What an ancient volcanic eruption teaches us about resilience today

What an ancient volcanic eruption teaches us about resilience today Gaby Clark Scientific Editor Robert Egan Senior Editor 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. The data partially backed this up, showing major loss of life near the eruption. But our research has revealed some surprises. Forager populations closest to the epicenter were already declining before the volcano blew. So the disaster compounded preexisting vulnerabilities among these small groups of people who survived by moving around a lot to gather sufficient resources, such as plants, nuts and wild game. In contrast, population levels boomed after the eruption in certain areas quite close to the destruction. Survivors didn't just sit there and perish; they migrated away from the worst-hit zones into safer regions. Inland survivors quickly moved to coastal areas where marine ecosystems recovered faster, shifting their entire economy to survive. The Jōmon people appear to have reacted and also adapted quite rapidly. Paradoxically, populations living far away from the volcano (where people should have been safe) stagnated or declined after the eruption. This was probably due to a volcanic winter, when ash clouds blocked the sunlight, reducing plant growth and the numbers of animals on which the Jōmon hunter-gatherers relied for their main food supplies. Surviving the apocalypse What do these prehistoric responses mean for us today? The core insight of our research is the vital role of human agency. True resilience isn't about perfectly maintaining the status quo or seamlessly continuing as if nothing happened. Rather than causing total collapse, this ancient disaster triggered a complex mix of migration, adaptation and recovery. Survivors chose to move. They forged entirely new social networks, innovated new economies and found creative, resourceful ways to thrive in a permanently altered world. By studying these ancient disasters, we generate a more dynamic vision for modern resilience. Survival is not a fixed state. The lessons of the Jōmon people remind us that our future in the face of climate shocks and other disasters won't be decided only by environmental conditions but also by our collective social actions and capacity for making decisions. Publication details Enrico R. Crema et al., Divergent demographic responses to the Kikai-Akahoya volcanic catastrophe in mid-Holocene Japan, Science Advances (2026). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aeh7197 Journal information: Science Advances Provided by The Conversation This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.