Greg Egan

A grim, but fascinating, unsolved mystery. A mostly peaceful and prosperous farming culture known as LBK spread across Europe from Anatolia, from 11,000 to 7,000 years ago. When it eventually came to an end, in many places the transition appears to have been unremarkable, but in some sites there are vast mass graves, and other signs of strange tensions arising in various settlements.

https://www.science.org/content/article/headless-bodies-hint-why-europe-s-first-farmers-vanished

Dec 4 at 1:57pmWeb
Show threadDigital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 👽Dec 4

@gregeganSF Vampires. Towns turn on each other, fortify walls, behead the infected? Classic.

Not really, but I'm surely stealing some of this for my RPG settings. Let a whole peaceful region apparently go crazy.

Show threadSimonDec 4
@gregeganSF I read a long article about this a while ago. It made a lot of the fact that they were a river based culture - all of their towns were on fertile river side land. The collapse comes soon after they reached the end of the available space for their way of life. If you've spent 400 years moving excess population along to the next identical bit of land to found new settlements and you run out of that land, you have to adapt somehow. And, well, maybe they didn't.
Show threadKilla KoalaDec 4
@gregeganSF Obviously they invented social media.
Show threadJohn Carlos BaezDec 4

@gregeganSF - when I clicked the link I got told I was past my quota of 3 articles a month... so I read the article here:

https://archive.is/v4HYp

Show threadDavid QuinteroDec 5
@gregeganSF incredibly intriguing. Mass hysteria in some violent form?