Explaining the human and cultural puzzles: A new development theory✰

This paper sets out to counter some commonly-held assumptions relating to human behaviors and development. Existing theories – especially those that are based on the assumptions that human power always promotes and never retards socioeconomic development and that environmental challenges and threats are treated as negative factors for development – have left many dynamic phenomena relating to human evolution and cultural development unexplained. In this paper, based on two newly-defined factors – human power and environmental/geographic challenge, a simple model is constructed to explain the long-term, nonlinear or even cyclical development patterns of human civilizations. The theoretical and empirical findings derived in this paper are unexpected but reasonable, including: (i) that human power's contribution to socioeconomic progress or development may follow an inverted U-shaped pattern; (ii) that unfavorable environmental and external factors may become incentives (whereas favorable environmental and external factors may become disincentives) for humans to survive and advance; and (iii) that cyclical or predictable environmental/geographic challenges gave birth to the earliest civilizations. Finally, the empirical and simulated results reveal that the nonlinear or cyclical development patterns are related to the inverted U-shaped effects of human power and the various cyclical or predictable challenges.