Page "State (polity)" Paragraph 45

:" For 99. 8 percent of human history people lived exclusively in autonomous bands and villages.

At the beginning of the Paleolithic the stone age, the number of these autonomous political units must have been small, but by 1000 B. C.

it had increased to some 600, 000.

Then supra-village aggregation began in earnest, and in barely three millenia the autonomous political units of the world dropped from 600, 000 to 157.

In the light of this trend, the continued decrease from 157 to 1 seems not only inescapable but close at hand ".