ARCHAEOLOGY

New research: Plague repeatedly struck Stone Age communities in Sweden

3:09 min
  • DNA-analysis of unusually well preserved human remains from 5000 ago show that the plague was much more common than previously thought.

  • This is believed to be an important piece in the jigsaw to explain why there was a significant drop in the early Scandinavian farming population, sometimes described as the ”neolithic decline”,

  • ”The big surprise is (that) this was very common in this population. Something like 17 percent of the individuals have been affected by plague,” says archeologist Karl-Göran Sjögren.