Demographic synchrony increases the vulnerability of human societies to collapse

Abstract

Why do human populations remain vulnerable to collapse, even when they are large? Classical demographic theory predicts that volatility in growth should decline rapidly with size due to the averaging effects of the law of large numbers. As such, while small-scale societies may be demographically fragile, large-scale societies should be much more stable. Using a large census dataset of 228 indigenous societies from Brazil, we show that this prediction does not hold. Instead of volatility declining as the square root of population size, it falls much more slowly. This means that individuals within communities do not behave as independent demographic units as their lives are correlated through cooperation, shared subsistence practices, overlapping land use, and exposure to common shocks such as disease outbreaks or failed harvests. These correlations build demographic synchrony, drastically reducing the effective demographic degrees of freedom in a population, keeping volatility higher than expected at all scales. As a result, large-scale populations fluctuate as if they were much smaller, increasing their vulnerability to collapse. This helps explain why human societies of all sizes seem vulnerable to collapse, and why the archaeological and historical record is filled with examples of large, complex societies collapsing despite their size. We suggest demographic synchrony provides a general mechanism for understanding why human populations remain vulnerable across all scales: Scale still stabilizes synchronous populations via density increases, but synchrony ensures that stability grows only slowly with size, leaving large populations more volatile, and more vulnerable, than classical demographic theory predicts.