Chaos and order in stateless societies: Intercommunity exchange as a factor impacting the population dynamical patterns

The once abstract notions of dynamical chaos now appear naturally in various systems Kaplan D, Glass L. Understanding nonlinear dynamics. New York: Springer; 1995]. As a result, future trajectories of the systems may be difficult to predict. In this paper, we demonstrate the appearance of chaotic dynamics in model human communities, which consist of producers of agricultural product and producers of agricultural equipment. In the case of a solitary community, the horizon of predictability of the human population dynamics is shown to be dependent on both intrinsic instability of the dynamics and the chaotic attractor sizes. Since a separate community is usually a part of a larger commonality, we study the dynamics of social systems consisting of two interacting communities. We show that intercommunity barter can lead to stabilization of the dynamics in one of the communities, which implies persistence of stable equilibrium under changes of the maximum value of the human population growth rate. However, in the neighboring community, the equilibrium turns into a stable limit cycle as the maximum value of the human population growth rate increases. Following an increase in the maximum value of the human population growth rate leads to period-doubling bifurcations resulting in chaotic dynamics. The horizon of predictability of the chaotic oscillations is found to be limited by 5 years. We demonstrate that the intercommunity interaction can lead to the appearance of long-period harmonics in the chaotic time series. The period of the harmonics is of order 100 and 1000 years. Hence the long-period changes in the population size may be considered as an intrinsic feature of the human population dynamics.