Plague probably wiped out people in Stone Age Europe

About five thousand years ago, the population of northern Europe collapsed, as the region's Stone Age farming communities decrease tenfold. However, the reason for this decline in the population remains a subject of controversy, BTA reported.

New research based on DNA extracted from human bones and teeth found in ancient tombs in the Scandinavian countries - seven from the Swedish region of Folbigdens, one from the Swedish coast near Gothenburg and one from Denmark - suggests that a disease, most likely the plague, could would be the reason for the Neolithic population decline. The remains are from megalithic tombs.

Remains of 108 people were examined - 62 of men, 45 of women and one of unknown gender. Of these, 18 in number or 17 percent were infected with the plague at the time of their death.

Scientists have managed to create a family tree of 38 people from six generations or about 120 years of Folbigdens. Of these, 12 people or 32 percent were infected with the plague. Genetic data indicate that their community experienced three distinct waves of an early form of plague.

The researchers completely reconstructed the genomes of the different strains of the plague-causing bacterium Yersinia pestis responsible for these waves, and found that the latest may have been more infectious than the previous ones. The authors of the study identified signs that suggest that the disease was transmitted from person to person and caused an epidemic.

We have learned that the Neolithic plague was the precursor to all later forms of plague, said Frederik Searsholm, a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen and lead author of the study published in the journal Nature.

A later form of the same pathogen caused the Justinian Plague, which raged in the sixth century BC, and the Black Death of the fourteenth century, which decimated the populations of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.

Because the strains circulating during the Neolithic population decline were very early variants of the bacterium, the plague probably caused different symptoms than those seen during the epidemic millennia later.

The decline of the population in Northern Europe occurred around 3300 BC. - 2900 BC By this time, cities and advanced civilizations were already flourishing in places like Egypt and Mesopotamia.

The population of Scandinavia and northwestern parts of Europe disappeared completely, to be replaced later by representatives of the Yamnaya culture arriving from the steppes around modern Ukraine. They are the ancestors of modern Northern Europeans.

Until now, various scenarios have been proposed to explain the decline of the population in Northern Europe - war or simply competition with the peoples of the steppe, which began to dominate at the end of the Neolithic, an agricultural crisis that led to mass starvation, or various diseases, including the plague. said Searsholme. The problem was that only one plague genome had been identified so far, and it was not known whether the disease could have spread to the human population, he added.

DNA evidence also provides insight into social dynamics in communities at the time, showing that men fathered children by many women and that women were led by neighboring communities. Women seem to have been monogamous.

"Multiple reproductive partners can mean multiple wives. They may also mean that men were allowed to find a new partner if they were widowed, or that they had lovers,'' Searsholm said.