From the Roman Empire to the Maya civilization, history is filled with social collapses. Traditionally, historians have studied these downturns qualitatively, by diving into the twists and turns of individual societies.

But a team of scientists has taken a broader approach, looking for enduring patterns of human behavior on a vaster scale of time and space. In a study published in May 2024, the researchers wanted to answer a profound question: Why are some societies more resilient than others?

The study, published in the journal Nature, compared 16 societies scattered across the world, in places like the Yukon and the Australian outback. With powerful statistical models, the researchers analyzed 30,000 years of archaeological records, tracing the impact of wars, famines, and climate change.

The researchers looked for factors that explained why societies in some cases suffered long, deep downturns, while others experienced smaller drops in their populations and bounced back more quickly.

One feature that stood out was the frequency of downturns. You might expect that going through a lot of them would wear societies down, making them more vulnerable to new catastrophes. But the opposite seems to have occurred. They found that going through downturns enabled societies to get through future shocks faster. The more often a society went through them, the more resilient it eventually became.