David Reich

So it looks like this particular agent has been killing...

people for 5,000 years, four or 5,000 years in Western Eurasia, and in fact is killing, like, a scarily large fraction of the population.

Like, as a quantitative person, which I am reading this literature, I think people are embarrassed by the implication.

The implication is that

a third, a quarter, a half of deaths in this entire period are from this.

It's so unbelievable, so ridiculous that such a high proportion of people over such a long period of time are dying from this one agent that people don't even say it.

They just publish one paper after the other, publishing more sequences, and they just don't think about the implications of such a high rate of death.

It's really hard to imagine that people have bacteria in their blood and they're not dying of these things.

It doesn't seem that people are ignoring, people are selectively picking tombs.

These are tombs that are buried properly.

They're not grave pits.

So the implication seems to be this one agent that we happen to be able to detect is killing a very large fraction of people in Western Eurasia over this period.

So what's the implication of that?

One thing is that maybe it seems to be coming from steppe rodents, probably.

And so maybe the people on the steppe are somewhat more, I mean, they're still dying of it, but somewhat more protected of it than it spreads into farming Europe maybe 5,000 years ago, which is when we start to see it.

And maybe this results in disorganization of the population, giving such high rate of death.

And maybe it creates a type of situation that the Europeans encountered when they got to the Americas, where...

societies were disrupted.

So, you know, in the last few years we had COVID-19 that killed a half percent of the world population or something like that.

And it was so disruptive.