LONDON – Pandemics have been on everyone’s mind recently for obvious reasons and the UK press, in June, focused on some research published in Nature Communications in May 2023, relating to the Neolithic inhabitants of Britain (the people who initially built Stonehenge) – and why they disappeared.
Pooja Swali from the Crick Institute says that the team, which consists of the University of Oxford, the Levens Local History Group, and the Wells and Mendip Museum, has discovered Yersinia pestis in the dental pulp of 2 out of 34 human remains dating from some 4000 years ago in Somerset (a mass burial) and Cumbria (a ring burial). Yersinia pestis is the bacterium that causes plague, and it’s been around for a long time, but this discovery reveals that it was present in the UK significantly earlier than previously thought. Evidence of plague in Britain dates from the reign of the Roman emperor Justinian, in the 6th C, but scientists know that plague was present in Europe long before this. What was not clear was whether it reached Britain across the intervening Channel, and it seems from the latest discoveries that it did.
Stonehenge (Photo Credit: MJTM)
The people who lived in what is now Britain, several thousand years ago, and who include the henge builders, seem to have originated in Anatolia. Research on 51 Neolithic skeletons in 2018 shows that they were genetically distinct: olive-skinned and dark-haired, similar to modern peoples from the Mediterranean. But 90% of them died out, relatively shortly after the henge was constructed, and they were replaced between 2000 – 2500 BC by an ethnic group who were tall and fair, deriving from the Eurasian steppes and bringing horses and wagons with them. They are known as the Beaker people and their arrival marks the transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. They, too, used Stonehenge for purposes of their own. Around the time of their arrival, the European population fell dramatically: we do not know why, but a pandemic is a possibility. Plagues have historically caused demographic changes, and continue to do so.
The suggestion is that a plague brought into the country by this new group cleared the way for these immigrants to take over (presumably, the resistance of the Neolithic population was lower than that of the newcomers). Ian Armit, senior co-author and Professor of Archaeology at the University of Bradford, said of the 2018 project: “The analysis shows pretty conclusively that migration of the Beaker people into Britain was more intense and on a larger scale than anyone had previously thought. Britain essentially has a whole new population after that period.”
The strain identified in the Somerset and Cumbrian remains is similar to the plague in Europe around the same time. It’s not the same as the Black Death, which was transmitted via fleas (some strains of plague can, like Covid and other illnesses, be spread by sneezing and coughing). Pooja Swali comments
“The ability to detect ancient pathogens from degraded samples, from thousands of years ago, is incredible. These genomes can inform us of the spread and evolutionary changes of pathogens in the past, and hopefully help us understand which genes may be important in the spread of infectious diseases. We see that this Yersinia pestis lineage, including genomes from this study, loses genes over time, a pattern that has emerged with later epidemics caused by the same pathogen.”
However, questions still remain. Why was the resistance of the Beaker People to plague higher than that of the Neolithic inhabitants? Also, only two of the bodies investigated held Yersinia pestis, and in the case of the Somerset sample, the case appeared in a mass grave of people who had died from trauma rather than plague. Could they have been killed to stop the disease spreading, once one person had been identified with symptoms? The study concedes that this might have been a possibility:
…we cannot completely rule out a higher prevalence of plague amongst the remaining 28 individuals from this site as false negatives are possible, due to factors such as poor preservation of endogenous microbial DNA and variable pathogen load, making detection of ancient pathogens more difficult. This raises the question–which we cannot answer at this point–of whether there may have been any connection between the disease and violent treatment of these individuals. At least one of the two child mandibles shows signs of perimortem trauma, although the disarticulated state of the remains means that potential trauma to the rest of the skeleton cannot be assessed. The presence of Yersinia pestis DNA in the two children suggests that they were either diseased when any trauma was inflicted on them, or alternatively that any trauma was inflicted after their death from the plague. The latter scenario cannot be dismissed altogether, although it is improbable given the rate of perimortem trauma observed in the assemblage as a whole, which suggests most or all individuals were killed during a specific violent event.
Stonehenge (TWH) [Photo credit: MJTM]
The Wild Hunt asked a number of historians and other experts to comment on these findings.
“The population turnover from the first Neolithic farmers to ‘beaker people’ from the steppes is one of the huge mysteries. It is the last great European population turnover. Essentially modern Europeans are Beaker People. Population turnovers like this are really rare compared to ethnic change. Normally one would expect genetic admixture even if one culture completely replaced another as in early medieval England and Iceland.
The suspicion is of a lethal pathogen and increasingly Black Death is in the frame.
The arrival of Beaker Culture across Northern Europe] was initially seen as a migration but was reinterpreted in the social and political climate of the 60s as a cultural change. 21st-century molecular biology blew this idea out of the water. For example, the population turnover in Britain between 2,500 and 2,000 was 93%. So why?
Forget ideas of invasions and genocide. There were no organised states capable of achieving either. Plus there is no evidence of mass violence in this period. Evidence shows that the population of Neolithic farmers in Britain declined dramatically from 2,900 BC to 2,400. Agriculture virtually disappears.
The population crash seems to have been triggered by climate change adversely affecting food production. This leads to starvation, disease and social dislocation and violence as the ruling class lose their ‘magic’ in the eyes of the ruled. The four horsemen always ride together. The Beaker migrants moved into an empty space genetically swamping the remaining indigenous people.
With regard to disease, Black Death has been found in the skeletons of the Neolithic farmers of Northern Europe. All modern variants of Black Death track back phylogenetically to that Neolithic strain detected first in the Baltic, notably Sweden. That particular strain is considered to possess the plasminogen activators that made it pneumonic. That is what made Black Death so dangerous in the Medieval outbreaks. It spreads like a respiratory virus. Someone fleeing the plague but carrying it arrived in a village and within a week half the village are dead.” [John Lambshead, biologist, historian and author of The Fall of Roman Britain: and why we speak English].
“The author is an epidemiologist and policy expert, not an archaeologist, and there’s some very fast and loose use of the evidence here, particularly in terms of distribution of evidence and sample size. There’s also a dollop of diffusionism, which is long considered an inadequate model. Population change is much more complex (and we already knew about the plague).” [Dr. Kari Sperring, historian and novelist].
“The article at least (I haven’t read the book) is very speculative. The implications of the hypothesis are also quite extreme – it would imply Indo-Europeans had higher resistance to the pathogen, but given the mortality rate in the middle ages, amongst their descendants, that would imply an even more extreme rate amongst the pre-IE population, in a much less urbanised society than medieval Europe – surely there would be a lot more evidence if that were the case?” [Paul Treadaway, University of Cambridge, Department of Haematology]
This piece of research cannot, therefore, be considered to be conclusive (nor do the writers make such a claim), but it does point to some interesting hypotheses relating to the Neolithic population collapse and the subsequent domination of Beaker culture.
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