Or, in Australia, hiccoughs.
The central idea behind this website/book is that a rather cosy hunter/gatherer life in the east of the Mediterranean was dramatically interrupted by a meteor storm. This triggered new ways of living (survivalism) and religion.
In an attempt to come up with a plausible rewriting of human history, there is a lot of guesswork and many assumptions. In some cases, things don’t make sense, there is a puzzle piece missing. In those cases you can make un-collaborated guesses, like they were invaded, there was a drought, an uprising, materials ran out or they simply got bored or somewhere else was shinier.
Add to the possibilities disease, which can arrive via a single traveller.
Researchers have decided that the plague makes sense when trying to determine what happened to the builders of Stonehenge, which was a mystery according to current orthodox ideas. The Guardian writes:
Violence may have played a role in the replacement of the Stonehenge builders from Anatolia: 90% of the steppe herders involved in the great westward migration were males, and domesticated horses and metal weapons would have provided them with a distinct advantage in conflict. But even taking all this into account, it is almost impossible to explain how a small group of nomadic herders was able to replace a large, well-established farming society.
…Pooja Swali from the Crick Institute announced the discovery of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague, in the dental pulp of three people who died about 4,000 years ago – two in Somerset and the other in Cumbria.
The idea being that an unknown group of soldiers with superior weapons could not have wiped out / scared off the incumbent druids, and there had to be more. I’m not even sure that the plague has parallels with smallpox in the Americas – can you have plague immunity?
Anyhow, I am glad this idea is now in my head – the possibility of an unknown externality interrupting the timeline of a hypothesis.