Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues

by Jonathan Kennedy

Could diseases have helped a relatively small community of shepherds to replace a well-established farming society in northern Europe in the first half of the fifth millennium BCE? Although we don’t yet have a smoking gun, there is strong circumstantial evidence that indicates this might have been the case. The population in the region did not keep on growing inexorably after agriculture was adopted. In the northwest of the continent the initial period of growth occurred between around 6,000 and 5,500 years ago, but then the population crashed; by 5,000 years ago it was up to 60 percent less than it had been at its height.[65] It remained low for another half-millennium. In Britain the population continued to raise livestock, but many people seemed to have abandoned cereal cultivation and instead reverted to foraging.[66] Interestingly, it was between 5,000 and 4,500 years ago—when the population was at its lowest point—that the Neolithic European Farmers went to all the trouble of building Stonehenge. Was the construction of this great monument an ultimately futile effort to appease their gods and arrest the decline of their community?