How one society rebounded from ‘the worst year to be alive’
Excerpt: It was the worst time to be alive, according to some scientists. From 536 C.E. to 541 C.E., a series of volcanic eruptions in North and Central America sent tons of ash into the atmosphere, blocking sunlight, chilling the globe, and destroying crops worldwide. Societies everywhere struggled to survive. But for the Ancestral Pueblo people living in what today is the U.S. Southwest, this climate catastrophe planted the seeds for a more cohesive, technologically sophisticated society, a new study suggests. ...Although there’s no way to perfectly reconstruct how the Ancestral Pueblo people’s social systems broke down and reformed, Sinensky thinks it may have happened something like this: As crops continued to fail, the small, disparate groups eventually had to band together to survive. They shared technology and growing techniques and built villages. Then, as rain and warmth returned, this cohesion persisted. Chaco Canyon emerged as a major cultural center for a resilient, restructured society. The findings speak to the ability of humans to reorganize in response to even extreme climate changes, Sinensky adds. “Ancestral Pueblo people restructured … and thrived with this reorganized economic and political structure,” he says. “We should take some solace in knowing that it’s possible to reorganize, to change, even deeply rooted aspects of societies.”…