Although a plague may have been behind a late neolithic decline in population, there are many reasons why we should be cautious about making inferences based on radiocarbon datasets, writes Professor Stephen Shennan (UCL Institute of Archaeology) in The Conversation. Did a major epidemic of plague trigger a prolonged collapse in Europe’s population in late neolithic times – from around 5,600 to 4,000 years ago? In Europe, the neolithic is part of the stone age, spanning the time from the