The plague and the population of Europe in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages

This article brings to the attention of historians the recent discoveries by palaeogeneticists of a pandemic of plague in Europe during the fourth and third millennia BCE that contributed to the decline of the once-thriving Neolithic farming population of Anatolian origin and opened the way to the migration of nomadic herders equipped with bronze weapons who came from the steppes of southern Russia. As the geneticists' sequencing of ancient DNA has revealed, the ancestry of central, northern and western Europeans changed from predominantly Anatolian to largely (or, in some areas, predominantly) the steppe nomads. Besides the change in ancestry, the genetic sequencing of Bronze Age European populations also provides evidence that the arrival of the Yamnaya changed their social structures and gender relations and contributed to the spread of the Indo-European languages.