3.3 million years distilled into one principle: anthropy in the longue durée

Existing frameworks for analysing social disorder—from world-systems theory to ecological economics—tend to treat spatial, temporal, and social externalities as separate phenomena. Anthropy proposes a unified mechanism: social systems displace disorder rather than resolve it. This paper offers a long-duration stylisation—from stone tools to data centres—to show that anthropy is a structural constant of human social organisation, observable over 3.3 million years. Applying a uniform analytical protocol (order created / disorder displaced / dominant transfer type) to seven historical configurations reveals that the modalities of anthropic transfer migrate as displacement spaces become saturated: from spatial to social, then from social to temporal and cognitive.

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Publication Details

Journal
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Published
2026-04-06
DOI
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19433085
Primary Topic
World Systems and Global Transformations
Type
article
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article

3.3 million years distilled into one principle: anthropy in the longue durée

Stéphane Lalut
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
World Systems and Global Transformations
article

3.3 million years distilled into one principle: anthropy in the longue durée

Stéphane Lalut
article en

Abstract

Existing frameworks for analysing social disorder—from world-systems theory to ecological economics—tend to treat spatial, temporal, and social externalities as separate phenomena. Anthropy proposes a unified mechanism: social systems displace disorder rather than resolve it. This paper offers a long-duration stylisation—from stone tools to data centres—to show that anthropy is a structural constant of human social organisation, observable over 3.3 million years. Applying a uniform analytical protocol (order created / disorder displaced / dominant transfer type) to seven historical configurations reveals that the modalities of anthropic transfer migrate as displacement spaces become saturated: from spatial to social, then from social to temporal and cognitive.

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Reduced inequalities
Openalex Percentile: Top 20%
World Systems and Global Transformations
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