David Reich

So if this thing is killing a third of people or half of people, you know, randomly

randomly killing people with cultural knowledge, randomly ripping into structures like in, I don't know, was it Montezuma died or one of his parents resulting in civil wars in the Inca when the Europeans encountered them, just disrupting the cultures that were there.

Maybe this would have created a situation where

there was disruption in the old ways of life and maybe combined with other things or even just by itself could have created an opportunity for people to move in from elsewhere even though they were not as densely spread because the big observation we haven't talked about and it's something that we as an ancient DNA community have been looking into again and again now

and keep making progress on, is that about 5,000 to 4,500 years ago in Europe, there's a radical transformation in the ancestry of Europeans.

An example of this is what happens in Britain.

So about 4,500 years ago, the farmers who are there, they arrived there 6,000 years ago, they build Stonehenge, the last big stones of Stonehenge go up 4,500 years ago, and then within 100 years, 90% of them are gone.

And they're replaced by migrants from the continent bearing majority ancestry from the steppe north of the Black and Caspian Seas.

This is one place where we know what happened very well, but we see it all over Europe.

We see it in Spain.

We see it in Portugal.

We see it in the Netherlands.

We see it in Germany.

We see it in Czechia.

We see it in Italy.

We see it in Switzerland.

We see it everywhere.

This wave of people from the East arrives and it displaces these successful immigrants

impressive, densely packed farmers with new people who have this ancestry from the East who are not as focused on farming, although some of them are, as the people who came before.

That one's more- Because it causes inflation.