Explaining the stability of human populations provides knowledge for understanding the resilience of human societies to environmental change. Here, we use archaeological radiocarbon records to evaluate a hypothesis drawn from resilience thinking that may explain the stability of human populations: Faced with long-term increases in population density, greater variability in the production of food leads to less stable populations, while lower variability leads to more stable populations. However, increased population stability may come with the cost of larger collapses in response to rare, large-scale environmental perturbations. Our results partially support this hypothesis. Agricultural societies that relied on extensive landscape engineering to intensify production and tightly control variability in the production of food experienced the most stability. Contrary to the hypothesis, these societies also experienced the least severe population declines. We propose that the interrelationship between landscape engineering and increased political-economic complexity reduces the magnitude of population collapses in a region.

解释人口的稳定性为理解人类社会对环境变化的适应能力提供了知识。在这里，我们使用考古放射性碳记录来评估从弹性思维得出的假设，该假设可以解释人口的稳定性：面对人口密度的长期增加，食品生产的更大变异导致人口稳定性降低，而变异性降低导致更稳定的人口。然而，为了应对罕见的大规模环境扰动，人口稳定性的提高可能会带来更大的崩溃。我们的结果部分支持这一假设。依靠广泛的景观工程来集约化生产和严格控制食品生产变异的农业社会经历了最稳定的过程。与假设相反，这些社会也经历了最不严重的人口下降。我们建议景观工程与政治经济复杂性增加之间的相互关系降低了一个地区人口崩溃的程度。