30,000 years of history reveals that hard times boost human societies' resilience

The old saying may be true: What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. At least that's the case for human civilizations across 30,000 years of History, according to a new analysis published May 1 in the journal Nature. The study found that, across the globe, ancient human societies that experienced more setbacks were also quicker to bounce back from future downturns. 

"The more often a population experiences disturbances or downturns, the more likely it is to be able to recover faster the next time around," study leader Philip Riris, an archaeologist at Bournemouth University in the U.K., told Live Science.

This seesaw between vulnerability and resilience was particularly strong among early farmers and herders, Riris and his colleagues found. Agricultural communities throughout history experienced more downturns overall than other societies, such as hunter-gatherer groups, but they also recovered from these downturns more quickly than other groups. 

"It's an important paper," said Dagomar Degroot, an associate professor at Georgetown University who studies how climate change influenced human history and who was not involved in the research. "There is a lot of really influential work on the collapse of societies faced with climate change," Degroot told Live Science, "but a focus on resilience and only resilience is significantly rarer."

Historians and archaeologists have published many case studies on individual societal crises, Riris agreed. But it's hard to compare these experiences across space and time. He and his team pulled together data from 16 separate archaeological sites around the globe, spanning from South Africa to Canada, with data stretching back as far as 30,000 years ago. 

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To determine downturns and recoveries, the researchers used a method called "dates as data." Each site had records of radiocarbon dating, which gives an age for organic materials based on the decay of carbon-14, a radioactive form of carbon. Previous studies have established that the number of carbon-14 dates available for a certain time and place is correlated with population. When there are more people, it means more activity, buildings, trash heaps and firepits to excavate and date.