Thousands of years ago, across the Eastern Mediterranean, multiple Bronze Age civilizations took a distinct turn for the worse at around the same time.
The Old Kingdom of Egypt and the Akkadian Empire both collapsed, and there was a widespread societal crisis across the Ancient Near East and the Aegean, manifesting as declining populations, destruction, reduced trade, and significant cultural changes.
As usual, fingers have been pointed at climate change and shifting allegiances. But scientists have just found a new culprit in some old bones.
In remains excavated from an ancient burial site on Crete, in a cave called Hagios Charalambos, a team led by archaeogeneticist Gunnar Neumann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany found genetic evidence of bacteria responsible for two of history's most significant diseases – typhoid fever and plague.
Therefore, the researchers said, widespread illnesses caused by these pathogens cannot be discounted as a contributing factor in the societal changes so widespread around 2200 to 2000 BCE.
"The occurrence of these two virulent pathogens at the end of the Early Minoan period in Crete," they wrote in their paper, "emphasizes the necessity to re-introduce infectious diseases as an additional factor possibly contributing to the transformation of early complex societies in the Aegean and beyond." READ MORE...
