  We study the temporal evolution of a small number $N$ of ultra-cold bosonic
atoms confined in a ring potential. Assuming that initially the system is in a
solitary-wave solution of the corresponding mean-field problem, we identify
significant differences in the time evolution of the density distribution of
the atoms when it instead is evaluated with the many-body Schr\"odinger
equation. Three characteristic timescales are derived: the first is the period
of rotation of the wave around the ring, the second is associated with a
"decay" of the density variation, and the third is associated with periodic
"collapses" and "revivals" of the density variations, with a factor of $\sqrt
N$ separating each of them. The last two timescales tend to infinity in the
appropriate limit of large $N$, in agreement with the mean-field approximation.
These findings are based on the assumption of the initial state being a
mean-field state. We confirm this behavior by comparison to the exact solutions
for a few-body system stirred by an external potential. We find that the exact
solutions of the driven system exhibit similar dynamical features.
