This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: When a massive environmental disaster strikes, do societies simply collapse and disappear? Or do people find a way to adapt, rebuild and recover?
For me, as a researcher studying ancient societies and their environments, these aren't just academic questions—they can also offer useful perspectives on our own climate-threatened future. To understand how human communities handle cataclysmic shocks, my colleagues and I looked back 7,300 years. We investigated what happened to the prehistoric Jōmon hunter-gatherer populations after they were hit by the Kikai-Akahoya eruption in Japan—the largest volcanic eruption since the end of the last ice age.
This enormous underwater volcanic eruption was devastating, blasting out of the seabed without warning, battering the Japanese islands with powerful earthquakes and massive tsunamis. The eruption pumped volcanic ash high up into the atmosphere, which then rained down and blanketed the landscape in meter-deep layers of toxic dust. This volcanic ash choked coastlines, destroyed inland rivers and killed off lush forests for decades.
Near the epicenter of the eruption, the environmental destruction lasted for centuries, destroying local food systems. For the Jōmon hunter-gatherer people who relied on harvesting natural resources in the wild, this caused catastrophic and enduring shocks to their food security. For a long time, archaeologists have debated what happened to communities during the aftermath.
Some have argued that it led to a total apocalypse where all human life abruptly ended. Others have insisted on total continuity, suggesting people just pushed through. Our new research moves past this rigid, binary debate.
By tracking population levels across different regions of Japan before and after the blast, we uncovered a more complex story. The paper is published in the journal Science Advances. We initially assumed that thicker ash meant greater population declines.
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