10 Prehistoric Pandemics Too Dangerous For The Modern World

10 Prehistoric Pandemics Too Dangerous For The Modern World Number 10: Bone Silence. You are standing in a research laboratory at the Natural History Museum in London, in November of 2003, and the bone on the table in front of you is wrong. It was recovered from a mass burial site beneath the floors of a mud-brick house at Çatalhöyük, Turkey, one of the earliest and densest human settlements ever to exist on this planet, a city of up to eight thousand people packed so tightly together that they entered their homes through holes in the roof because there were no streets between the buildings. The site had been occupied continuously from approximately 7500 BCE to 5700 BCE, which means the people who lived and died here did so across nearly two thousand years of unbroken urban proximity, breathing the same air, sharing the same contaminated soil, burying their dead literally beneath their feet.