Climate undulation may accelerated vanishing of Fremont Indian

[http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/318/5856/1540](http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/318/5856/1540)


This may not be the most exciting archaeology discovery in the history. As we already know that some tribes Indians have lived on the high cliffs in Utah which were virtually unreachable. However, the disappearing of these tribes from those cliffs reveals an unsettling question: was climate the driving factor?

Evidences show that the possibility is significant, as the article tells. However, what raised my interest to blog it was this paragraph:

> The impact was all the harder because of the previous and intervening wet years, researchers suspect. There's evidence that after each drought the Fremont rebounded as climate improved. "Each time they did that, there seems to be a population boom," says Steven Simms, a Fremont scholar and archaeologist at Utah State University in Logan. But those extra mouths to feed demanded more crops, leaving the culture even more vulnerable to the next dry spell.

This leads my thought to my research area, which was also struck by snowstorms and/or droughts almost every year. Nowadays the people there barely manage to recover after the disasters, therefore the population is only slowly increasing according to official census data. However, the case would be different if they are changed to another mode of life which is more resistant against natural disasters. Could a similar pattern appear afterwards? Will they become more resistant but less resilient and suddenly become fragile in the face of a major disaster? Or, anything similar has happened in the history?