Social distancing due to illness was already practiced 6 thousand years ago: study

Madrid. The practice of social distancing to combat the spread of disease can date back 6,000 years, according to a study of Neolithic settlements in Trypillia, Ukraine, published in the Journal of The Royal Society Interface.

New ancient DNA research has shown that diseases such as salmonella, tuberculosis and plague emerged in Europe and Central Asia thousands of years ago during the Neolithic era, the time of the first agricultural villagesexplains Alex Bentley, of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

This led us to question whether Neolithic villagers practiced social distancing to help prevent the spread of these illnesses.Bentley added.

As computational social scientists, he and postdoc Simon Carrignon have published on ancient adaptive behaviors and the spread of disease in the modern world. They discovered that the megasentamientos from the ancient Trypillia culture in the Black Sea region, around 4000 BC, were a perfect place to test his theory that the limits of personal space have long been integral parts of public health planning.

They focused on Nebelivka (present-day Ukraine), where thousands of wooden houses were regularly spaced in concentric patterns and grouped in neighborhoods. Epidemiologists know that this arrangement is a good setup for containing disease outbreaks. This suggests and helps explain the curious layout of the world’s first urban areas: it would have protected the residents of the time. We set out to test how effective it would be through computer models.

They adapted models developed in a previous project at UT. These new tools can help us understand what the archaeological record tells us about prehistoric behaviors. The principles are the same, only the first diseases were transmitted through food, instead of through the air.Bentley said.