I came across something interesting about a Neolithic gallery grave in the Paris Basin (often called the Bury site).
For roughly 200 years, most of the people buried there appear to belong to a single extended family line. Then the burials stop very abruptly — not a gradual decline, just silence.
DNA taken from the remains shows early forms of plague (Yersinia pestis) along with other infections, and the deaths seem to skew toward younger individuals.
Around the same period, environmental data suggests farmland in the area was abandoned and forests began to grow back.
What’s unusual is that when the tomb is used again later, the people are genetically unrelated — likely from Iberia — and they follow different burial practices.
So it looks like one population disappears, and another completely different group moves into the same landscape later.
Curious what people here think:
Was this just disease-driven collapse… or something more complex that wiped out entire communities without leaving clear records?