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      Barbarigenesis and the collapse of complex societies: Rome and after

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      PLoS ONE
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          Abstract

          “Barbarism” is perhaps best understood as a recurring syndrome among peripheral societies in response to the threats and opportunities presented by more developed neighbors. This article develops a mathematical model of barbarigenesis—the formation of “barbarian” societies adjacent to more complex societies—and its consequences, and applies the model to the case of Europe in the first millennium CE. A starting point is a game (developed by Hirshleifer) in which two players allocate their resources either to producing wealth or to fighting over wealth. The paradoxical result is that a richer and potentially more powerful player may lose out to a poorer player, because the opportunity cost of fighting is greater for the former. In a more elaborate spatial model with many players, the outcome is a wealth-power mismatch: central regions have comparatively more wealth than power, peripheral regions have comparatively more power than wealth. In a model of historical dynamics, a wealth-power mismatch generates a long-lasting decline in social complexity, sweeping from more to less developed regions, until wealth and power come to be more closely aligned. This article reviews how well this model fits the historical record of late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages in Europe both quantitatively and qualitatively. The article also considers some of the history left out of the model, and why the model doesn’t apply to the modern world.

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          THE WAVE OF ADVANCE OF ADVANTAGEOUS GENES

          R Fisher (1937)
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            The fine-scale genetic structure of the British population.

            Fine-scale genetic variation between human populations is interesting as a signature of historical demographic events and because of its potential for confounding disease studies. We use haplotype-based statistical methods to analyse genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data from a carefully chosen geographically diverse sample of 2,039 individuals from the United Kingdom. This reveals a rich and detailed pattern of genetic differentiation with remarkable concordance between genetic clusters and geography. The regional genetic differentiation and differing patterns of shared ancestry with 6,209 individuals from across Europe carry clear signals of historical demographic events. We estimate the genetic contribution to southeastern England from Anglo-Saxon migrations to be under half, and identify the regions not carrying genetic material from these migrations. We suggest significant pre-Roman but post-Mesolithic movement into southeastern England from continental Europe, and show that in non-Saxon parts of the United Kingdom, there exist genetically differentiated subgroups rather than a general 'Celtic' population.
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              Partial Differential Equations in Ecology: Spatial Interactions and Population Dynamics

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: Formal analysisRole: InvestigationRole: MethodologyRole: SoftwareRole: Writing – original draftRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS One
                PLoS One
                plos
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, CA USA )
                1932-6203
                16 September 2021
                2021
                : 16
                : 9
                : e0254240
                Affiliations
                [001] Department of Anthropology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, United States of America
                University at Buffalo - The State University of New York, UNITED STATES
                Author notes

                Competing Interests: The author has declared that no competing interests exist.

                Author information
                https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6781-2503
                Article
                PONE-D-21-05786
                10.1371/journal.pone.0254240
                8445445
                34529697
                434cbb8d-8f6d-4d75-8452-2d3099e6c1ce
                © 2021 Doug Jones

                This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 20 February 2021
                : 22 June 2021
                Page count
                Figures: 8, Tables: 6, Pages: 33
                Funding
                The author received no specific funding for this work.
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                Custom metadata
                Annotated Mathematica files and pdfs for models of wealth-power mismatch in 2- and n-player games, and data on collapse of social complexity, Rome and after, are available online through the Open Science Foundation (OSF), DOI 10.17605/ODF.IO/HUFXV.

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