science

The Neolithic population crash in northern Europe occurred from about 3300BC to 2900BC. By that time, cities and sophisticated civilisations had already arisen in places such as Egypt and Mesopotamia. [emphasis added]

I will recommend a good book that I'm currently reading: 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

It's largely about the possibility of The Sea Peoples as the primary force for multiple civilizational collapses, but the author does a pretty good job of pointing out how little or no evidence really exists in many of the cases discussed. It's giving me a lot more perspective about the type of cultural sharing that was going on around the Mediterranean at that time.

These two ancestral Y. pestis genomes were identified from a Swedish individual with Neolithic Farmer (that is, Anatolian-derived) ancestry (5035–4856 cal. bp)4 and an individual from Latvia with hunter-gatherer ancestry (5300–5050 cal. bp)10, respectively. Although these genomes are of very similar age and ancestral to all other plague genomes available, the two studies arrive at different conclusions: Rascovan et al. argue that their finding supports a role of plague in the Neolithic decline whereas Susat et al. conclude that these early plague forms are probably a result of sporadic zoonotic events.

Time to check on the mooFlu in the US.

With the rise of global warming, risks of such epidemics increases ... thankfully today, we have antibiotics and vaccines against plague. So, let's try real hard not to decay back into stone age.