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SOCIOLOGY
Phylogenetic methods of evolutionary biology can be used to study sociopolitical variation mapped onto linguistic trees. The range of political complexities in Austronesian societies offers a good test case. See Article p.801
Today, the whole world is divided into states whose political organization consists of multi-level bureaucracies frustratingly familiar to all of us whenever we try to deal with government agencies. But as Europeans expanded around the globe in recent centuries, they encountered non-European peoples living under simpler political organizations, variously termed chiefdoms, tribes or bands, of which the simplest was egalitarian and leaderless1. The archaeological record suggests that all societies were politically simple until around 10,000 years ago, and that the first states didn't arise until about 3400 bc. Through what stages has political complexity changed with time? On page 801 of this issue, Currie et al.2 describe a big advance in understanding this central problem of political science. They have achieved it by applying the quantitative methods of phylogenetic-tree analysis now routine in evolutionary biology.
Currie et al. took advantage of a particularly suitable database: the territorial expansion and political evolution of speakers of Austronesian languages. From that family's differentiation on the island of Taiwan around 3200 bc, Austronesian speakers spread through the Philippines into Indonesia, west to coastal southeast Asia and Madagascar, and east through the Pacific Ocean to evolve into Polynesians and colonize every habitable Pacific island from Hawaii and Easter Island to New Zealand3,4.
One advantage of the Austronesian expansion for scholars is that the Austronesian language tree is densely filled out, with 1,200 extant languages, and without the language extinctions that drastically pruned the Indo- European language tree4. A second advantage is that, over most of the Polynesian realm, Austronesian people were the first human colonists, thereby decreasing complexities associated with...