\n
![\"EarthSnap\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/earthsnap-banner-news.webp.webp\")
\n<\/a><\/p>\n
The megalithic tomb was located near a commune in northern France about 30 miles north of Paris called Bury. One stone chamber held burials from two distinct periods separated by a quiet gap. <\/p>\n
Stone Age population collapse <\/p>\n
A team led by Frederik V. Seersholm at the Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen (UCPH<\/a>), analyzed DNA preserved in the teeth of 132 people.<\/p>\n The analysis showed that the people buried on either side of that gap were not closely connected by ancestry.<\/p>\n The earlier dead aligned more closely with Stone Age farming groups from northern France and Germany, while the later burials carried stronger ties to southern France and Iberia.<\/p>\n That divide fixes the tomb as a record of replacement, but it leaves open the harder question of what drove the break in the first place.<\/p>\n DNA without continuity<\/p>\n The ancient DNA<\/a> allowed the researchers to compare the human remains without relying on grave layout. They assigned 74 samples to the earlier phase and 51 to the later phase after the pause.<\/p>\n \u201cWe see a clear genetic break between the two periods,\u201d said Seersholm, one of the study\u2019s lead authors.<\/p>\n Because no close relatives crossed the gap, the pause likely marked population loss rather than ordinary family change at Bury.<\/p>\n Southern roots arrive<\/p>\n The later community had its closest genetic ties to southern France and the Iberian Peninsula, now largely Spain and Portugal.<\/p>\n In this group, more than 80% of ancestry<\/a> was traced to Iberia, while the earlier group looked mixed.<\/p>\n By around 2900 BC, southern ancestry had moved northward into the Paris Basin and partly replaced local lines.<\/p>\n Newcomers did not immediately erase every trace of earlier people, but complete continuity does not fit the evidence at the site.<\/p>\n Families patterns in the tomb<\/p>\n Burial rules decide whose remains enter a tomb over time, and the analysis showed that family patterns changed sharply.<\/p>\n During the early phase, 55 of 72 analyzed people had a close relative buried beside them inside the tomb.<\/p>\n Later burials included only 21 related people among 53, and one male line stood out more strongly than before.<\/p>\n Burial choice therefore recorded social power, not just biology, because many women never entered the chamber.<\/p>\n Disease found in the bones<\/p>\n Disease provided another clue, but plague has also been found in at least 17% of individuals from Stone Age graves in Scandinavia.<\/p>\n Screening revealed pathogens<\/a>, microbes that can cause disease, including the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis and relapsing-fever bacterium Borrelia recurrentis.<\/p>\n At Bury, plague appeared in three earlier samples and one later sample \u2013 too few for a simple verdict about collapse.<\/p>\n \u201cWe can confirm that plague was present, but the evidence does not support it as the sole cause of the population collapse,\u201d said Professor Martin Sikora, senior author of the study.<\/p>\n Young deaths reveal signs of crisis<\/p>\n Age patterns made the early phase look even less like an ordinary cemetery sample from the region.<\/p>\n Children and young people died in unusually high numbers, which often points to war, famine, or epidemic disease.<\/p>\n Such mortality cannot name a cause by itself, because rapid population growth can also distort age patterns in graves.<\/p>\n A grave preserves only selected dead, so the living community may have suffered losses beyond the stone walls.<\/p>\n Forests returned between burials<\/p>\n Pollen from the Paris Basin added an environmental signal between the two burial phases at Bury.<\/p>\n From 2900 to 2500 BC, forests regrew where open grazing land and fields had probably shrunk.<\/p>\n Regrowing trees matter because fewer farmers, animals, and fires often let woodland reclaim used ground across a landscape.<\/p>\n Fields can vanish from pollen for many reasons, so the evidence supports stress rather than naming one trigger.<\/p>\n Monument building ended<\/p>\n Collective tomb building across northwestern Europe also slowed near the same broad period as burials paused.<\/p>\n Across many regions, megaliths<\/a>, large stone monuments, had gathered the dead for generations before use faded.<\/p>\n At Bury, the people who built and first used the monument were not the people who later returned.<\/p>\n Ending construction may therefore reflect fewer communities able to organize labor, not simply changing taste.<\/p>\n A wider European pattern<\/p>\n Other European data now place Bury within a larger population downturn across much of northwest Europe.<\/p>\n Later Bell Beaker<\/a> groups, linked to a widespread pottery style, carried new ancestry into northwest Europe.<\/p>\n Several centuries later, people with roots in eastern grassland herding groups mixed with local lines.<\/p>\n Bury therefore captures an earlier moment, when southern farming communities moved north before those later arrivals.<\/p>\n Bury cannot represent all of Europe, yet it brings the collapse into human focus. The lesson is careful: DNA shows replacement, while the causes must be traced through bones, microbes, landscapes, and time.<\/p>\n The study is published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter<\/a> for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.<\/p>\n Check us out on EarthSnap<\/a>, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls<\/a> and Earth.com.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"People buried in a Stone Age tomb near Paris before and after 3000 BC came from two largely…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":418513,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[61,60,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-418512","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418512","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=418512"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418512\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/418513"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=418512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=418512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=418512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}