Social distancing in the World's Oldest Cities?
Modelling cultural responses to disease spread in Neolithic Trypillia mega-settlements
In 4500 BC, thousands of people lived in the world's earliest cities, known as Trypillia mega-settlements, near the Black Sea. These settlements featured houses that were regularly spaced and clustered into neighbourhoods.
A collaborative team of researchers based at the Universities of Cambridge, Tennessee, Durham, Eastern Washington and Texas modelled the spread of foodborne disease, such as ancient salmonella, on the detailed plan of a mega-settlement called Nebelivka.
The model reveals that the pie-shaped clustering of houses in distinct neighbourhoods could have served as social distancing, protecting against early foodborne diseases including salmonella. This layout would also have protected residents from emerging diseases of the time, such as plague and TB.
The paper, recently published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, suggests that disease was likely a significant driver of human settlement patterns in Neolithic times.
Figure 1 - The data gathered from the Trypillia mega-settlements
Figure 1 - The data gathered from the Trypillia mega-settlements
Figure 5 - The results of the modelling
Figure 5 - The results of the modelling
Carrignon (McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research, Cambridge) and Bentley (Anthropology, University of Tennessee) collaborated with the primary archaeologists of Trypillia mega-settlement Chapman and Gaydarska (Durham University) and the GIS expert Buchanan (Eastern Washington University) who had mapped this early city in detail. Carrignon and Bentley had previously worked on modelling how disease spread when people have different ways to interact culturally, as well as different protocols for social distancing during the Covid-19 pandemic.
After Carrignon and Bentley explored the spread of disease on an abstract network that captured the clustered neighbourhood aspect of the settlement, they modified the epidemiological model to match the actual plan of Nebelivka settlement, provided by Buchanan. Michael O’Brien (Texas A&M University, San Antonio) provided cultural evolutionary context. It was a fruitful collaboration in which everyone played a crucial role.
Simulations of disease spread at Nebelivka, for three different levels of cross-neighborhood interaction. On the map at bottom, the houses are colored by neighborhood. The parameter q captures how often household members visit neighborhoods outside their own (from left to right, rarely to frequently). More mixing results in more spread of infection.
Simulations of disease spread at Nebelivka, for three different levels of cross-neighborhood interaction. On the map at bottom, the houses are colored by neighborhood. The parameter q captures how often household members visit neighborhoods outside their own (from left to right, rarely to frequently). More mixing results in more spread of infection.
This research builds on approaches discussed and developed within the CDAL team (Computation and Digital Archaeology Laboratory) at Cambridge. This group of computational archaeologists uses computational methods to broaden the range of questions the archaeological record can help us to answer and improve the accuracy of these answers.
In this specific study, an Agent Based Model (a type of computer model) was used as a way to explore different hypotheses about what happened in ancient cities. By running millions of simulations under varying conditions, it become possible for the archaeologist to estimates which process where likely to happen and which one were not. In this specific setup, model of pathogens spread and cultural interactions between group of people are applied to the archaeological evidences of Nebelivka settlement layout, allowing to explore hypotheses about the resistance of such layout in front of different pathogens and under different social interactions regimes.
Bentley, R.A., S. Carrignon, B. Gaydarska, J. Chapman, B. Buchannan, M.J. O’Brien. Modelling cultural responses to disease spread in Neolithic Trypillia mega-settlements. Journal of the Royal Society Interface
During this research, Simon Carrignon was funded by the Starting Grant ’Demography, Cultural change, and the Diffusion of Rice and Millet during the Jomon-Yayoi transition in prehistoric Japan’ (Grant Agreement No. 801953), where he developed the kind of model used in this paper to understand the transition of farming in prehistoric Japan.
Published 18 October 2024
The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
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