technologies really depended on the growth of the population of the world, relations between the regions where the technologies were invented and applied, as well as from key innovation. The researchers also found evidence that the development of military technologies was influenced by the level of agricultural productivity. At the same time, their development did not depend on the factors at the level of the state – the number of societies, the size of the territory of powers and perfection of their management.
According to our study, this set of military technologies was one of the most important factors that led to the growth of mega-air and world religions, such as Christianity and Buddhism, in the first millennium BC, “the first author of Peter Turchin from the University notes Connecticut state. Under Megamature, researchers understand the societies capable of supporting tens of millions of people and extending over millions of square kilometers. They appeared as a result of the growth of the complexity of society, to which connections between states with developed technologies.