Uncovering Britain's DEADLY Prehistoric Plague - New Evidence
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- čas přidán 5. 05. 2024
- A study published in Nature Communications in May 2023 saw researchers reexamine bones from the Levens Park Ring Cairn. It was revealed that one of the four people buried within the cairn had been infected with the plague-the earliest known instance in Britain (circa 2000 BC).
Key sources:
Swali, P. et al. (2023) ‘Yersinia pestis genomes reveal plague in Britain 4000 years ago’, Nature communications, 14(1)
Clare, T. et al. (2021) ‘A re-interpretation of the Levens Park ring cairn, Cumbria, based on the original excavation archives’, Archaeological Journal, 178(2)
Clare, T., Wilkinson D.M., Moor Divock revisited: some new sites, survey and interpretations, CWAAS
Turnbull, P. & Walsh, D., A Beaker Burial in Levens Park, CWAAS
Harding, A.F. et al., Prehistoric and Early Medieval Activity on Danby
Rigg, North Yorkshire, Archaeological Journal - Věda a technologie
When the Yamnaya where first venturing west off the steppe they also had the plague, it was the airborne version the pneumonic plague as it was detected on 2 peoples remains I think in Germany or Poland. It has a 90% to 95% mortality rate and the British Isles is repopulated by this percentage, it cant be a coincidence. What I think happened is the plague was transported by people from the steppe then when the steppe people had ridden out the worst of it they would move on to try and escape it and thats why and when we see Indo European languages spread across the globe. These people where introducing the plague of which they had the immunity to, if it has a 90% to 95% mortality rate then the populations are soon going to be whittled down to the immune people and then these immune people group together and start leaving the steppe on mass to settle in much better lands barely populated. Also lets remember that the Neolithic farmers that the steppe people replaced, they themselves replaced the hunter gatherers in the British Isles by a near exact percentage in population numbers and the farmers also spread right across the British Isles and where farming the whole Island within 200 years. It all seems a bit to easy and it wouldnt surprise me if the diseases that jumped from animals to humans through domestication maybe played a huge role in wiping out the hunter gatherer population in the same manner.
I think you are right. The Steppe people were probably not invincible maniac warriors but people who brought the plague. They had domesticated animals, like cattle, and got the plague from these animals. Their population collapsed, but there were some survivors and they had a good deal of resistance to the disease. No one else in the world had this resistance. The only way a people could avoid being replaced by the Steppe people was to get the plague first well before the Steppe people showed up. If that happened, their population would collapse but they recover.
The history of the 1346 Black Plague showed that the plague started in the steppes on Eurasia, spread quickly through the Black Sea, to the Mediterranean Sea and moved around Europe in a clockwise fashion, and after about 15 years moved through Poland and Russia before reaching the areas near the steppe. Something similar must have happened 5000 years ago, except the disease traveled more slowly because there were fewer ships, but the plague must of travelled through the Mediterranean first.
This explains why the people of northern Europe were mostly replaced by the Steppe people. The plague arrived just before the Steppe people did. In contrast, it appears that the population of Southern Europe was mostly wiped out, but had partially recovered when the Steppe people showed up, so the people of Southern Europe ended up with two thirds Anatolian ancesstry and one third Steppe ancestry.
A similar thing took place during the European settlement of America and Australia. Also I would point out that not just domesticated animals would be a new vector for disease but also the pests which would infest the new larger settlements. One of the theories for Neolithic dwellings being deliberately burned down and rebuilt so often was due to pests.
That's right. There was a period before 2000 BCE when most people found buried in central Europe died of the plague. It seemed an amazement it never got to Britain. Plague tended to travel along trade routes. The Bell Beaker people traveled great distances along Europe's rivers and the English channel. They substantially replaced the population of England. Conditions might not have been quite right for a plague pandemic to hit northwestern England. It seems most likely that a trader brought plague there, and, it would have been typical if he was who got the privileged burial. The Amesbury Archer, a chieftain and priest buried at Stonehenge, grew up in the Alps! The beaker people carried metalworking technology that made them seem magical to neolithic people, and they also had superior weapons and will to use them.
The megaliths, like ring cairns, and Stonehenge, were a Neolithic feature, but it seems the bell beaker people took them over and reconstituted them with their own ritual, possibly in the course of taking political control of the population.
I think it's more likely that beaker skeletons in Britain haven't been examined for the plague, only their DNA and their isotopes that show where they grew up, than that they didn't have the plague. In such an absence of obvious research, a scholar with a single paper based on one burial can easily make a big splash and set his career for life.
@@dorasmith7875 there is I think only 2 mass graves in Germany/Austria where you could say because of the time period and how they where executed it could of been the Yamnaya spreading West. But in the UK with all those people who had been building all the megalithic stuff there must of been a lot of people and to find no trace of them being massacred. The only explanation is disease, when mainland Britain was colonised by the Neolithic people they had fully spread across the whole landscape farming within a 200 year period taking over all the hunter gatherers territories. Just 200 years to totally change an island from a none farming to full farming the numbers must of been substantial.
Supposedly the type of rats was new and carried the plague into the houses.
This is really helpful. Living less than half a mile from the Levens site, it’s fascinating. I’ve visited most of the Cumbria sites and seeing them compared is great. Aerial shots are so useful.
Thank you. Fascinating. I have visited some of them. I had no idea there were such things as Ring Cairns. I hope you post updates in the future.
I wonder if the big outer ring was built as an "eternal" warning for future generations to stay away - just like we try to build those warning monuments near nuclear waste sites today...
Imagine if all our stone rings were warnings n hippies dance in them like temples ......
I wonder if it was an astronomical thing, and our sensationalist commentator isn't troubling to tell us that in his fifteen minutes of fairly superficial information.
@@dorasmith7875oi - RUDE. Also, “astronomical”, total guff
Thank you for making this video. I have never heard of ring cairns but wish I had with all the trekking around the north west and north east that I used to do. I’ve subscribed to your channel, and hope to see it grow!
This is what happened when the New World was discovered. The first landings brought Smallpox to the Americas and it spred like wildfire. By the time North America was settled by Europeans, 90% of the native population was gone and the settlers moved into a depopulated place.
Thanks a lot. I am actually horrified by the images of the bronze age people being very much helpless in face of this illness wiping them out, their symbolic effort to contain the pain and death.
Well. We're here, & we're damn lucky to have modern medicine.
Would love to see a follow up too - and thanks for your enthusiasm, that's beautiful to see. ^^
Love your confidence in "modern medicine" despite the hundreds of biolabs creating brand new diseases.
@@kubhlaikhan2015 THEY'RE HARVESTING BABIES FOR ADRENOCHROME!!!1111
Were your parents normal, nice people and you just turned out stupid or are they dummies, too? Just curious.
@@kubhlaikhan2015 We live three times longer than the Neolithic people did. That suggests to me that "modern medicine" does such a good job that we take it for granted and think that our longer lifespans are our normal etitlement.
@@abrahamdozer6273 There were plenty of 90 year olds throughout most periods of history. Famine and war (which go together) are the exceptions. In more recent history, urban squalor was the biggest killer before sanitation systems were introduced. Sewers extended our lifespans, not drugs and surgery. Plagues in the past often got out of control for similar reasons, exploding in overcrowded cities and on the back of human migration. Nothing to do with "entitlement" nor medical prowess. A study in the US a few years ago estimated that over 55% of modern deaths involve some degree of medical malpractice which include drug side effects and nursing home negligence due to overcrowding. Most killer illnesses can be linked to industrial pollutants and food contaminants such as asbestos, teflon, microplastics, pesticides, volatile organics and so on. The new form of modern squalor and medicine won't save you - it just adds new hazards to the stew.
@@kubhlaikhan2015 The average life span 5000 years ago was the mid thirties. 200 years ago, it was in the mid 40s. The average life span (at least where I live) is over 80.
In Norway too: Lundeby in Raade, Hunnfeltene, Gunnarstorp and so on...
Well, the presence of Yersinia pestis so long ago poses some questions. The 12th century CE arrival of the plague in Europe is well attested, and the bug struck violently, like an unfamiliar microbe to virgin populations. That is puzzling, if plague was around thousands of years already. Also, recurring epidemics should be in evidence over those millennia.
We don’t have much evidence between this and the Justinian Plague, which struck well before the 12th century. The plague was not a new microbe
Microbes evolve.
And they do so much faster than us big slow breeders.
Bacteria don't do so as fast as viruses, but a few hundred years is easily enough time for a pathogen to evolve a new suite of surface proteins.
It is also ample time for human populations to lose immunity. Ours is largely adaptive, and not genetic.
Good point. But the Yersinia pestis is a family of Bacteria rather than one. But diseases can evolve. Syphilis was probably knocking around Eurasia in a mild form until going crazy in the late 15th century. Unless it was brought back from the new world?
Be wary of using BCE and CE . . . . continue with what we know and trust, BC and AD. The dating system revolves around the birth of The Nazarene.
@@EllieMaes-Grandad Yeah, that doesn't work as well for non-Christian areas and cultures of the world. To study comparative histories, along with scholars from these other areas, it's better to name it in a more inclusive way.
Ancient Irish tradition, folklore, mythology and the Irish Annals speak of there being a great plague in Ireland, during this period.
When the first Indo-European peoples arrived from Scythia (Pontic-Steppe), the older Neolithic peoples of Ireland were hit by a Great Plague.
Here:-
- Irelands Neolithic peoples are called the “ Partholón”
- Irelands First Indo-European peoples are called the “Nemed”.
This same tradition, speaks of the Tallaght area, South West Dublin having Great Ancient Plague graves from that time.
And then the Celts were a later Indo-European immigration?
excellent piece of work, very well presented in an enthusiastic style many thanks. Liked and subscribed.
Cracking video mate. Well done!
Thanks!
It's cracking alright.
I wonder if the migratory artisans that brought bronze smelting technology with them, also carried the disease that had such devastating effect on the local population. Much like colonists carried smallpox to indigenous folk around the world.
And measles. A double whammy. People forget how dangerous measles is. It not only kills but can leave children blind or deaf or brain damaged or any combination of the three. Like covid. As far as I know I never had it but I wouldnt be surprised to find I was one of the millions who had it but had no symptoms. So lots of children got measles but survived.
Would a society struck by heavy plague have the labor necessary to build these? Remember they must keep the tiny farms and livestock viable, care for the living sick too feeble to work, while contributing excess labor to construction.
... Three are similar ringed stone structures in South Africa gathering various theories. Could they be connected by function somehow?
Realistically, it doesn’t take that much labour to make these structures. And, if there was a plague, it’s not known how widespread it was. All we know is that it was probably present at the time.
Perhaps consider the influenza pandemic of 1918, which was significantly more deadly than other outbreaks, either before or after. Some variants of a viral infection are positively lethal, others can pass by barely noticed.
@@TheHoveHeretic The plague is not a viral beast. Y. pestis is a bacterium. Otherwise, I think you have a point. The bacteria is widely present. In the Sierra Nevada in California, it is endemic among some rodent populations, with a rare human case every decade or so. Not often.
Fascinating! I wonder what international contacts were experienced by those people? Did small pox for instance, travel the Silk Road to the Mediterranean, to France and to England? Or might there have been an early appearance of the 'English Sweat'? Concerning the latter, in Tudor times it was claimed this disease did not affect people in Scotland or Ireland. If true, what were their historic exposures to diseases?
I really enjoyed this presentation and subscribed and gave thumbs up. I love history and archaeology and like to encourage new channels. It is a treat to have a real person narrate with a real voice. I absolutely detest the channels with the cringe-worthy AI voices! Those I do not follow!
Evidence is building that a quest for tin started a trade with the Mediterranean with Phoenicians at the start of the Bronze Age 3000 years ago. I think this might have had a large impact on the native peoples.
I used to travel through Settle regularly. I always noticed a small partially wooded hill in a field, that reminded me of a buial mound. Eventually I decided to get a closer look... it was bigger than expected. I climbed to the top and saw it was as round as hoped, with even sloping sides where the trees hadn't distubed the earth.
I was at the time disappointed to find that the top had collapsed in and was where most of the trees were. Lovely place to sit but I figgured if it was a mound archaeologists must be aware of it.
Now I wonder if it had been built with an inner depression, rather than it collapsing. Either way, well worth getting soaked to the knees and leaving a small part of a perfectly good pair of pants on a barbwire fence.
It’s a ring cairn hotspot!
@@seaside_rambler oop norf we callz 'em pants, ye sothern ponce.
So, is it coincidence that around the same time (2500BC) Stonehenge was undergoing Phase 3 (Sarsens, Trilithons, rearrangement of BlueStones) AND the Beaker Culture was arriving in the UK ? What if the Beaker culture unwittingly introduced the Black Death and Phase 3 of Stone Henge was a last gasp of the preceding culture in an effort to either get the Gods onside or commemorate the huge numbers of their contemporaries lost to the plague ? This would also explain how the Beaker culture was able to supplant the indigenous one. Has anyone done any research looking for evidence of plague resistance in Beaker populations ?
Well, do beware grand narratives. Things happen for multitude of reasons. It is unlikely that people will outright study the hypothesis that the plague caused all of this this video intends to show that it may have contributed.
@@AdamMorganIbbotson but the way of testing a hypothesis is to allow it to make a prediction and then see if it turns out true...If the dates all line up and you can prove that outsiders with a resistance to plague arrived at about the same time as the plague did and that the indigenous population coincidentally declined then it would be interesting to make more predictions and test them until you either disprove the hypothesis or accumulate enough evidence that it begins to look like historical fact...
The mortise and tenon construction of the final phase of Stonehenge suggests that maybe a different culture fininshed the monument. That's are woodworking joinery you're seeing, not what stoneworkers would do. There are no others built that way. By the way, Stonehenge fell down but the other stone circles aroung Britatain did not suggesting that the woodworkers who finished Stonehenge didn't quite know what they were doing ... not up the Neolithic standards.
@@abrahamdozer6273 many stone circles have fallen over. The result of thousands of years of land erosion and farming sadly. The bigger the stone, the easier to topple!
@@AdamMorganIbbotson Stonehenge's post-and-litel construction is unique and entirely different from what you are describing. Stonehenge seems to have been finished by a different culture.
I have been out of the circle {:grins:} for decades now but I still have my archaeological nose tweaked every now and again by something good popping up on CZcams :D Fascinating.
Well presented, good topic.
That's northern England then. If a plague hit the land back then, what happened south of Watford . . . ?
Probably the same, but with a lot more moaning.
@@AdamMorganIbbotsonha ha good one m8 !!!
The Normans, a plague that lasts forever
Such a well done channel! Greetings from NYC!
Great video, Adam! :)
Thanks, make sure to subscribe for more Megalithic adventures!
This is a REALLY fascinating video! Thank you! 🙏🙏🙏
Amazing video! Really appreciate the effort of getting shots of the mounds and cairns today. Also what is the song around 2:50?
It’s the theme tune to an obscure Australian film called “Wake in Fright”
@@AdamMorganIbbotsonvery much not obscure. Major marker in emergence of the modern Australian film industry (modern vs the first wave in 1910s-1920s)
@@janmeyer3129 well yeah, but it did go missing in a shipping container for a few decades. It’s not Star Wars haha
@@AdamMorganIbbotson was never missing in my memory!
Brilliant. Thanks
First, I'm very glad you dropped the weird voice. Second, this was most fascinating, I'd just watched a video about the depopulation of the british isles in exactly this time period & you've done a great job of knitting together facts to form a logical & coherent explanation. But as we all know, that which makes sense is often not true, so I hope that some anthropologist gets a great big honking grant to study the burials in the various sorts of cairns & rings to see if there is more evidence of plague.
Illustrations of the original appearance of the different types of cairns would help. How did the people have the time and energy to invest in these monuments. Who would be interred?
Had no idea.... Need to go walking now
I have heard that there will be soon a report of the plague back to the Palaeolithic or stone age in "Nature" magazine. The ring cairns are fascinating.
Very neat. Very interesting. I'm new to the channel. You remind me of Pete Kelly.
I recall some climactic issues that affected the Middle Eastern lands, perhaps 2200bce. I also recall that the Black Death Middle Ages followed some climate issues in China.
Just wondering about how these things get set off.
Fascinating, thank you for this report!
Thank you for this excellent video🖖
The late Stone age civilisation that inhabited Britian offers a unique insight to a peoples who had a unique original culture and language, if diseases did reduce their populations then that indicates migrants bringing in disease's as we have seen in the age of colonisation across the world in the 17/18th centuries and the empty land lay ready for the Beaker people and later the Cymru peoples.
interesting, very well done.
Cool. Thanks
mate this started playing in the background and i thought it was boris johnson lol
Interesting ! Thank you!
You are welcome!
Thankyou, its been a year or two since i read about the 90% genetic replacement, and speculation of the cause, reminded me then of the european arrival in the americas, just how much plague was there , do you know ?
Very interesting,thank you. I have never heard of this possible plague. You talk the whole time about no entrance, what if is no EXIT for plagued ancestors
Good point!
I seem to have fallen down a rabbit hole!
Keep going and you’ll end up banging a drum at Stonehenge in your birthday suit.
Now you have me thinking of how I can escape the chaos of an impending family vacation to see these. And to consider how many milsr structures still visible in continental Europe may be of similar cause & origin.
Check out my earlier videos - even bigger sites in my “Mysteries of the Stone Age” documentary!
And thanks!
Thank you for an interesting video. Please stick with your natural voice; it sounds so much better😊
Interesting. Is there anything in the south (different kinds of monuments) that match the dates and point to increased morbidity?
There’s thousands of burial monuments across Britain, not all linked to the Early Bronze Age. Many big mounds were started in the Early Bronze Age, or even the Neolithic, then reused throughout the Bronze Age. See the Stonehenge landscape! Later burials weren’t as showy.
Does that date tie into the bronze age collapse?
I am in Canada and not likely to visit in person. I enjoyed the vid.
Thank You for a very informative video. In fact, it so informative that I am a bit confused about something. Was this plague around the same time as the collapse of the Bronze Age Civilization in the Eastern Mediterranean ? Could this be part of the reason for this collapse as was the so-called Sea People ?
Just wondering ...
Thousand + years earlier
Confusion is everywhere!!
Show me your Ring Cairns Baby! ❤❤❤
Brilliant
About half way along the road from Orton, Cumbria, ( old Westmorland) east towardvSunbiggin Tarn there is a bridlepath going north by a farm. Not far past the farm in a field is a small stone circle. Ive not been back for years and note it now has a name on the ordnance map. From memory it doesnt have an obvious entrance. Youve got me wondering now.
You may be thinking of Gamelands, one of about six ‘Cumbrian Circles’, mid-to-late Neolithic ritual enclosures similar to henges (c. 3200BC). There’s a very damaged concentric circle next to Sunbiggin Tarn, and Penhurrock Cairn, to the northwest of towards Shap. Asby Scar to the north has several ring cairns - including two at Gaythorne Plain.
So, assuming populations were comparatively much smaller then, and with a plague epidemic having occurred.
Where did the labour come from to undertake the construction of these monuments?
Thanks! This is great. Well done 👍🏼
you ought examine climate as fundamental cause because of its implication with the decline of other notable empires and curture before and around 2000 BC. Plagues often accompany major climatic events.
I often think the rings ofstones are Cemeteries and some are also Trash heaps,,, people generate trash.
Yeah the Bell Beaker plague
Ring cans?????? Oh! CAIRNS!!!!!
Why is it that the cars in the background are driving on the starboard side of the road? I mean, this is in England, isn't it?
We drive on all sides of the road in Yorkshire. Road anarchy
Liked the topic. Thank you.
Well done. Thank you!
Interesting how you pronounce the word "cairn". We say "carn".
Really? Where is that?
An Australian lady I knew came from n/w of that country. She referred to her town a 'canns' . . .
Always been a cairn in uk
Ad altiora!
🙂❤👍
Love the drone footage of Birkrigg. The outer ring us not so identifiable in the ground.
Maybe factor in climate change too during the Bronze Age. The climate did cool. Volcanic winter maybe, causing drought, famine , disease and the mass movement of people 🤔
It would only require a single individual with an incubating pathogen to spread a disease, and by the time they eventually died, it could have potentially been passed on to a large number of connecting communities.
If each single community had even limited regular contact with neighbouring peoples, the possibility for a contagion to spread is far greater than had they quarantined.
Ah, the tranquillity of lockdown.
I could do with another right about now!
Quite a lot of the footage in this video was taken in lockdown!
Sooooo Stonehenge is NOT unique at all! And is prob a ring cairn?? 🤷♀️
"The Plague" was an often visitor to all of Europe from Prehistoric times to the last ones in 1066 and the 1600's. At the last one, the surviving labourers as serfs went on strike. Parliament passed a law that prohibited them for doing so. The Landed Gentry and the House of Lords passed laws prohibiting wage negotiation. Now you know where Worker Unionism comes from, so long ago. It is not, somehow related to Socialism or Communism. From this bastardry, "The Commons" was created.
Great rankings!
So glad to see the collars! Retro is the way
Denmark, France and Belgium are my personal favorites
Good luck in NC!
The Tories did it.
REC flashing in the corner because you filmed this in 1992? 🤷♂️
Yep.
It seems insane to me that a people so interested in and in touch with their past are gleefully sacrificing their genetic future to foreigners from halfway around the globe. SMH. 😢
WHY DO ALL THESE BOTS KEEP SAYING THANK YOU AND THATS INTERESTING 😂😂😂
Is "alieness" even a word. Wouldn't alien surfice
“Its striking situation, appearance, and alien” - no probably not. And yes, alienness is a word.
Not only is “Alienness” a word it means something different from “alien”. “Alien” as a noun means “a strange or foreign thing” and as a adjective means “strange or foreign”. “Alienness” means “the quality of being alien”. I doubt you’d see “strange” and “strangeness” as meaning exactly the same thing. “Alienness” is in the Oxford English Dictionary with an earliest example from 1655