Johannes Krause and the researchers at Max Plank know more about the plague than any scientists on earth.
No, I'm not going to summarize it for you. I'm tired of doing the work for people too lazy to do it for themselves.
On the original steppe which attacked Europe SIMULTANEOUSLY with the arrival of the steppe people, he is of the opinion that it was BROUGHT BY THE STEPPE HERDERS.
@Silesian,
Yes, that is Bicicleur's often repeated "theory". Unfortunately, it depends on the idea that crowded cities meant large stores of grain, which attracted rats, whose fleas spread the disease in the densely populated settlementss. The facts according to Krause are that it probably appeared first on the steppe, IS NOT transmitted by flees, and steppe people were fleeing the plague as well as the fact that there was less grass for their animals. Instead of outrunning it, they brought the plague with them.
My personal hunch, although that's all it is, is that it was spread by eating the infected host, which was probably, as in many cases, marmosets, or creatures like them. You trade them on for the pelts, but what do you do with the meat? You eat it.
https://phys.org/news/2017-11-plague-stone-age-central-europe.html
That particular type of plague is now extinct.
Btw, in order to feed those herds the steppe arrivals engaged in a massive deforestation of Europe, a deforestation which makes what's happening to the Amazon look like child's play.
The Bubonic plague was, once again according to Krause in a paper recently published by him, first found in Samara. THE STEPPE.
https://novoscriptorium.com/2019/08/05/bubonic-plague-had-a-bronze-age-origin-study-finds/
I don't know what is so difficult to grasp. The plague always comes from the steppe originally. It was the same with the Black Death, which spread from the Crimea, and earlier than that, the Justinian Plague. That's where the best hosts live.
It's not the fault of the Steppe people that it arose amongst them, so those who can't bear that anything bad be connected to them should just chill out. They're just facts, just like it's a fact that influenza always seems to spread from China, and Sars viruses.
Don't shoot the messenger.
As for the population change brought by the steppe people, anyone who thinks it's just a coincidence that male LN yDna was virtually wiped out in Central Europe and Britain, but much of the MtDNA SURVIVED is seriously illogical or perhaps naïve, or just can't bear the idea that this warrior culture either killed or enslaved or otherwise took the local men out of the breeding pool, and that includes Krause if he's silly enough to say such a thing. Sorry, that's usually what happens with conquests. And no, I don't think the steppe women having a higher percentage of RH- is enough to explain it. It's not a big enough difference, no matter what that RH obsessed loon may be saying. Let's have a little common sense for goodness' sakes.
A re-reading of David Anthony is a good idea.
And no, I don't think it worked exactly the same way in every place. He never said it did, and I never said it did. In Greece and other parts of southern Europe there were too many farmers, maybe fewer crop failures, or it wasn't hit as much by the plague. As a result, the modern percentage of steppe is about 25-30% there, not 50% as it is in Central Europe, and even more in the more sparsely populated north east which probably didn't have any people until the steppe people arrived. Doesn't mean their arrival wasn't disruptive, just as the arrival of the Germanic tribes into the Empire was a horror for Europe. Anyone who can't see that it took almost 1000 years to recover intellectually and culturally and in almost every other way including the standard of living from the Germanic invasions either knows very little of the history and archaeology of Europe after the fall, or is biased because they correlate their ancestors being blameless in every possible way with, what was it, their survival? Sorry, that's not how I roll, or indeed how Italians roll. We're always our own worst critics, happy to wash our dirty linen quite publicly. People from other countries should try it some time; it's very freeing to know one is being completely honest.
Which also brings me to the Latins. If the calculators others love so much are accurate, I'm about 70% Iron Age Latin, and about 25-30% "Greco-Italian", so half of that is also "Italic". Yet, I'm only 25% steppe. Like me, the Etruscans and Latins were SOUTHERN EUROPEANS, not predominantly, nor even half steppe. Even without that steppe admixture, they would have created great civilizations as the people responsible for most of their ancestry did in "Old Europe" and Anatolia.
As for their culture, the "good bits" imo all came from the Etruscans, who got it from the Greeks, and they also came from Old Europe and Anatolia. The things I hate, particularly the very male centered religion, and the extremely warrior centered culture bent on conquest, came from the steppe.
Some might respond that great conquests and warrior cultures eventually made their appearance in West Asia. Indeed they did. The Semites, of course, like the steppe people were herders. If you would read up on some anthropology you would read that herders are often more aggressive than farmers. The same goes for the herders of the Caucasus, btw.
It's called the cycle of history, for those who have ever studied history. There's a civilized core built up over hundreds of years. Then there's the people of the periphery, waiting to see weakness for whatever reason. When they see it, they swoop in, there's a collapse, and the whole process of building a civilization has to start all over again. In case it isn't sufficiently clear, I'm ALWAYS for the civilized core, no matter the ethnicity. Imagine where we could be if we didn't have to keep starting all over again from scratch all the time.
Hey, we can't like all the stuff some of our ancestors did.
@Bicicleur,
Don't you ever get tired of me proving you wrong?
You really should do your homework before you discuss these things.