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This paper has several interconnected goals. First and most generally, we will review the project represented by the papers in this dedicated issue and the SAA Symposium (2012) on Social Complexity and the Bow. This project centers on the ever-stronger and broader theory testing now becoming feasible in archeology and anthropology, in this case exploiting the unique natural laboratory represented by what we refer to as the North American Neolithic transitions. Second, we will strive to synopsize the papers in this issue as opportunities to falsify two general theories of the cause of increases in social complexity associated with the North American Neolithic: warfare and social coercion theories.1 We argue that, though much work remains to be done, the current evidence supports one of the central predictions of both these theories, that the local arrival of elite bow technology was a central driver of local transitions to increased social complexity. This conclusion, if ultimately verified, has profound implications for the possibility of general theories of history. Third, we will argue that several important details of this evidence falsify warfare theory and support (fail to falsify) social coercion theory (the authors' favored perspective). Moreover, several potential falsifications of social coercion theory are amenable to alternative interpretations, leading to new falsifiable predictions. Finally, we discuss how interactions with our colleagues in this project produced new insights into several details of the predictions of social coercion theory, improving our interpretative capacity.

This Special Issue of Evolutionary Anthropology grew out of a symposium at the 2012 Society for American Archaeology (SAA) meeting in Memphis, Tennessee (April 18-22). The goal of the symposium was to explore what we will argue is one of the most important and promising opportunities in the global archeological enterprise. In late prehistoric North America, the initial rise of cultures of strikingly enhanced complexity and the local introduction of a novel weapon technology, the bow, apparently correlate intimately in a diverse set of independent cases across the continent, as originally pointed out by Blitz. If this empirical relationship ultimately proves robust, it gives us an unprecedented opportunity to evaluate hypotheses for the causal processes producing social complexity and, by extension, to assess the possibility of a universal theory of history. The rise of comparably complex cultures was much more recent in North America than it was elsewhere and the resulting fresher archeological record is relatively well explored. These and other features make prehistoric North America a unique empirical environment. Together, the symposium and this issue have brought together outstanding investigators with both empirical and theoretical expertise. The strong cross-feeding and extended interactions between these investigators have given us all the opportunity to advance the promising exploration of what we call the North American Neolithic transitions. Our goal in this paper is to contextualize this issue.

Since Darwin we have been in possession of two superficially dissonant facts. On one hand, humans are merely one of millions of animal species, all products of common ancestry. On the other, humans enjoy a level of ecological dominance that is spectacularly, qualitatively greater than that of any other animal that ever lived, including our closest relatives. Moreover, this unique ascendancy results from a complex suite of attributes that are each individually also unprecedented, including cognitive virtuosity, complex language, and an expanded ethical sense. Collectively, these facts constitute the human uniqueness problem. In spite of its importance, the superficial complexity of this problem has frustrated attempts to resolve it. Though a vast body of earlier work produced important isolated insights, no earlier theory has proven complete or convincing. I briefly review here a new resolution of the human uniqueness problem.1 This new hypothesis appears to be the necessary theory-of-everything. It ostensibly accounts parsimoniously for every major nonstochastic feature of the human story from the origin of Homo approximately 2.0 to 2.5 million years ago through the present instant. I use secondary, review literature where possible here to improve interdisciplinary accessibility. As well, I apologize to the many investigators whose important work could not be directly referenced because of length constraints.