New research suggests ancient cities might not have been much different from the ones that exist today.
Past research has shown that as modern cities grow in population, so does their productivity and efficiency, the Santa Fe Institute reported. A recent study suggests ancient cities also experienced the predictable mathematical phenomenon, dubbed "urban scaling."
"Our results suggest that the general ingredients of productivity and population density in human societies run much deeper and have everything to do with the challenges and opportunities of organizing human social networks," said professor Luis Bettencourt, lead investigator of SFI's Cities, Scaling, and Sustainability research program.
To determine whether or not ancient cities also followed urban scaling, a team of researchers looked at archaeological data from the Basin of Mexico, which is now Mexico City and the surrounding regions. The team analyzed the dimensions of hundreds of ancient temples, as well as thousands of houses in order to determine population size and density throughout history. The team was also able to estimate the construction rate of the structures and how heavily they were used. The findings indicated the larger the ancient settlement, the more productive it was.
"It was shocking and unbelievable," said Scott Ortman, now an assistant professor in the department of anthropology at Colorado University-Boulder and a former Institute Omidyar Fellow. "We were raised on a steady diet telling us that, thanks to capitalism, industrialization and democracy, the modern world is radically different from worlds of the past. What we found here is that the fundamental drivers of robust socioeconomic patterns in modern cities precede all that."
In the future the researchers plan to look at settlement patterns in other ancient sites around Peru, China and Europe in hopes of finding more evidence supporting the phenomenon.
The research was published in a recent edition of the journal Science Advances.
