Does diffusion of horse-related military technologies explain spatiotemporal patterns of social complexity 1500 BCE–AD 1500?

Thomas, Russell

doi:10.1073/pnas.1322270111

Cited by 4 publications

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“…Historians have shied away from the quantitative methods that are commonplace in the historically focused scientific fields such as geology and evolutionary biology. Although there have been occasional attempts in using historical data to build and test alternative quantitative historical models (Turchin , ), the resistance by most historians is usually based on arguing that the models used in such endeavours lack the necessary complexity and generality (Thomas ). As clearly outlined in this issue of Molecular Ecology by Pelletier & Carstens (), there has been a similar tension within the field of phylogeography and historical population genetic inference (Pelletier & Carstens ).…”

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confidence: 99%

All models are wrong

Hickerson

2014

Molecular Ecology

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As the field of phylogeography has continued to move in the model-based direction, researchers continue struggling to construct useful models for inference. These models must be both simple enough to be tractable yet contain enough of the complexity of the natural world to make meaningful inference. Beyond constructing such models for inference, researchers explore model space and test competing models with the data on hand, with the goal of improving the understanding of the natural world and the processes underlying natural biological communities. Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) has increased in recent popularity as a tool for evaluating alternative historical demographic models given population genetic samples. As a thorough demonstration, Pelletier & Carstens (2014) use ABC to test 143 phylogeographic submodels given geographically widespread genetic samples from the salamander species Plethodon idahoensis (Carstens et al. 2014) and, in so doing, demonstrate how the results of the ABC model choice procedure are dependent on the model set one chooses to evaluate.

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confidence: 99%