New research suggests prehistoric plague may have contributed to Neolithic population decline

New evidence suggests that prehistoric plague bacteria could have been deadly to humans, raising the possibility that plague may have been one of several factors behind the late Neolithic population decline in Europe. 

Until recently, researchers were unsure whether prehistoric strains of plague found in human remains more than 4,000 years old were highly lethal or caused relatively mild illness. 

New research shows that mass deaths among prehistoric hunter-gatherer communities in southern Siberia were likely caused by early strains of plague, demonstrating that these ancient strains could be deadly. 

Although these Siberian hunter-gatherers were isolated from Neolithic farming communities in Europe, researchers suggest that plague may have independently spread via wild animal “disease reservoirs”.

Despite these findings, archaeologists remain cautious about linking prehistoric plague directly to Europe’s Late Neolithic population decline. One reason is that the known European plague cases appear around 400 years after the population decline is thought to have begun. 

Read the full article by Ruairidh Macleod, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford, and Stephen Shennan, Professor of Theoretical Archaeology at the UCL Institute of Archaeology, in The Conversation.