Yersinia in Bronze Age Britain

R1b's first showed up in pre-Celtic Britain around 2500 BC, although - Wiki now tells me - they abandoned their Bell Beakers by 2100 BC, instead using "food vessels and cinerary urns". It seems Somerset then suffered a plague problem. Two children ten and twelve years of age caught the plague, were killed by weapons, then their corpses were dumped in a well.

I vaguely recalled a Bronze Age cold patch but, no, that's yet to come: MBA, 1800-1500 BC. If we're talking Rapid Climate Change, that's 4200 BC and 2200 BC. Maybe the latter occasioned the shift in British material culture.

The 2000 BC plague demonstrates commerce between pre-Celtic Britain and the Continent - perhaps also, then, pre-Celtic. That commerce will be drying up following the LBA collapse 1200 BCish.

The authors say that this wasn't the most virulent such bacillus; so, horrible welts were involved, but not enough to kill most folk pace the Turtle. (Unless it went septic of course.) This grave was not a mass grave. Bernard says: La présence des blessures mortelles sur les squelettes de ce puits rends improbable le fait que ce puits a servi de sépulture à la suite d'une épidémie de peste. I disagree; given the age of these two kids, it is likely their community did perceive a threat from their disease, so killed these two precisely to spare the rest.