摘要
Dear readers,It is our pleasure to welcome you to a special issue of the Journal of Social Computing.This issue contains articles examining the evolution of collective computation within(pre)historic societies.There is special emphasis on the possibility that the development of writing(together with both the technologies that arise with writing,and the technologies that writing helps enable)constituted a bottleneck in the more or less continuous growth in scale that has long been a hallmark of human societies.
