From statistical correlations to dynamic models in the study of past human resilience to climate change

Abstract

• Climate change. • Dynamic models. • Human-environment interactions. • Cultural evolution. • Resilience. There is a growing body of research on human resilience to extreme climatic episodes in the past. Many studies focus on comparing archaeological records prior to a perceived climatic episode to those after it to investigate a causal relationship between the two. Although these comparisons are important, they are limited in their potential to facilitate a causal understanding of the factors that determine the human response to climate change. For such an understanding, it is necessary to explicitly consider prior processes that could have made certain populations more resilient to extreme climatic episodes. This assertion calls for a new focus on the cultural and demographic dynamics in ancient populations over the generations that preceded the climatic episode. In this article, we use a dynamic model to propose and explore several processes of cultural evolution and demography that – together with the prior climatic dynamics – may have determined populations’ abilities to cope with extreme climatic episodes. This endeavour allows us to outline alternative hypotheses regarding what determined the fate of different human groups. These, in turn, may help direct the collection and analysis of archaeological data and highlight modalities within it that may be helpful for inference of the processes that determined populations’ resilience to extreme climatic episodes.