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Early warning signals of population
collapse among European
Neolithic societies (8000-4000 BP)
Is it possible that one of humanity’s major technological advances—
agriculture—failed to buffer against widespread social collapse during
Europe’s Early Neolithic period? If so, what lesson can contemporary societies
learn from the archaeological remains of this important phase in
human evolution? In this talk, I analyze whether declining socio-ecological
resilience presaged Early Neolithic collapse using recently developed
quantitative indicators of declining resilience called early warning signals
(EWS). Until recently, EWS have only been detected in carefully controlled
biological experiments, paleoclimate proxies, and in simple biological and
physical systems. In this talk, I present evidence that EWS can also be
detected in human populations and are unlikely to be explained by a range of
confounding factors. These new findings result from improvements in the
integration of large-scale archaeological datasets, and computational and
statistical advances that are narrowing the gap between archaeological data
and theory. It is important that sustainability scientists consider how the
generic mechanisms suggested by EWS can contribute to human demographic
collapse, as well as the possibilities for developing new ways of detecting
declining resilience in contemporary societies.
Friday, January 27, 2017
SHESC Building, Room 254
2:30pm
Free and open to the public
Sean Downey is an ecological
anthropologist whose research explores
the social and ecological dynamics of
farming and foraging societies, past and
present. Using a range of quantitative and
qualitative methods, his work focuses on
analyzing system dynamics, feedback,
scale, historical contingency, and
emergence in project that span three subdisciplines of anthropology including
sociocultural anthropology, archaeology,
and computational historical linguistics.