A scary YouTube
clip arguing that the “Neolithic decline” was caused by none other than our
good ol´ friend Yersinia pestis. After killing off a large portion of the farming
population of Old Europe, the continent became easy pray for the Indo-European invaders.
Not sure
if I buy this. The genetic evidence suggests a mass die off of *male* lineages,
while female lineages survived and “intermarried” with the Indo-European conquerors.
Is there any other plague pandemic in world history during which men are extremely
disproportionately affected?
That being
said, the pesky bacterium have apparently been found at Neolithic sites…
Were the males bioligically weaker against the pest or was it something in their lifestyle that made them infected more often than women?
ReplyDeleteDisieases with a short incubation time that also kill the afflicted fast can show very large variantions in diffrent groups even if the groups are bioligically equaly good at fighting of the disease.
For example if one group regulary travel they can catch the diseasein one village and die from the disease before reaching the next village.
In ancient times this would have much larger impact on how diffrent groups wete afflictrd than tofay, when we almost daily are expised to people who the day before were in some place at the other end if the globe or so.
Yes, exactly. What I find strange is that the narrator claims that the Neolithic towns were hotbeads of the plague, but if so, men and women would have died in equal numbers (I think). Or did they die in equal numbers there, but not in the rural areas? Maybe some kind of male foraging made the males more exposed to the plague?
ReplyDelete