Early warning signs that foretell imminent societal collapse – new study
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... lapse.html
How to spot if society is DOOMED: Researchers reveal the signs that show civilization is set to collapse
• Researchers examined archaeological records of the European Neolithic
• This revealed there were a number of early warning signs before collapse
Researchers examined 2,378 archaeological sites from nine regions of Neolithic Europe to determine if early warning signs were present before the collapse of a civilization.
...early warning signals are present when an ecosystem begins to show declining resilience.
This phenomenon can indicate the forthcoming of ‘major reorganization,’ or a regime shift within the ecosystem, and subsequently, a collapse...
During this period, the communities experienced massive population growth as a result of the emergence of agriculture and the technological advancements that followed.
While these developments may seem beneficial, they also led to ‘periods of devastating societal instability ...
And for those who want to dig deeper, here's a link to the study itself, full text!
http://www.pnas.org/content/113/35/9751.full
I'll just include the abstract here (my formatting and emphases):
Ecosystems on the verge of major reorganization—regime shift—may exhibit declining resilience, which can be detected using a collection of generic statistical tests known as early warning signals (EWSs). This study explores whether EWSs anticipated human population collapse during the European Neolithic. It analyzes recent reconstructions of European Neolithic (8–4 kya) population trends that reveal regime shifts from a period of rapid growth following the introduction of agriculture to a period of instability and collapse.
We find statistical support for EWSs in advance of population collapse.
Seven of nine regional datasets exhibit increasing autocorrelation and variance leading up to collapse, suggesting that these societies began to recover from perturbation more slowly as resilience declined.
We derive EWS statistics from a prehistoric population proxy based on summed archaeological radiocarbon date probability densities. We use simulation to validate our methods and show that sampling biases, atmospheric effects, radiocarbon calibration error, and taphonomic processes are unlikely to explain the observed EWS patterns.
The implications of these results for understanding the dynamics of Neolithic ecosystems are discussed, and we present a general framework for analyzing societal regime shifts using EWS at large spatial and temporal scales. We suggest that our findings are consistent with an adaptive cycling model that highlights both the vulnerability and resilience of early European populations. We close by discussing the implications of the detection of EWS in human systems for archaeology and sustainability science.
It would be nice if they spelled out a bit more clearly what all the Early Warning Signs were and how exactly they measured them.