Pulsing and Cultural Evolution in China

States first emerged in several famous locations around the world: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Indus, Central America, and China. These are often labeled by anthropologists as the “pristine states,” with all states that later emerged by contact and emulation labeled “secondary states.” Contrary to what is often thought however, states did not rise in a smooth trajectory toward some peak of power. Instead, they sputtered and fidgeted on the landscape. This paper will address the emergence and history of one of the pristine states, China. The history of China is a history of almost countless rises and falls. The growth of Chinese states “pulsed” in both space and time. Within one “dynasty,” a capital might move six or eight times. Dynasties expanded into great empires, only to dissolve into regional states or even city states. There have been many meticulously reconstructed historical explanations of this history of rise and fall. However, a far simpler explanation has not been offered; one that could be called an environmental “null hypothesis.” That is, can this pulsing history be explained with a model that accounts for the pulsing of slow-renewable natural resources by ancient farmers as they cut and cleared and farmed the ancient forests of China. This paper will discuss preliminary work on such a model that uses slow-renewables and turnover times to explore temporal dynamics.