Shifting from correlations to dynamics in the study of human prehistorical resilience to extreme climatic shifts

In recent years there has been a growing body of research on human resilience to extreme climatic shifts in the past. Most studies focus on comparing archaeological records prior to a perceived climatic shift with those after it, to investigate a causal relationship between the two. Although these comparisons are important, they are limited in their potential to facilitate causal understanding of the factors that determined the human response to climate change. We assert that for such understanding, it is necessary to explicitly consider prior processes that could have made certain populations more resilient to the extreme climatic shift. This assertion calls for a new focus on the cultural and demographic dynamics in prehistorical populations, over the generations that preceded the climatic shift. In this article, we lay out several mechanisms of cultural evolution that – together with the experienced climatic dynamics prior to extreme climatic shifts – may have determined populations’ abilities to cope with them. This endeavor allows us to outline alternative hypotheses regarding what determined the fate of different human groups. These, in turn, may help direct the collection and analysis of archaeological data and to highlight modalities within it that may be helpful for inference of the mechanisms that determined populations’ resilience to climatic shifts.