When the World Changes, We Change: A Deep History of H1, H2, and H3
- Fellow Traveler
- Nov 22
- 10 min read
If the Earth could talk, it might say,
“I’ve been doing this a long time—pay attention.”
Human history is usually told as a chain of inventions, but the archaeological and climate records tell a different story: civilizations rise and fall in rhythm with the planet’s own pulse.
When the climate enters a long, quiet stretch, societies build towers, irrigation networks, and sprawling bureaucracies. When the climate shifts abruptly, those same systems buckle under the weight of assumptions they no longer fit.
Underneath all of this lies a simple logic.
Environmental amplitude—H1, the volatility and tail-risk of the physical world—sets the boundary conditions.
Human sensing and decision-making—H2—determine how precisely and how quickly societies detect and interpret those changes.
And hysteresis—H3, the system's recovery lag—governs how long it takes to rebuild once collapse comes.
These three forces form a hidden grammar of history.
Sidebar: The Three Forces That Shape How Systems Survive Change
Figure 1 distills the logic behind the H1–H2–H3 framework into a single three-part sequence. It shows how every adaptive system—an organism, a city-state, a civilization—must constantly negotiate between the world’s volatility, its own sensing and decision-making, and the long arc of recovery when things fall apart. Each component tells a different part of the story, but together they form a universal pattern.
H1: Volatility—The World’s Raw Amplitude
On the left, the volatility curve captures the environment as it really behaves: jagged, irregular, and full of surprises. Some fluctuations are small, others enormous. The spikes are not noise—they’re the defining feature. This is H1, the amplitude of the world’s uncertainty.
Every adaptive system begins here, facing a reality it cannot control. The question is simple: Can you sense this volatility fast enough to keep up with it?
H2: Sensing and Decision Latency—The Filtered Response
The middle curve shows what happens next. No system—biological, cultural, or technological—responds to the world in real time. It smooths. It filters. It averages. This is H2, the system’s sensing-and-decision latency.
The result is a quieter, slower-moving curve that trails behind the world’s volatility. This makes life manageable, but it also creates vulnerability. The filtered signal lags just enough that when volatility spikes sharply, the system can fall dangerously out of sync with reality.
This is the core trade-off: sensing buys stability at the price of speed.
H3: Recovery Lag—Why the Path Back Is Not the Path Down
On the right, the hysteresis loop shows what happens when the mismatch between H1 and H2 grows too large. Systems can collapse quickly when they lose coherence, but recovery is a different beast. Rebuilding requires energy, coordination, and time—resources that are often scarce after a crash.
The upward recovery path is longer, slower, and more fragile than the collapse path. This asymmetry is H3, the recovery lag inherent to all complex systems.
It explains why civilizations rarely bounce back to their previous state, why ecosystems recover unevenly, and why modern systems—from electrical grids to global supply chains—can take years or decades to fully rebuild after a disruption.
The Larger Pattern
Together, these three curves form a universal sequence:
The world fluctuates (H1).
We interpret and act on those fluctuations with delay (H2).
When the lag becomes too large, systems break—and rebuild slowly (H3).
This pattern is not unique to history or ecology or economics. It is the signature of adaptive life operating under constraint. The figure is a reminder that survival is not just about sensing the world or recovering from setbacks—it is about managing the gap between them.
1. The First Quiet Epoch: When Stability Made Settlements Possible
After the last glaciers retreated, the Eastern Mediterranean entered an unusually stable climatic period. Speleothems from Soreq Cave in Israel show sustained centuries of higher rainfall. Lakes filled. Forests expanded. Seasons settled into reliable rhythms.
This was one of humanity’s first prolonged dips in H1. And with low amplitude came the courage to stay put.
Natufian communities built stone houses, stored grain, and created some of the world’s earliest proto-villages. Their successors, the first Neolithic farmers, expanded Jericho into a settlement with walls and a stone tower that seems far too ambitious for its era.
These were early experiments in H2—systems for sensing the world and predicting its rhythms. Bureaucracy in its embryonic form: storage, coordinated labor, communal planning. Even here, agency mattered. But climate set the stability of the ground they walked on.
2. The 8.2 Kiloyear Event: A Sudden Shock
Around 6200 BC, the climate snapped. A massive glacial outburst in North America disrupted ocean circulation, dropping temperatures and altering rainfall across the Levant. Lakes contracted abruptly. Forests retreated. Farming villages thinned out along once-reliable water corridors.
The Neolithic world inhaled sharply, staggered, and tried to rebalance. This was an unmistakable H1 spike, and Neolithic sensing systems—ritual calendars, grain storage, local knowledge—were too slow to register the change.
This produced a classic case of H3: societies clung to old patterns even as the environment shifted beneath their feet. Recovery lagged across generations, not decades.
3. The Bronze Age: Complexity Rises on a Narrow Ridge
By 3500 BC, climate conditions had stabilized enough (though drier than before) for the first great era of urban complexity. Cities spread along the Tigris, Euphrates, Nile, and Levantine coast. Writing emerged. Irrigation systems multiplied. Trade networks expanded.
All of this—scribes, granaries, temple accountants, tax collectors—formed a massive sensor array. Bureaucracy was the Bronze Age’s version of H2: a way of “hearing” the world’s signals and predicting its rhythms. But precision has a cost. The more tightly these systems optimized themselves to seasonal floods and harvests, the more slowly they could adapt when the patterns changed.
High accuracy.
Long latency.
A perfect H2 trap.
4. The 4.2 Kiloyear Collapse: When Optimization Overreaches
Around 2200 BC, the climate delivered another abrupt jolt. Lake levels across the Eastern Mediterranean plunged. Dust storms swept Mesopotamia. Nile floods weakened for decades.
The Akkadian Empire attempted to reinforce its sensing systems with physical infrastructure, constructing the “Repeller Wall of the Land” to block the Amorites—climate refugees fleeing the same drought the empire could not sense quickly enough to prepare for. It did not work.
Egypt’s Old Kingdom collapsed soon after. Levantine cities emptied. Populations moved in waves toward more resilient ecologies. What historians describe as political collapse looks, under climate light, like synchronized H1 exceeding H2 capacity, amplified by H3—the delay of institutions still trying to operate as if the old world remained.
Rebuilding took centuries because recovery itself has a cost; once sensing networks and institutional memory break, the path back is slow.
5. The Late Bronze Age: A High-Complexity System on Thin Ice
By 1500 BC, a new international order emerged: the Hittites, Egyptians, Mycenaeans, Cypriots, Canaanites, and Assyrians formed a dense web of trade and diplomacy. Clay tablets describe grain shipments, emergency requests for tin, and delicate multinational alliances.
This world was a dazzling achievement of H2—a far-reaching sensor network connecting multiple continents. But it was also optimized to razor-thin tolerances. Each palace depended on others for metals, grain, shipping, and security.
High precision; zero slack.
When environmental amplitude began to rise again, the results were immediate.
Sidebar: Why the Late Bronze Age Collapsed and the Iron Age Did Not
Figure 2 shows two very different kinds of worlds. On the left is the Late Bronze Age: a glittering web of palaces, ports, merchant hubs, and overland routes, all tightly bound together by diplomacy, shipping timetables, and the flow of metals and grain. On the right is the Iron Age: smaller, more self-contained communities linked by fewer, looser ties. The contrast reveals something essential about resilience and fragility.
The Hyper-Connected World: When Everything Depends on Everything Else
In the Late Bronze Age network, every palace and port is stitched into the system by dozens of trade routes. This looks impressive—and it was. Goods and information could move astonishing distances. But systems like this carry a hidden cost: the more tightly you couple your world, the faster it fails when stress arrives.
A drought, a failed harvest, a destroyed port—any one of these could ripple through the network. The red lines in the figure show how a single failure propagates outward, triggering others. The system is optimized for efficiency, not resilience. This is the Bronze Age’s great vulnerability: the margin for error disappears.
The result is not a slow decline but a cascade—a synchronized collapse across dozens of polities that had once seemed stable.
The Modular World: Why the Iron Age Could Absorb Shocks
The Iron Age network looks quieter, almost humble by comparison. Palaces still exist, ports still matter, and trade continues—but the connections between clusters are fewer and weaker. What happens in one region no longer determines the fate of the whole.
In this modular world, failure becomes localized. A drought can ruin one cluster without sinking its neighbors. A port can go quiet without shutting down the entire Mediterranean. These smaller societies reorganized, diversified, and built redundancy into their way of life—not out of foresight, but out of necessity after the collapse. Over time, this became a design feature: a world with compartments, not a single intertwined machine.
The Bigger Lesson
The two networks illustrate a simple truth about complex societies:
Hyper-connected systems are powerful but brittle.
Modular systems are slower, smaller, but far more resilient.
Where the Late Bronze Age lived on a knife-edge of interdependence, the Iron Age lived in loosely connected cells. And when environmental volatility rose—when H1 spiked—the difference between those designs determined who collapsed and who endured.
The figure reveals what archaeology often obscures: resilience is not just about strength; it is about architecture. The Late Bronze Age fell because it was magnificent. The Iron Age survived because it was modest.
6. The Late Bronze Age Collapse: Cascading Failure in a Connected World
Multiple climate proxies—Anatolian tree rings, Dead Sea levels, Mediterranean sediment—show a sequence of droughts around 1200 BC. Harvests failed across the region. Cities that had stood for centuries burned: Ugarit, Mycenae, Troy, Hattusa.
The collapse was not local; it was systemic. One palace’s failure cut off another’s grain. One burned port ended a neighbor’s trade. A hyper-connected world faced a hyper-synchronized crash.
This was H1 overwhelming a system whose H2 accuracy was excellent but whose latency was fatal. And H3 shaped the aftermath: palace economies kept issuing diplomatic letters and requesting shipments long after the capacity to respond had vanished. Recovery was slow and uneven, because rebuilding sensing networks and trade routes is harder than abandoning them.
7. The Iron Age: Smaller Systems, Faster Sensing
After the collapse, the Levant reassembled into smaller states—Israel, Judah, Phoenicia, Aram. These societies were less centralized, more agile. They relied on terracing, micro-irrigation, diversified subsistence, and maritime trade.
This was adaptability born of necessity—forced by collapse—which eventually became adaptability by design. These smaller systems could tolerate moderate volatility because their sensing loops were shorter and less brittle.
H2 shrank, which lowered H3.A practical response to living in a noisier world.
8. The Roman Climate Optimum: Expansion on Easy Mode
From about 0 to 200 AD, the Mediterranean climate entered a stable, warm phase. Rainfall patterns were supportive. Agriculture boomed.
The Roman Empire thrived under these conditions. Roads, aqueducts, shipping networks, and grain fleets expanded. Stability (low H1) allowed massive growth in H2: sensing networks, administrative apparatus, taxation reforms, and coordinated military systems.
Rome’s sensing capability was unmatched. Its latency, however, grew along with its size.
9. The Sixth Century: Volcanic Winter and the Long Recovery
In 536 AD, a massive volcanic eruption—likely in the Northern Hemisphere—dimmed sunlight worldwide. Snow fell in summer. Crops failed. This triggered the Late Antique Little Ice Age, a century-long period of cold and instability.
The Byzantine Empire struggled. Plague spread. Trade networks contracted. Borders reshaped themselves. Once again, a complex system faced a shock with insufficient slack and long institutional latency.
And once again, H3 revealed its power: recovery took centuries. The path upward was not the same as the path down.
10. Modernity: Buffers, Latencies, and the Deepening of H3
Today, fossil fuels, global supply chains, and high-resolution data networks act as dampers on H1. We buffer volatility with energy and information. But buffering is not immunity. It stretches our sensing loops and makes our recovery lags enormous.
Power grids take years to rebuild.
Semiconductor fabs take decades.
Global supply chains take generations to reconfigure.
Modernity looks different from the ancient world, but structurally it rhymes: more complexity, more sensing, and far longer delays when things break.
We have not escaped the model; we have deepened its stakes.
Sidebar: Why Collapse Is Fast but Recovery Takes Generations
Figure 3 shows a classic hysteresis loop: the path a system follows when it loses stability and the much slower, harder path it must traverse to regain it. This behavior isn’t unique to civilizations—it appears in ecosystems, materials science, climate dynamics, even neural networks. But in human history, hysteresis becomes painfully visible.
The Collapse Path — When H1 Spikes Faster Than H2 Can Respond
On the left-hand curve, environmental conditions worsen—drought intensifies, storms multiply, energy flows weaken. At first, societies compensate through their sensing and prediction systems (H2): grain reserves, taxation, diplomacy, storage, emergency planning. But once volatility crosses a certain threshold, those systems fall behind.
Coordination breaks down. Institutions fragment. Collapse accelerates. This descent is sharp because complex, optimized systems have long latencies. When the environment shifts abruptly, the system cannot reconfigure quickly enough. The result is a rapid, nonlinear plunge down the collapse path.
The Recovery Path — Why the Way Back Isn’t the Way We Fell
As conditions later improve, the system does not return along the same trajectory. Instead, it follows the long arc of the recovery path. This is hysteresis in action: the cost of rebuilding is far greater than the cost of maintaining stability.
Where collapse required only the failure of connections, recovery requires reconstructing them:
Grid restoration – rebuilding physical infrastructure, often from scratch.
Supply chain rebuild – re-establishing logistics networks that took decades to evolve.
Institutional reform – reorganizing sensing systems, leadership structures, and coordination mechanisms.
These processes have their own inertia. They introduce new frictions, new dependencies, and often new vulnerabilities. A society may rise again, but seldom to its previous form. Instead of a neat symmetrical loop, the figure reveals the asymmetry of resilience: collapse is easy; reconstruction is costly.
The Bigger Lesson
This loop is the fingerprint of H3, the recovery lag inherent in all adaptive systems. It tells us that civilizations don’t crumble because people fail—they crumble because their internal sensing loops (H2) cannot accelerate as fast as external volatility (H1). And the return journey demands energy, time, and social cohesion that are far scarcer after a crisis.
The figure is a reminder: when the world shifts, the path back is never the path down. Resilience isn’t the ability to avoid collapse—it’s the capacity to shorten the long, slow climb of the recovery curve.
Conclusion: The Pattern Beneath History
Across ten thousand years, the rhythm repeats:
Low H1 → stability, growth, complexity
High H2 → precision, optimization, rising fragility
H1 spike → cascading failure
H3 → slow, asymmetrical recovery
Civilizations are not machines. They are adaptive organisms shaped by the interplay of volatility, sensing, and hysteresis.
Agency determines which path we take, but H1 determines the stability of the ground we walk on.
And so the question remains—perhaps the oldest one:
How much organization can we afford, not in calm years, but when the world shifts beneath us?
Because every era, including our own, must negotiate the same ancient tension between complexity and uncertainty.
The Earth changes.
We change with it.
And the quiet logic beneath those changes—the rhythm of H1, H2, and H3—has been here all along.
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