Increasing social complexity, climate change, and why societies might fail to cope

Abstract

The PEOPLE 3000 working group focuses on integrating archaeological and paleoecological case studies with mathematical modeling. We seek to understand how coevolving human societies and ecosystems can successfully cope with the interrelated forces of population growth, increasing social complexity and climate change, and the diversity of trajectories of reorganization that social-ecological systems follow. Our work focuses on the observation that human societies experienced periods of social and economic development followed by major reorganizations throughout the Holocene. Thus, we are investigating explanations for what appears to be widespread and, potentially, climate-driven patterns.