Terence McKenna writes in Approaching Timewave Zero:

In all the novelty maps, when the graph line moves downward, novelty is assumed to be increasing. When there is movement away from the base line, novelty is assumed to be decreasing in favor of habitual forms of activity. Time is seen as the ebb and flow of two opposed qualities: novelty versus habit, or density of connectedness versus disorder. In this we see clearly that one trend toward greater novelty reached its culmination around 2700 B.C., precisely at the height of the Old Kingdom pyramid-building phase, Then a countermovement toward predictable forms of behavior asserted itself and increased in importance until around 900 B.C. At that time, around the time of the consolidation of Mycenaean sea power, the tendency toward habituation was overcome and replaced by a long cascade into greater and greater novelty, which reaches its culmination early in the twenty-first century.

The career of novelty is revealed to be a process that is punctuated by subprocesses. These mitigate, modify, and influence an overall general tendency toward greater and greater novelty. The theory shows the last 1,500 years to have been highly novel times that have oscillated at levels of novelty very close to the horizontal axis, the maximized "zero state".