Political evolution

Abstract

[...] ancestral Austronesian societies underwent spectacular political differentiation5 to give rise to examples of the entire range of political organization, from small egalitarian societies such as Borneo's Iban, through the simple chiefdoms of Easter Island and New Zealand and the complex chiefdoms of Tahiti and Sumatra, to the Javan and Malagasy states (Fig. 1). [...] there's a grand challenge: can this approach ever succeed with the drastically pruned Indo-European language tree and the apparently less varied Indo-European political organization?