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Was Neolithic Europe the source of the plague?

yes, I think I read somewhere in the paper that the 5.7 ka TMRCA of the Y Pestis is near the splitoff from TBC, and TBC has been found at Atlit Yam, PPNB Levant
 
hum, maybe EHG traded infected fur with EEF causing havoc in farmer villages... EHG would get easily herds and survivors left in a Spanish-Amerindian way, the date of this Swedish sample is the date of diffussion of thr CWC...
 
By the way to accept theories one must provide verifiable proofs, those of Olalde providing steppe admixture (with supervised prolumping admixture) in BB Iberians is a counterexample, this is the fifht paper uncapable to find such admixture. Map A shows yellow as typical EHG and steppe, CWC show this color (without red for CHG.......), no yellow is displayed for Iberian BB.
 
berun said:
hum, maybe EHG traded infected fur with EEF causing havoc in farmer villages... EHG would get easily herds and survivors left in a Spanish-Amerindian way, the date of this Swedish sample is the date of diffussion of thr CWC...
Click to expand...

Yes, this was precisely my point.

It may be the other way around as well, of course.

I just don't see how Willerslev has proved one over the other.

By the way to accept theories one must provide verifiable proofs, those of Olalde providing steppe admixture (with supervised prolumping admixture) in BB Iberians is a counterexample, this is the fifht paper uncapable to find such admixture. Map A shows yellow as typical EHG and steppe, CWC show this color (without red for CHG.......), no yellow is displayed for Iberian BB.
Click to expand...

I think you're way over stating things here.

Part of the problem is the messiness of his work, as usual. This is only 5 components, and from what I can tell there is NO "steppe" component at all in there.

Plus, I can't even figure out the meaning of blue versus green. Is green Anatolian Neolithic? But then, what is blue? Why is Iberia mostly blue?

If someone can explain it, that would be great.



O4kiir3.png


LXjUaIR.png
 
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berun said:
hum, maybe EHG traded infected fur with EEF causing havoc in farmer villages... EHG would get easily herds and survivors left in a Spanish-Amerindian way, the date of this Swedish sample is the date of diffussion of thr CWC...
Click to expand...
the sample is 4.9 ka
afaik CWC reached Scandinavia (Battle Axe) 100 years later
and I guess Scandinavia had more furs than the steppe, they could get it from the local Scandinavian pitted ware HG

furthermore, the decline in neolithic settlements happened ca 5.3 ka, so Y Pestis might have been present in neolithic Europe prior to 4.9 ka

I admit it is all speculation
but the diseases that hit the Amerindians probably originated in PPNB
and it is very likely that when EEF arrived, European HG were hit in the same way Amerindians were hit when Europeans arrived there
afaik, the Amerindians were not hit by the plague?
 
Angela said:
Yes, this was precisely my point.

It may be the other way around as well, of course.

I just don't see how Willerslev has proved one over the other.



I think you're way over stating things here.

Part of the problem is the messiness of his work, as usual. This is only 5 components, and from what I can tell there is NO "steppe" component at all in there.

Plus, I can't even figure out the meaning of blue versus green. Is green Anatolian Neolithic? But then, what is blue? Why is Iberia mostly blue?

If someone can explain it, that would be great.



O4kiir3.png


LXjUaIR.png
[/IMG]
Click to expand...

the main argument for this K=5 is in map D

it shows that the populations with Y Pestis were unrelated, suggesting Y Pestis did not spread by mass migration, but rather through trade contacts
 
To confirm the identity of the strain
(named Gok2 from now), we also re-mapped the reads against
the closely related Yersinia pseudotuberculosis IP32953 reference
genome and calculated the mapping affinity against both
species, as done previously (Rasmussen et al., 2015). Reads
showed to be clearly closer to Y. pestis (Figure 1D), which was
also confirmed using a Naive Bayesian classifier that showed a
posterior probability of 0.93 for the reads originating from
Y. pestis.

What is pseudotuberculosis?
As far as I understand, only some symptomes are similar to tuberculosis.
But the bacteria has nothing to do with tuberculosis.
 
Bicicleur, I don't know where you got that TB originated in PPNB in the Levant. The paper says it was present with the first hunter gatherers who left Africa.

As for your last post, they wouldn't have gone to these lengths to try to distinguish the Y pestis from the "pseudotuberculosis" if they weren't pretty similar.

Pseudotuberculosis:

"Genetically, the pathogen causing plague, Y. pestis, is very similar to Y. pseudotuberculosis. The plague appears to have evolved from Y. pseudotuberculosis about 1500 to 20,000 years ago.[7] A 2015 paper in Cell argued for an older divergence.[8]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yersinia_pseudotuberculosis#cite_note-8
The reference is to the prior paper by this group and says the following:
"Molecular clock estimates have suggested that Y. pestisdiversified from the more prevalent and environmental stress-tolerant, but less pathogenic, enteric bacterium Y. pseudotuberculosis between 2,600 and 28,000 years ago "
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(15)01322-7
 
bicicleur said:
this map is the situation today, I guess, not 4.9 ka ?
Click to expand...

Yes, that's the present day distribution. Here's an overview of the allele distribution throughout time from an older paper, showing that the cline is quite old:

HQIZ3zO.png


HQIZ3zO.png


I don't know how much we can infer from this when it comes to the origin and spread of y. pestis, but it does show that northern European populations were apparently much better equipped to deal with such diseases than were southern populations. Add to that higher population densities in the south and it could explain why the WHG-like component increases over the millennia.

Generally I believe that populations whose ancestral environments are either very dry and hot (Basal Eurasian?) or extremely cold (Sungir?) would have been less adapted to outbreaks than populations from temperate regions such as Europe where those diseases propagate easily.
 
Johane Derite said:
Why does it make it more unlikely?
Click to expand...

Farmer society in Europe were in collapse because of the plague. That's probably the main reason why Indo-Europeans from the steppe were able to conquer and replace them. If there were no plague and population collapse in Anatolia it would be much harder to conquer or replace them.
 
Cpluskx said:
Farmer society in Europe were in collapse because of the plague. That's probably the main reason why Indo-Europeans from the steppe were able to conquer and replace them. If there were no plague and population collapse in Anatolia it would be much harder to conquer or replace them.
Click to expand...

It definitely looks like there were Chalcolithic & Bronze Age movements between Anatolia and Bulgaria/Romania associated with megarons and the spread of Ezero ceramics. However, as Lazaridis' SE-European paper has shown, these migrations likely weren't associated with steppe aDNA as was previously believed. My guess is that those findings were what initially led Reich, Lazaridis & colleagues to look into other hypotheses regarding PIE.
 
berun said:
hum, maybe EHG traded infected fur with EEF causing havoc in farmer villages... EHG would get easily herds and survivors left in a Spanish-Amerindian way, the date of this Swedish sample is the date of diffussion of thr CWC...
Click to expand...

one more thing : early Y Pestis didn't have the mutation to be transmitted by fleas.
I think Y Pestis couldn't be travelling in dead furs.
 
Angela said:
Bicicleur, I don't know where you got that TB originated in PPNB in the Levant. The paper says it was present with the first hunter gatherers who left Africa.
As for your last post, they wouldn't have gone to these lengths to try to distinguish the Y pestis from the "pseudotuberculosis" if they weren't pretty similar.
Pseudotuberculosis:
"Genetically, the pathogen causing plague, Y. pestis, is very similar to Y. pseudotuberculosis. The plague appears to have evolved from Y. pseudotuberculosis about 1500 to 20,000 years ago.[7] A 2015 paper in Cell argued for an older divergence.[8]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yersinia_pseudotuberculosis#cite_note-8
The reference is to the prior paper by this group and says the following:
"Molecular clock estimates have suggested that Y. pestisdiversified from the more prevalent and environmental stress-tolerant, but less pathogenic, enteric bacterium Y. pseudotuberculosis between 2,600 and 28,000 years ago "
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(15)01322-7
Click to expand...
I missed that part re TBC in African HG. Can you point it for me?
Yes, I checked pseudoTBC in wikipedia myself, but I hoped someone could tell me more.
Does it also affect humans, or only animals?
If I understand well Y Pestis is a subclade or a brother of Y pseudoTBC.
 
markod said:
It definitely looks like there were Chalcolithic & Bronze Age movements between Anatolia and Bulgaria/Romania associated with megarons and the spread of Ezero ceramics. However, as Lazaridis' SE-European paper has shown, these migrations likely weren't associated with steppe aDNA as was previously believed. My guess is that those findings were what initially led Reich, Lazaridis & colleagues to look into other hypotheses regarding PIE.
Click to expand...

I wonder if there was anthropological change in Anatolia related to these movements?
 
Cpluskx said:
I wonder if there was anthropological change in Anatolia related to these movements?
Click to expand...

I have no idea. I believe Maria Ivanova is usually considered the foremost expert on all things Balkanic and West Anatolian, but like most modern archaelogists she doesn't discuss anthropological/anthropometric stuff at all, sadly.
 
bicicleur said:
TMRCA of Gökhem and Bronze Age Y Pestis is 5,7 ka, very likely the date of the first outbreak
Tripolye was very densely populated, very favourable for the outbreak of a plague.
Yamna was mobile, favourable for spread of the plague.
But afaik, steppe people hadn't reached Scandinavia yet by 4,9 ka, but Global Amphora had.
As I said :
pointing to Trypillia is speculative but plausible untill someone comes up with another more plausible suggestion
Click to expand...

Yes, agreed.

Although, to clarify, Steppe and Scandinavian people were autosomally similar until around 4,000 BC, indicating that they had probably reached each other long beforehand. The TMRCA mentioned is more representative of the date when there was most likely increased mixing between these original Steppe/Scandinavian people and people from the South (EEF in the Baltic and Caucasians in Steppe Maykop). The intrusions into each other's territories looks to have been a two-way process, indicative of trading and inter-breeding - i.e. perfect conditions for the spread of disease.

Cucuteni Tripolye DNA looks to have fared relatively well in the European Neolithic collapse (both on the male and female sides), spreading West, and with EHG yDNA-R lines only really seeming to come to the fore (piggy-backing onto Cucuteni Triploye descendant communities) some time later.
 
Davidski made an interesting little point. Could be the plague be linked somehow with the Burning House Horizon? I know people like to see some kind of spiritual reason behind this practice, but maybe it was way more " practical "? Like someone having hard itching start to burn his own clothes and bed trying it gonna stop, maybe those people believed that burning everything material gonna kill the sickness. But at the same level, why wouldn't they kill animals and humans too?
 
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