Pandemic (Part 1)

A recent blog post Bring Out Your Dead brought up a topic that comes up in a number of Family Trees that I have traced.  This looked at the effect of various Pandemics on modern history, and this has lead me to write up in this blog post covering the surprising effects of Pandemics on the people of Great Britain.

The latest research on Ancient DNA has thrown up amazing insights in to the effects of ancient Pandemics on the people of Great Britain.   There have been three Pandemics that substantially affected the demographics of the British Isles in Prehistory to Historical times.

Pre-Historic Plague

Whilst lounging by the pool in Lindos on the Greek Island of Rhodes reading “Who we are and how we got here”  by David Reich, I came across some startling facts about the pre-historic population of Great Britain.  The book is a very good read, with the caveat that the author has laboured readers with a whole chapter justifying some of his findings to the “Thought Police” within the academic community who have howled about some of those that don’t fit with their world view.  But putting this to one side, his actual findings are utterly fascinating.   The book is well worth purchasing for anyone interested in Genetic Family History.  Also I’d recommend reading it by your private pool at the Lindos Blu Hotel just as I did.

The passage that caught my eye was the following:

“… the bacterium Yersinia pestis was the cause of the fourteenth-to-seventeenth-century CE Black Death, the sixth-to-eighth-century CE Justinianic plague of the Roman Empire, and an endemic plague that was responsible for at least about 7 percent of deaths in skeletons from burials across the Eurasian steppe after around five thousand years ago.”

I found his was startling.  Let’s start with the earliest, Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age Plague.  That Pandemic of plague was brought by the expansion of the Yamnaya Steppe culture in the Bronze Age, that saw a 90% replacement of Neolithic Genes by Bronze Age  Yamnaya Culture Genes showing a population replacement that separates the earlier periods of Stonehenge’s dominance to the later periods of Stonehenge’s adaption to a Bronze Age Culture.  This 9:1 distribution of genetic legacy is what is seen in modern indigenous British Citizens.

Genetic scientists working with Archaeologists have established that Yersinia Pestis the Black Death bacillus, has left its DNA in a large number of Yamnaya corpses, indicating that it was endemic amongst Steppe populations in the Bronze Age around 5,000 years ago.  However given that there was no population collapse associated with this infestation, it would seem that the Yamnaya Steppe derived population had built up a genetic resistance to the infection.

When these people moved West into Europe, they brought their steppe based disease with them, introducing it to Neolithic populations who had no natural resistance, causing population collapse within a couple of generations, and opening the way to their majority replacement by the Steppe Bronze Age Culture.  This first recorded Pandemic showed a pre-bubonic plague, i.e. not the plague form spread by fleas and lice etc, rather the pneumonic form that was spread by coughing, sneezing, and kissing.  This coincides historically with the rise of the “Corded Ware” culture that swept across central Europe around 4,900 years ago.

Bell Beakers and Population Change

About 200 years after this, around 4,700 years ago, the Bell Beaker Culture exploded across Western Europe, eventually making it to Britain.  Although the Bell Beaker Culture started in indigenous peoples in Iberia, it seems that by the time it moved North, it had been taken up by people with a steppe ancestry, not the previously indigenous Neolithic Peoples.  The Bell Beakers reached Britain, contrary to previous theories, not just by trade, but with a whole new population, this is apparent in the aDNA (Ancient DNA).   The people who brought the Bell Beakers had little if any Iberian or Neolithic Genes, their Genes were overwhelmingly from the Steppes.  Going by the genetic signatures, it looks as if this replacement population originated from the near continent, especially around the modern Netherlands.  Once again the dramatic, up to 90%, collapse of the pre-Bronze Age Neolithic population of Britain in the face of the Bell Beaker phenomenon, points to a disease driven reduction in population at the time, hosted by new immigrants.

Ring Cairns and New Religion

This has recently been reinforced by a study published in Nature Magazine in May 2023 where researchers re-examined the bones from a Ring Cairn burial at Levens Park in Cumbria in the North West of the UK.  These bones were from around  4,000 years ago on the transition period from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age.  Sure enough one of the four bodies buried within the Ring Cairn was infected with the plague; the earliest known (so far) example of the plague bacillus in Great Britain.

The plague victim’s body being in a Ring Cairn is highly significant.  Ring Cairns are emblematic of the period in Britain when the Neolithic changed to the Bronze Age.  They often appear in amongst earlier Neolithic stone monuments.  Interestingly unlike earlier stone burial monuments,they have no entrances built into them, perhaps this was just a quirk of the new belief system, but perhaps it was to contain metaphorically and spiritually the plague dead and cut down the risk of reinfection of the living, as opposed to the earlier Neolithic practice of revisiting tombs to commune with the dead?

What is also significant is that we go from a landscape dominated by a few monumental stone burial sites, where most people were perhaps left exposed to the elements and wildlife to be excarnated by natural processes,the bones of the more important families then being gathered and placed in communal stone tombs, to a landscape with a multitude of smaller stone Ring Cairns lacking entrances containing burials between 4,500 and 4,000 years ago.

I believe the change was a direct result of a new population and a new disease, with a new religious practice reflecting anti-plague best practice for a population that had no other scientific answers to a potentially deadly disease.  Some studies have speculated on a 90% population collapse between 4,200 and 3,800 years ago, the implications of the effect of Plague on the old Neolithic population is written in our genes in the UK.

This movement of people also explains the arrival of Pre-Celtic Indo-European Language families into the Eastern British Isles.  All thanks to the first wave of plague that we have discovered.

In the next instalment we will see how the next wave turned Britain into England.

If you would like your Family Tree researched, and your Family Biography published, then please feel free to contact Time Detectives at: Paulmcneil@timedetectives.co.uk