Uncovering Britain's DEADLY Prehistoric Plague - New Evidence 

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.

Thanks!

It's cracking alright.

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.

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.

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.

@@howardrisby9621 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.

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!

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.

And then the Celts were a later Indo-European immigration?

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.

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.

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.

Thanks, make sure to subscribe for more Megalithic adventures!

Quite a lot of the footage in this video was taken in lockdown!

It’s a ring cairn hotspot!

@@seaside_rambler oop norf we callz 'em pants, ye sothern ponce.

Probably the same, but with a lot more moaning.

@@AdamMorganIbbotsonha ha good one m8 !!!

The Normans, a plague that lasts forever

You are welcome!

Keep going and you’ll end up banging a drum at Stonehenge in your birthday suit.

Good point!

Check out my earlier videos - even bigger sites in my “Mysteries of the Stone Age” documentary!

And thanks!

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.

Thousand + years earlier

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.

We drive on all sides of the road in Yorkshire. Road anarchy

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

Yep.

“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