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# A discovery in a megalithic tomb 50 km north of Paris seeks to explain why such structures ceased to be built across Europe at roughly the same time
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/otkrytie-v-megaliticheskoi-grobnitse-v-50-km-k-severu-ot-parizha-pytaetsia-obiasnit-pochemu-podobnye-sooruzheniia-prekratili-stroit-po-vsei-evrope-primerno-v-odno-vremia/
- Published: 2026-07-08T15:00:13.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:25:41.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archaeology, Observations, Science

In brief, the cause was a major catastrophe in the Stone Age, around 3000 BC, after which the structure of the population changed entirely. The study, naturally enough, implies that the disappearance of the communities that built such burial complexes led to the disappearance of the monuments themselves.

At the necropolis near Bury, 132 burials were analysed, and it emerged that the tomb was used in two periods, separated by a demographic gap around 3000 BC. DNA analysis shows that the people before this demographic break and after it are not genetically related. In other words, the population of the area was replaced in its entirety by an unrelated group. The earlier group resembles the Neolithic farmers of northern France and Germany. The later one resembles the population of southern France and the Iberian Peninsula. So when the local population all but vanished, migrants from the south came to take its place. The social structure changed too. The more ancient group sought to bury several generations of the same extended families in a single necropolis, something like a great stone vault for one closely bound community. The second, more recent group was more selective in its burials, and gave preference to a single male line.

The authors write cautiously about the causes. Traces of the pathogens of plague and relapsing fever were found in the bones. Yet the burial itself does not bear the character of an epidemic one, and, in the authors' words, the collapse had a more complex structure: not only disease, but also ecological stress and other upheavals. What exactly they may have in mind is quite unclear. Why should an entire settlement suddenly vanish without any identified epidemic, and its lands be taken by newcomers from fairly distant territories?