Entire Populations Disappeared 3,000 Years Ago — Scientists Finally Know Where They Went

A tomb near Paris preserved evidence of a prehistoric population crisis so severe that the people using it before and after the disruption were largely unrelated. However, the timeline needs clarification: the collapse happened around 3000 BC, approximately 5,000 years ago, rather than 3,000 years ago.

Researchers did not discover a destination to which the original population simply relocated. Ancient DNA instead shows that local communities sharply declined, their genetic lineages largely disappeared, and migrants from southern France and the Iberian Peninsula later entered the Paris Basin.