雅思阅读 29: The Tomb That Split in Two（一分为二的古墓）

改编自 University of Copenhagen / ScienceDaily（2026年7月）。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/07/260707054108.htm

Reading Passage

A. For a thousand years, a large stone tomb near the village of Bury, about fifty kilometres north of Paris, served as the cemetery of a farming community. Its heavy megalithic blocks, dragged to the site by hand around 4500 BC, enclosed a passage into a chamber where the dead were laid, generation after generation, in the way that Stone Age communities across northern France had arranged their ancestors. Then, around 3000 BC, something broke. The people buried in the second phase of the tomb were not the descendants of the people buried in the first. The same stones held the dead of two unrelated populations, separated in time by a collapse so abrupt that the living, when they returned to the chamber, were burying foreigners. This is the finding, published in Nature Ecology & Evolution in July 2026, from a genetic study of 132 individuals by an international team led by the Globe Institute at the University of Copenhagen, with French, Danish and British collaborators. The tomb itself had been excavated in the 1970s, but the human remains had never been subjected to ancient DNA analysis until now.

B. The method that revealed the break is ancient DNA. By sequencing the genomes extracted from the bones and teeth of the people interred in the tomb, the researchers could compare, individual by individual, how closely each person was related to the others buried nearby, and where their ancestors most likely came from. The technique, once limited to a handful of labs, has become routine enough to apply to a whole cemetery. The earlier group, they found, was genetically typical of Stone Age farming populations from northern France and Germany — people whose ancestors had brought agriculture into Europe from the east several thousand years earlier. The later group, by contrast, showed strong genetic links to southern France and the Iberian Peninsula, as though a new population had moved northward into the Paris Basin and taken over the old cemetery. "We see a clear genetic break between the two periods," said Frederik Valeur Seersholm, one of the lead authors. The break is not a subtle admixture; it is a near-complete replacement, with no evidence of intermarriage between the two groups in the tomb itself. What looks, from the outside, like a single continuous cemetery turns out, under the microscope of the genome, to be two unrelated communities using the same stones at different times.

C. What caused it? To look for clues, the team used a technique that sequences not just human DNA but all the genetic material preserved in the bones — a kind of molecular midden. In the remains they found traces of several pathogens, including Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for plague, and Borrelia recurrentis, which causes louse-borne relapsing fever. The presence of Yersinia pestis is significant because plague is known to have spread widely through Eurasia in the third millennium BC, but the team cautions against a simple explanation. "We can confirm that plague was present, but the evidence does not support it as the sole cause of the population collapse," said Martin Sikora, the senior author. The decline, he argues, was likely driven by a combination of disease, environmental stress and other disruptive events — a perfect storm rather than a single catastrophe. Pollen evidence from nearby lake sediments, for example, suggests a period of cooler, wetter conditions around the same time, which would have shortened the growing season on which early farming depended.

D. The bones themselves tell the same story from a different angle. The archaeologists found an unusually high number of burials of children and young people in the earlier period, a demographic pattern that indicates crisis rather than ordinary mortality. When a population is dying of disease, famine or war, the very young and the very old die first, and the cemetery fills with the small bones that in normal times are the least common. The social structure recorded in the tomb also changes. In the earlier phase, the dead were buried in extended family groups spanning multiple generations, suggesting closely knit communities that brought relatives to the same tomb over centuries. In the later phase, burials became far more selective, dominated by a single male lineage — a different kind of society, organised around a different kind of authority, in which only certain men and their immediate relatives were granted the honour of the tomb. The shift in funerary practice mirrors the genetic shift: not just a new population, but a new way of arranging human beings.

E. The findings extend beyond a single tomb. They add to a growing body of evidence that a widespread Neolithic population decline affected large parts of northern and western Europe around 3000 BC, reaching well beyond the regions — Scandinavia and northern Germany — where it was first detected. They also help explain one of the more puzzling facts of European prehistory: the sudden end, around the same period, to the construction of the great megalithic monuments — the stone tombs, standing stones and chambered mounds that had characterised Neolithic life for two thousand years. "We now see that the end of these monumental constructions coincides with the disappearance of the population that built them," Seersholm said. The people who knew how to quarry the great stones, how to move them, and whose religion required them to be raised, died out or were replaced; the newcomers had different traditions, and the monuments were left to crumble. The tomb at Bury, in this reading, is not a single graveyard but a document of a civilisation's end — and a reminder that the people who built Europe's most enduring stone landscapes were themselves replaced, in a single century, by strangers from the south.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. The genetic evidence for two unrelated populations ii. What the bones and the burial pattern reveal about crisis iii. Why the megaliths stopped being built iv. How the tomb was discovered in 2016 v. What the molecular evidence says about disease vi. The history of ancient DNA research vii. How plague spreads in modern cities

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. Where is the tomb studied by the team located? A. Near Paris, northern France. B. In southern Spain. C. In Scandinavia. D. In Germany.

6. How were the two populations distinguished? A. By the shape of their pottery. B. By ancient DNA analysis of their bones and teeth. C. By the size of their houses. D. By carbon dating of animal bones.

7. What did the molecular analysis find? A. No pathogens at all. B. Traces of plague and louse-borne relapsing fever. C. Evidence of modern contamination only. D. The genome of a virus that caused cancer.

8. How did the later burials differ from the earlier ones? A. They included more children. B. They were dominated by a single male lineage and more selective. C. They were buried with gold. D. They used no stones.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. The earlier group was genetically typical of Stone Age farmers from northern France and Germany.
10. Plague alone caused the population collapse.
11. The study was published in Nature.
12. The tomb at Bury was first excavated by amateur archaeologists in the 19th century.
13. The end of megalith construction coincided with the disappearance of the population that built them.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

The researchers found traces of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for (14) __________, but argue the collapse was caused by a combination of disease and (15) __________ stress.

答案与解析

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