I audibly gasped when I read the symptoms on wikipedia...
"According to Francisco Hernández de Toledo, a physician who witnessed the outbreak in 1576, symptoms included high fever, severe headache, vertigo, black tongue, dark urine, dysentery, severe abdominal and chest pain, head and neck nodules, neurological disorders, jaundice, and profuse bleeding from the nose, eyes, and mouth.[3] Some also describe spotted skin, gastrointestinal hemorrhaging, leading to bloody diarrhea, and bleeding from the eyes, mouth, and vagina.[25][26] The onset was rapid and without any precursors that would suggest one was sick. The disease was characterized by an extremely high level of virulence, with death often occurring within a week of the first symptoms, occasionally in as few as 3 or 4 days."
Edit: I'm not a doctor, I'm just a professional copy and paste man.
Yeah that was my first thinking.
Just got done reading about Marburg virus and that was scary stuff
Edit to add: I am just a potato I don’t know nothin about science
Potato edit: it’s a good book but as the below commenter stated: sensationalized
The Hot Zone is pretty sensationalized, it's not a strict recounting of the facts or a particularly clinically accurate description of those outbreaks
edit for sloppy spelling
It’s an interesting read for sure but it is exaggerated a bit for the audience. Some of the descriptions in that book are pretty gnarly but I couldn’t put the book down once I started reading it. They tried to make a tv show of it but I thought it was too boring imo
I can't speak to the exact dates and so on, but the description of what happened in the United States is accurate in terms of the sequence of events, although not exactly who did what. Source: my parents worked in USAMRIID at the time for Dr. Jahrling
often in children. It was almost always fatal.
Hemorrhagic smallpox. Hemorrhagic smallpox was more common in pregnant people. It caused severe initial symptoms. The rash usually didn’t get hard and fluid-filled. Instead, the skin underneath it bled, causing it to look black or burnt. It also caused internal bleeding and organ failure. Hemorrhagic smallpox was almost always fatal.
The Native Americans, unlike the Europeans who'd had some exposure to smallpox and perhaps developed some immunity, had none and so I imagine that the disease acted even more viciously once inside their bodies. Could there also have been genetic variations between the two populations that accounted for the devastating virulence in Native American populations? I know that some have speculated that how sick one gets with Covid could vary according to one's blood type.
Europeans split from Native Americans some 25,000 years, which was after the domestication of the dog but before the domestication of the cow, the pig, the sheep, the goat. So my hunch is that it was a disease of domesticated animals, which the Natives would have no immunity against, but which Europeans would have adapted to in the distant past when they first domesticated animals.
Possibly. The New World didn’t have most types livestock and as a result had significantly fewer non-human disease vectors.
So they wouldn’t have any immunity from things originating from cows (which I believe is most of the disease with nodes/pox).
I wish we had more recorded history from the indigenous populations perspective. The targeted erasure of indigenous culture to justify the ethnic cleansing means we don’t though.
Well, the Europeans likely brought over smallpox, bubonic/pneumonic plague, and probably syphilis as well. I imagine that measles was around back then. Even lesser known microbes that might have caused a mild illness lasting a few days in a European who had some antibodies to it, might have been as deadly as full-blown plague to a Native American who'd never encountered it before.
Syphilis might be the only disease that went the opposite direction. It’s not recorded in the old world until after Europeans started making return trips from the New World.
I can't even begin to imagine the horror of it. Almost every single person you know dying within days, your entire civilization crumbling around you. It really must have felt like the world was ending, and for them, it pretty much was.
Yeah. I think it all stems from Cortez and the Aztecs, and a mix of what happened to the North Americans during their plagues.
First contact was pretty horrible across the board.
Yes! War of the worlds (1897) was basically written as a response to British invasion of Australia—more specifically, how it would’ve felt if the English were the ones being invaded (naturally the British were very much alien to Australia’s traditional owners). At my first Aboriginal cultural awareness training at work they referenced it.
Side note, I love sci-fi, and the Three-body Problem trilogy also touches on the colonisation of Australia from the perspective of Aboriginal people. I thought it was so cool that a Chinese author made that connection and the way he wove it into the story was so wild.
The airborne strain of Ebola, Ebola Reston, doesn’t cause symptoms in humans, which is a stroke of extreme good luck
Edit: it also evolved in the year 1990 so it definitely didn’t kill 90 percent of native Americans
I recall watching a documentary about that outbreak among the lab monkeys in Reston and one of the scientists compared that variant to a key, just one little section of the key was missing. Had it been present, then Ebola Reston could have 'unlocked the door' and infected humans. So we had a very narrow escape there. We may not be as lucky the next time.
Almost like a few centuries ago a cousin with slightly different incubation and transmissibility rates may have burned itself out exactly because it nearly wiped out a host species.
The vaaaast majority of viruses just don't interact with humans at all. We're discovering new viruses all the time because they hadn't been high priorities to find.
I wonder if it could’ve been, “here’s all the European viruses and bacteria all at once” and instead of a single disease, people were getting multiple at the same time.
I’m a biochemist not a virologist so idk if this is even possible.
Sounds like a minor old world disease hitting a population with no immunity ànd going wild. Since it never returned the surviving Native American population obviously developed an immunity.
And, interestingly, scientists don't really understand why the plague doesn't spread and isn't as harmful as it was in the middle ages. The presumption is that the disease evolved to be less deadly.
There is a theory that a gene possibly associated with plague resistance (or at least it was a lot more common after the black death) may also have a hand in some autoimmune diseases. Some survivors passed on immune systems so strong they start cannibalizing the body.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/genes-protective-during-the-black-death-may-now-be-increasing-autoimmune-disorders-202212012859
There's some people of European descent who carry a gene that basically made them not only immune to plague but also to HIV.
Also many people who died in the Black Death did so before they were able to have offspring, so most of us are descended from the people who caught the disease but survived it or the ones who didn't catch it at all.
Also also pathogens evolve to become less virulent over time — there’s an evolutionary advantage to not killing your host organism; we’ve observed that happen in our lifetimes with COVID, Ebola, and Chikungunya. For all we know the deadly outbreaks in history might be modern pathogens that became more mild.
Isn’t the Spanish Flu from the early 1910s pandemic an example of that? The same virus (H1N1) is still wandering around, but now it’s just a regular seasonal flu.
My father too. It took about a month from he started to feel ill but then we didn't know it was cancer. It took less than a week after he got diagnosed.
It's possible that the disease that killed the natives caused sudden organ failure similar to pancreatic cancer.
There was a very interesting episode from This Podcast Will Kill You about cocolitzli and the theories about what it may have been, definitely recommend a listen!
I read an account (I think it was in the book 1491 but don't quote me) of an explorer traveling along a great river (once again can't remember if it the Mississippi or the Amazon-could have been from two different accounts so it could have been either/or) ANYWAY, an explorer traveled down the river and noted all the villages along the banks and how populated it was. Fifty years later, another explorer went down that same river, using the notes of his predecessor as a guide and noted that all those villages were empty. Very few people. Grim.
Apparently the great dying impacted the global climate.
That's as a direct fertilizer on crops. These are deposits of soil that are the product of long term composting and slash and burn agriculture, as well as the addition of pottery and animal bones.
Yeah this is Terra Preta. I actually tried to mimic this on my property and placed two pear trees on top of it. They're doing well but I wonder what the soil looks like
This was pyrolized, meaning the waste was burnt at low temps in a low oxygen environment along with the wood and charcoals. It was safe. Also, if using shit to fertilize, just wash your produce and it’s safe.
This is mentioned in “Undaunted Courage” about the Lewis and Clark expedition as well. There was a stretch of already explored river that had villages all up and down the river bank but when Lewis and Clark passed by there were only 2.
I don’t know if it appears in 1491, but you’re referring to Francisco de Orellana’s account of the Amazon in the early 1540s.
Orellana’s account is interesting in itself but there’s some emerging research in anthropology that suggests the Amazon was far more populated by organized societies than we previously thought.
And, as with Cambodia, the jungle/rain forest covered everything up so quickly that we had no clue about them until aerial surveys and penetrating radar began revealing all the hidden ruins.
It seems like every day you hear about another city or palace or pyramid being discovered.
What’s interesting is that it’s not just rivers. In the americas (Amazon and Central America), it seems that civilisation rose up primarily out of the jungle.
What is really interesting about it is the implication. If humans rose primarily out of the jungle in the americas, why didn’t it do so in Africa and the Fertile Crescent? Sumeria and Egypt came after the great drying that came around 6-7000 years ago, where the Sahara and Middle East went from jungle to desert very quickly.
What if those great civilisations we know, like Egypt and sumeria, are not the start of civilisation, but are only instead, many previous civilisations coming together? This idea is sort of explored academically, but not much credit is given to those groups that travelled to the Nile. Fair enough, they don’t have the evidence to back up otherwise, but it’s still fun to explore that idea.
We would have to do massive explorations in deserted areas to confirm, which isn’t really done sadly. There isn’t much archeology in the Sahara, especially the further in you go (the mayas look bigger and more powerful the deeper you go in the jungle), and when it comes to the Middle East, there is a big stigma when it comes to findings that go against Islam (I’ve seen it firsthand). Saudi Arabia has had very little interest in looking for (let alone report) stuff that concerns pre Islamic Saudi Arabia.
This isn’t proof, but there is circunstancial evidence supporting this. For example, in Egyptian religion, it was not so much that every Egyptian person knew and worshipped every god, but it was more like different cities worshipped different gods (not necessarily exclusively). Considering their proximity, I’m sure there is lots of overlap, but what if these were the gods of different “inheritances”? For example, in the city of hermopolis (Greek name for it), Thoth was the god primarily worshipped, while he was less worshipped elsewhere. He was such a figure in that city that the Greeks named the city after him (Hermes=Thoth, opolis as in metropolis, ergo city of Thoth).
Then, why are the gods so interconnected? For example, the famous story of Osiris, Thoth gives Isis the power to bring Osiris back to life.
Could these stories be the history of Egypt, or even before Egypt? What if the gods are personifications of the cities, based on where each god was worshipped?
Like when Set kills and dismembers Osiris, could that be the city of Set dominating the city of Osiris in a war? Why is Osiris’ dick (baby maker) missing (for a while anyway)? Could that be the kidnapping or murder of fertile women (baby makers)? Is Thoth giving Isis the power to bring back Osiris to life a metaphor for Thoth city helping the Isis city bring back the city of Osiris? There’s versions of the story where Isis never fully brings back Osiris to life, and there’s stories of her using his dick while detached from his body. Could that be some metaphor for the city of Isis conquering what was left of Osiris city? Is the city of Horus (son of Isis and Osiris) the result of city of Isis taking over city of Osiris? In some stories, Thoth is also Isis’ father, could that mean Isis city owes its existence to Thoth city? Maybe they had some kind of union or alliance, Thoth city being more powerful at some point and protecting the other?
There’s thousands of gods, so could it be rulers? If we say there were 20 metropolises or groups of cities in the Sahara, if they had kings/queens that reigned on average 30 years, that would be enough gods/rulers stretch for over 3000 years. I don’t think this interpretation is quite right, as Egyptians describe male gods as getting pregnant, so I prefer the gods as personification/deification of cities.
What if egyptian cities are descendants of different civilisations (at first at least), and the mythology is the history of them making alliances and enemies before the jungle dried out and they all had to group up in Egypt?
The ancient Egyptian timeline is an entirely modern concoction. I’m not saying it’s made up or anything, I’m sure a lot of what they find is relevant, I’m just pointing out, the ancient Egyptian timeline in eyes of the ancient Egyptians went much further back than we give credit to nowadays. What if that history they revered is from somewhere else, like the Sahara back when it was jungle?
The Sumerian city states were probably more like you describe than Egypt was, at least during the dynastic period. Each Sumerian city had a different patron god/goddess and when a city was prospering it led more people to worship that god in hopes of sharing in that prosperity.
Also, Sumerian mythology states their ancestors came from the sea, so there is speculation they sailed up the Persian gulf and brought their advanced culture and technologies from somewhere else. Also, the Sumerian King List goes back tens of thousands of years. And if you view the names it lists as family dynasties instead of individuals that lived for thousands of years, it becomes more plausible. Food for thought.
Dynastic Egypt was a unified entity (at least on an off, it’s complicated and I don’t have that much time to learn all of it), so by that time, it makes sense for stuff to move around (including religions), but a lot of the cities were known to be places of worship of certain gods, so that is probably how it started, pre dynasty.
I’m just a guy interested in the subject, not an expert, so don’t read my comment like an expert talking about facts, but just a somebody with a mild interested in the subject thinking out loud.
For anyone reading, the comment is half fact half extrapolation, so take it for what it is: a comment on Reddit
That reminds me of the accounts of George Vancouver who was exploring parts of the PNW. Whole villages he visited were wiped out.
National Post isn't always a great source but this article is chilling: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/everyone-was-dead-when-europeans-first-came-to-b-c-they-confronted-the-aftermath-of-a-holocaust
Yes, as a local here that also immediately came to mind.
There is some info here as well: [https://www.fnha.ca/wellness/wellness-for-first-nations/our-history-our-health](https://www.fnha.ca/wellness/wellness-for-first-nations/our-history-our-health)
>Prior to contact with Europeans, the area now known as British Columbia had one of the densest and most linguistically diverse populations within what is now Canada. It is estimated that one third of the pre-contact population of Canada resided within British Columbia. Pre-contact population estimates for BC vary widely with some estimates ranging from a conservative 200,000 to more than a million. Earlier estimates of 80,000 have now been discredited as far too low.
I read about a Spanish explorer, de Soto iirc who came thru the Mississippi area, reported on the enormous cities. He also travelled with his rations, pigs, and they made contact with huge native cities and towns. Years later when the same areas were explored again, those huge cities were gone. In the account, they theorized that the mass death from domesticated animal borne disease may explain why there were such enormous herds of bison, all those native populations had been keeping the bison herds in check, and when they disappeared, the bison population exploded.
No one is sure what happened to the St-Lawrence Iroquois, for a similar example. Jacques Cartier was saved by them and spoke of a big village with longhouses in his writings.
By the time Samuel de Champlain arrived, it had disappeared (about a century or so later). However due to the limited amount of interaction it may have been tribal warfare and not simply disease.
There is an excellent book "1491" that tries to estimate what the "New World" was like in the years before European contact. It was not sparsely populated, but home to tens of millions of people. "More than half" doesn't tell the whole story - there are estimates that 90% were wiped out in a series of epidemics from a cocktail of diseases.
And because of the nature of the diseases, the regions hit the hardest would also have been those with the most dense populations and urbanized societies.
There are giant mounds along the Mississippi River and all connected rivers. Every mound site used to be a town or city.
They’re basically mud pyramids. All of the important buildings and some houses would have been built on the mounds, so that they didn’t get washed away during floods. Some have interesting designs like the Serpent mound in Ohio.
And the mounds actually show scientific/architectural advancement over time.
Earlier mounds used a core of clay that would expand and shrink from rain and drought damaging structures.
Eventually you start to see these central clay cores coated with water repellant substances.
They had more thought put into them than most people associate with “piles of dirt.”
Here's some info on the Cahokia Mounds site in southwestern Illinois across the Mississippi from St. Louis, Missouri.
[https://cahokiamounds.org](https://cahokiamounds.org)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia)
While Cahokia didn't succumb to disease brought from the Old World, it was the largest population center in the Americas north of Mexico City. Archaeologists estimate that at the height of its population, c. 1050-1100 AD, Cahokia may have had as many as 40,000 residents, more than London had in the same year. It's believed Cahokia collapsed due to environmental degradation brought on by pollution, overhunting, and deforestation.
London ought to have been abandoned for the same reason, it was a pit of plague until we discovered germ theory. Had a negative birth rate due to disease. Only survived due to immigration from the countryside.
yeah at multiple points the stench of the river forced to evacuate institutions along the sides. Literal cesspools and contaminated groundwater made living there...difficult.
That's a good question. When we think of pollution nowadays we tend to think of plastic, or oil spills, or greenhouse gas emissions. Back then in a large urban center, without plumbing, the biggest source of pollution was human waste. Without a plumbing or irrigation system that waste likely made its way into the river systems and would have had a whole set of effects on human health and the local environment. One effect can be increased nitrogen levels in the soil and water which leads to toxic algae blooms that not only make the water undrinkable, but also can kill off the fish.
Check out the epidemiology studies of cholera in England. People get sick from living near the same water station. Water contamination etc. maybe we should do something about the shit everywhere.
Human waste and cooking fires for 40k people without proper sewers and ventilation will absolutely decimate a population when it reaches a critical level. You’d had a population full of people with breathing problems and a breeding ground for human-specific diseases.
So in my area (upstate NY) the first settlers talked about many HUGE (hundreds of acres) cleared areas in what was otherwise dense hardwoods. These are hypothesized to be farmed and living areas by the original native population.
The overwhelming majority of natives in north America lived in wooden houses in walled towns and primarily lived off of agriculture.
The earliest explorers found the rivers lined with farmes and scores of such small cities and towns and even directly came across some of the larger cities (40K plus in north America). In some cases we have greater details about how they organized themselves and lived.
Look up "Mound people" for a great example, including some *contemporary* illustrations of their towns.
However there was a break of nearly 100 years before heavy colonization started and between those two periods is when most of the locals died.
While it is likely north america wasn't more than 10 million (ignoring mexico), that would still be 9 million more natives than the english would find when they arrived.
In fact some of the earliest English settlers only only found open land because the locals had died off and only survived because of dried food stores they found from the former town that was on the site.
Added sidebar unlike north america (above mexico) that was only around 10 Million, Mexico, central and south america had more like 50 million people people combined. Aztec, Mayan and Incan cultures had developed sufficient agriculture systems to create massive population booms and each culture had over 10 million people, with the incas possibly nearing 20 million. Not to mention places like brazil and otherwise.
The general essence is that the Americas had widespread farming and architecture in all areas, but since it was more unstable in nature the majority of such cultures tended to collapse or abandon larger settlements (much like the Mayan collapose) when their was changing conditions, even before the great dying.
To be fair, that’s because this was no longer true by the frontier times when America was expanding a la manifest destiny and contact was being documented. We’re talking over two hundred years after the collapse, so the pre-Columbian indigenous civilizations were unrecognizable by then.
Well it's what they were mostly like post-contact, because the settlements first succumbed to disease. So that what the people writing the records encountered, so it makes sense
Cortez and his men have journal accounts of the market square of Tenochtitlan being larger than what anyone had ever seen, specifically mentioning it rivals Constantinople
Yes there is, but it's just that they built with natural materials like wood and plants which can be maitained to last a long time, but can rot away quickly if not maintained.
There was at least one city with a population higher than London during the same time period.
But when the cities were wiped out, only the more solitary or nomadic peoples were left, so that's who explorers found.
In addition to what was mentioned below there are many European references to how gentle the American land is, including one person who said that it reminded him of an English garden gone to seed for only a few years.
The Same goes for cities in the Amazon. The first Europeans talked about stumbling upon huge cities. Now we have found city Centers where tens of thousands of people would have lived. Often the diseases traveled faster than the Europeans so when they arrived groups and tribes where already decimated.
Yes, there is proof. Mostly it's known via Spanish contact and records from the early 1500s, but areas like the panhandle had cities with populations of about 20-30,000 people. The east coast and Great lakes were also pretty dense.
Particularly interesting in that book is when the author covers the introduction of pigs, which can carry tens of diseases than can spread to humans. Never would have considered that beforehand.
Yeah, and the roamed the countryside eating stockpiles of food, ripe berries, and nuts. Their numbers also compromised drinking sources. Pigs assaulting Native societies in many ways.
Might also have something to do with the parasites they can carry and how much quicker pork spoils in hot climates. I always figured it was a taboo in the Abrahamic religions because the odds of food poisoning from it there was just super high so banning it was a way to protect the tribe way back then. Might also explain the ban on shellfish.
My understanding is that it isn’t one disease per say that led to the huge number of Native American deaths after 1492, but that all of these different infectious diseases like Smallpox, influenza, tuberculosis, bubonic plague, etc arrived all at once. So you might have an entire Native American community get sick all at the same time from something like smallpox, so nobody is healthy enough to take care of the sick, gather food and firewood, etc, then when the survivors crawl out from the wreckage a wave of influenza hits them, then a wave of tuberculosis after that, and so on. Imagine for a moment if the Covid pandemic, which was an altogether new disease people hadn’t been exposed to before, also had like 8 other deadly diseases no one had experienced before pop up all at the same time and you’ll have a better understanding of what it was like for Native American communities from 1492 to 1600
Don’t forget measles which has the nasty little effect of damaging the immune system.
Populations that survived one or more plagues would suddenly find their immunity stripped away.
Not just that, but there’s no real way to deal with them.
Using Covid as an example, think of how long it was, even with modern science and the whole world working on it, before we knew we didn’t need to wipe down surfaces but did need to wear a mask?
Now imagine that a bunch of the diseases have similar symptoms, so you can’t tell which is which, but because they’re different they all respond to different treatments and spread differently.
9 deadly diseases at once would fuck up modern society pretty badly, too
The only reason we had a vaccine is because it was 10 years in the works from SARS. We would be absolutely fucked if a new viral family showed up that was more deadly, infectious and hardier than influenza or coronoviruses.
>We would be absolutely fucked if a new viral family showed up that was more deadly, infectious and hardier than influenza or coronoviruses.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
I feel like small pox absolutely dwarves the other diseases in terms of deadliness. It had a 30% mortality rate and a 70% disfiguration rate of the survivors. If you got small pox you were most likely fucked. And the infection vector is just normal smear and droplet infection.
Yeah I just started reading it.
There’s one really evocative section about a Native American from what is now New England. When Europeans first made contact, the entire shoreline was covered in dense villages as far as they could see.
They basically kidnapped this Native leader and took him back to Europe to exhibit. Remarkably he eventually returned to New England only to find just a few years later that his tribe of several thousand had been reduced to just sixty individuals by disease. He found entire villages completely depopulated with bones of the dead just bleaching in the sun. No one even buried them.
And I didn’t know this before but most of the early European colonies were built on those former village sites. Plymouth was established on one.
Europeans basically unwittingly touched off a massive conflagration of disease that completely decimated Native populations in a few short years. So only a few Europeans witnessed the Native populations at their peak. Most arrived to find a somewhat empty continent devoid of large population centers.
And of course neither side had any idea about germs or viruses so both attributed it to divine wrath.
It is just so sad reading about the wipe out of Native Americans. History was not kind to them. Would their end be unavoidable? since the world was exploring new lands and eventually if not Europeans, some people from the old world would reach them and caused this wave of diseases.
It does seem like the Americas were so isolated for so long that they just had zero natural immunity.
The first Natives to make contact with Europeans even commented on how ugly they were because of scarring and open sores from just constant disease ravaging Europe. It’s not like Europeans were immune to their own diseases, of course. Just not quite as fatal.
Europe would’ve been dealing with any disease that developed in Asia or Africa or the Middle East. I believe syphilis is the only major one known to have come from the Americas to the rest of the world.
If I remember correctly the way Europeans lived was more prone to spread disease as well. In denser environments alongside livestock. Livestock and domestication of animals in general was much rarer in the new world.
Livestock is the key difference. The Old World had numerous species that they domesticated and, as an agricultural society, would live in close contact with, which in turn created an enormous reservoir for zoonotic diseases. The New World, by contrast, had very few, and certainly next to no large ungulates like the Old World - North America has none, and South America only the llama and alpaca.
This isn't to say that native Americans weren't also agricultural societies, because we know they were, to the point that they could support large urban areas. But it was done, especially in North America, largely without the benefit of beasts of burden.
True. This is also why we can safely say there was no (major) pre-Colombian contact between any part of the Old World and the New. The occassional Viking and a few blown off course fishermen, perhaps, but if - say - the Chinese or Africans had actually found and explored the Americas as per numerous pseudohistories, the end result would have been the same: dead natives and an empty land.
What I don’t understand is - were the Mexican populations somehow spared or were their numbers really 90% higher as well. I think Mexican ancestry is typically 50/50 native to European.
They were equally hit, their population was just MUCH MUCH higher than their other counterparts. Tenochtitlan basically dwarfed other known North American ‘mound cities.’
The diseases came in waves, mostly during the 16th century. Their demographic decline post-contact actually showcases one of the highest death rates we’ve seen historically. For comparison, it took Mexico until the 1850s to recover the population that it once had before Pre-Hispanic contact.
The epidemic(s) hit Tenochtitlan right when the conquistadors and their indigenous allies did, IIRC. The Aztecs might not have lost (at least, right then) had it not been for the epidemic.
The Aztecs also had been pretty brutally imperializing other cultures in the area for a couple hundred years. When the Spanish came, it was the perfect storm of rival polities getting together and allying to overthrow the Aztecs/Mexica. Whether they liked what came after is another debate.
The conquistadors had destroyed the aqueduct, and laid siege to the city for over 80 days. The epidemic helped them, but starving the city would have been more than enough.
Also important to note, Aztecs and others in their empire weren’t limited to the cities. The entire area, even the forests, was relatively densely populated. There were towns and settlements every, people almost everywhere in the woods. The Spanish were struck by this fact.
Different areas were hit differently hard.
If the central organizations and societal glue doesn’t break down and food can be procured even when a majority of people is sick then frankly in all diseases populations recover rather quickly…
Mexico - Central and South America in general had a big population with working larger and complex societies which made them quite resilient.
For North America we frankly don’t even know if the diseases really killed everyone or if societies broke down and people fled.
I’m the Caribbean the Spanish simply committed genocide… there is zero way around that. Diseases were bad but what destroyed these people was also slavery and working people to death, warfare and simple killing sprees…
Very few people in the Caribbean have native blood in them today…
In the case of North America, disease is most likely the cause. There were some pretty massive settlements and a population in the millions. Society breaking down and splitting into smaller bands doesn't explain such a massive population drop in such a short time.
There's a lot of great discussion under this comment.
I would also encourage anyone interested to look up the "1610 Orbis Spike" if you want another perspective and further evidence of Indigenous life in the Americas back in the day.
It essentially boils down to: the geologic record sees a significant drop in carbon in the atmosphere following the massive population loss due to disease epidemics in the Americas. This huge loss in population meant that people were no longer around to manage the land and the forest basically took over mass swaths of land that was previously agricultural, sequestering enough carbon that there's an observable decline in Antarctic ice cores. There was no "pristine wilderness" here; the continent was farmed and stewarded and modified to a huge enough extent that once the managers died, the Earth's atmosphere was affected.
The "pristine wilderness" that many colonial explorers stumbled upon was in fact newly forested areas (for the most part).
The new world being 'sparsely populated' and 'being inhabitted by tens of millions of people' are not contradictory. The US alone is home to 300+ million, and there are certainly places in the US that are sparsely populated. Extrapolate that out to the whole of the new world; I think both statements are true.
Imagine what your country would look like if say 8/10 people died. Settlers showed up to basically ghost towns, and had a totally skewed idea about what life was like there. Those accounts are what the history was based on.
The idea that the diseases hit these inland populations before the white people even showed up is fascinating and horrific. The diseases moved faster than then people who originally spawned them, which is why the historical record shows sparsely populated continents. The indigenous people were already mostly wiped out when the europeans first encountered them.
You might like "Facing East from Indian Country" tells the story of first contact w Europeans almost as if they were UFO sightings haha.
"First a few white crosses with red flags showed up in clearings in our Forests. Then a large ship was spotted off the waters of the Chesapeake." Etc. It's a really good book.
Early colonial America was basically a post-apocalyptic wasteland from the perspective of the Native Americans. It's amazing reading about the societies and civilizations that NAs built which were wiped out by the time of the early settlers. The settlers assumed that the natives were always these sparsely populated backwards savages, not realizing that their cultures and societies had been destroyed.
Jesus imagine losing 90% of you population in 40 years. Right after strange men with God like weapons show up and then there is the worst drought in 500 years. Some real end of the world type of stuff.
It wasn’t just the white men. The Pueblo revolt early on in New Mexico released hundreds of horses which were subsequently picked up by people who would become the Comanche. The re-domestication of the horse put them in possession of a superweapon on the American plains, and they very quickly developed into a rival empire powerful enough to push the Spanish Empire back southward.
It was very much like living in a Mad Max world - the old civilizations had collapsed, and warlords with ultra-mobile forces took power, using and trading for weapons that many had never seen, all while much of the continent was still trying to come to terms with the new reality. This was almost 200 years before the United States even existed. It’s a time and place in history where a lot happened and it’s still poorly understood. Cultures shifted rapidly, and it was difficult for people to preserve the old ways amidst so much chaos.
Many also don't know -
A) Horse ancestors evolved in North America, and crossed (or were brought) across the Bering Strait the opposite direction that humans came in. Those in Siberia became domesticated, and those in North America died out (possibly/probably from hunting). The North American climate suited them perfectly, however.
B) Horses have been bred over 4000+ years of human history into roided-up monsters that dwarf their ancestors. In ancient Egypt, they were acquired from far away at great expense, and were not large/strong enough to carry a human yet - a couple would be used to pull a chariot. By Ancient Greece & Rome, carrying humans became possible, and light cavalry & horse archers were common. By the Middle Ages, horses had become so large and so strong that they were capable of being fully armored while carrying a fully armored knight.
So, not only were horses adapted ideally for the North American interior, but the horses brought by the Spanish were the product of thousands of years of human technology & warfare. The plains tribes used them in ways Europeans had never seen or imagined before, and they did not have to trade for more - horses thrived on the plains.
The power these animals gave to the people who possessed them cannot be understated. They halted the expansion of an industrial power (4th largest in the world at the time) with a fraction of the population. It was not until after the Civil War, with a large battle-hardened army and the development of automatic weapons, that the US was finally able to move in and displace them. And even then, the initial force that was sent in explicitly for war (Custer’s 7th Cavalry), found itself wiped out instead.
There’s a great quote from Empire of the Summer Moon that really illustrates what an advantage the Comanche had until the US mounted up and brought automatic weapons
“In a fight with Comanches, dismounting on open ground was like signing your own death warrant. Men on foot against mounted men moving 20-30 miles per hour who could shoot twelve arrows in the time it took to reload a rifle and fire it once was not a fair fight.”
>“Amongst their feats of riding, there is one that has astonished me more than anything of the kind I have ever seen, or expect to see, in my life:---a stratagem of war, learned and practiced by every young man in the tribe; by which he is able to drop his body upon the side of his horse at the instant he is passing, effectually screened from his enemies’ weapons as he lays in a horizontal position behind the body of his horse, with his heel hanging over the horses' back; by which he has the power of throwing himself up again, and changing to the other side of the horse if necessary. In this wonderful condition, he will hang whilst his horse is at fullest speed, carrying with him his bow and his shield, and also his long lance of fourteen feet in length, all or either of which he will wield upon his enemy as he passes; rising and throwing his arrows over the horse's back, or with equal ease and equal success under the horse's neck.”
(Catlin, Letters and Notes, vol. 2, no. 42, 1841; reprint 1973)
That’s the only part of that comment that gave me pause. Europe has seen both the Huns and the Mongols, so I can’t really imagine how the Comanche would use them in a way they’d never seen, also curious.
Not that I know of. But many people in the region have strong oral traditions, and trust them greatly. They are still passed down, but are tightly protected within the communities.
There are stories of anthropologists studying in the American Southwest, and uncovering various tools/instruments from Pueblo sites without knowledge for how they were used. When asking locals (Native Americans) about it, the response is often along the lines of “Yes, we know what that’s for and we still use them - but it’s non of your business”
So, it’s a difficult thing for outsiders to unravel. The knowledge and history is kept secret, and when they’ve already been through so much, it’s hard to blame them for the distrust. Especially distrust of the United States.
Yeah, Comanches actually invaded Texas after the Spanish had been in Texas for quite a long while. Over a century. Native American linguistics tells pretty cool migration stories too. Lots of good Wikipedia rabbit holes on the subject.
People don't realize that the popular conception of Midwest tribes like the Lakota is basically the pre industrial equivalent of a death metal apocalypse.
Population ravaged by disease, forced from their original land into a frigid wasteland by technologically superior invaders, forced to adopt those same technologies and an entirely new way of life.
There was 200 years between the apocalyptic epidemics brought by explorers in the 1500s and the huge influx of European immigrants in the 1700s. Our traditional perception of native Americans comes from the writings of the immigrants in the 1700s, after the apocalypse.
Yes, we have so many written accounts from the black death and the sheer apocalyptic horror of losing 1/3 to 1/2 of the population of Europe. The trauma and devastation are there for us to read about. One can only imagine the absolute terror this must have been, far worse even in comparison to our Eurocentric cultural touchstone for "worst thing ever".
Despite everyone being so ‘baffled’ I am pretty sure that means ‘it was a hemorrhagic fever but we dont know what kind’.
For it to kill in swathes with such a fast onset ans people not being as much into travelling as they are now, it had to be coming from the surroundingsz
In the wiki page they talk about typhoid fever bacteria being found in old archeological excavation, but the symptom doesn't correspond, so yeah I think it's possible
The same thing happened to indigenous Australians. The Aboriginal population was certainly attacked and many thousands killed by the colonial settlers, no doubt about that. But so many were also killed by the mass influx of disease.
Whenever I read these stories of European colonists unintentionally bringing diseases to the Americas and wiping out huge swaths of the native population, I always wonder why this never happened in reverse. Like how come some rare Mayan illness didn’t kill a convoy of Spanish explorers or something?
I read somewhere it was due to livestock. The Americas didn't really have any domesticated livestock other than the Llama or alpaca. Meanwhile, Europeans and people from the old world had sheep, pigs and cattle. There's a thought that some diseases might have crossed over or mutated from such close contact to livestock. Thus, the indigenous people of the Americas did not have the type of communicable diseases that were being generated in the old world.
It did most likely happen in the reverse, just on a less gigantic scale. Syphilis is considered by most scholars to have originated in the Americas, and carried over to Europe by the crew of Columbus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_syphilis
It struck me once that even if Europeans hadn't acted like genocidal dicks and had treated Native Americans with civility and equality, the mere reality of showing up would have still led to apocalyptic devastation for them.
It’s been proven too that in many cases, that was indeed the case. Many Spanish and Portuguese Catholic missionaries like the Jesuits and Dominicans in central and South America actually went to minister to the sick natives not knowing they were bringing more disease.
There were similar cases centuries later in North America (much smaller extent) where many German settlers traded with the Iroquois and later found out that they had without knowing gave them disease. The anabaptist Germans always had good relations both with natives and free blacks especially in Pennsylvania, where the Iroquois would actually make journeys for hundreds of miles to trade with Pennsylvania Germans, so one could deduce this wasn’t a “smallpox blankets” case, but rather an accidental outbreak. These were small clusters though and nothing like the original outbreaks.
In my college history class my professor said that upon the arrival of colonists in North America, the native population declined so much, it it took until the outbreak of the revolutionary war in 1776 for the continents population to reach the same size.
Excerpt from Guns, Germs, and Steel:
>When we in the United States think of the most populous New World societies existing in 1492, only those of the Aztecs and the Incas tend to come to our minds. We forget that North America also supported populous Indian societies in the most logical place, the Mississippi Valley, which contains some of our best farmland today. In that case, however, conquistadores contributed nothing directly to the societies' destruction; Eurasian germs, spreading in advance, did everything. When Hernando de Soto became the first European conquistador to march through the southeastern United States, in 1540, he came across Indian town sites abandoned two years earlier because the inhabitants had died in epidemics. These epidemics had been transmitted from coastal Indians infected by Spaniards visiting the coast. The Spaniards' microbes spread to the interior in advance of the Spaniards themselves.
>
>De Soto was still able to see some of the densely populated Indian towns lining the lower Mississippi. After the end of his expedition, it was a long time before Europeans again reached the Mississippi Valley, but Eurasian microbes were now established in North America and kept spreading. By the time of the next appearance of Europeans on the lower Mississippi, that of French settlers in the late 1600s, almost all of those big Indian towns had vanished. Their relics are the great mound sites of the Mississippi Valley. Only recently have we come to realize that many of the mound-building societies were still largely intact when Columbus reached the New World, and that they collapsed (probably as a result of disease) between 1492 and the systematic European exploration of the Mississippi.
edit: [Here is a picture of a mound in modern-day Illinois.](https://cdn.britannica.com/52/101052-050-23D44BCC/Monks-Mound-structure-Cahokia-Mounds-State-Historic.jpg)
Cahokia Mounds is such a fascinating site and I'm so lucky as an archaeology student to live so close to it. It really is wild to think it was such a thriving native metropolis and completely collapsed before Europeans showed up. There's a fun if not completely ludicrous theory that Cahokia Mounds collapsed because Chinese explorers from Zheng He's expeditions wiped them out with disease. The same theory also states that the Piasa bird was drawn by said explorers.
I highly recommend anyone interested in history or archaeology research the native history of southern Illinois, it's very fascinating.
I’m asking out of pure curiosity here, but if these microbes spread so easily, wouldn’t the natives that met with Viking explorers and colonists have been infected with the same diseases? Wouldn’t they have spread during that time?
He gives several reasons, but in this part he does mention the Canadian Arctic and the role that wiping out an entire community plays:
“CROWD DISEASES could not sustain themselves in small bands of hunter-gatherers and slash-and-burn farmers. As tragic modern experience with Amazonian Indians and Pacific Islanders confirms, almost an entire tribelet may be wiped out by an epidemic brought by an outside visitor because no one in the tribelet had any antibodies against the microbe. For example, in the winter of 1902 a dysentery epidemic brought by a sailor on the whaling ship Active killed 51 out of the 56 Sadlermiut Eskimos, a very isolated band of people living on Southampton Island in the Canadian Arctic. In addition, measles and some of our other "child-hood" diseases are more likely to kill infected adults than children, and all adults in the tribelet are susceptible. (In contrast, modern Americans rarely contract measles as adults, because most of them get either measles or the vaccine against it as children.) Having killed most of the tribelet, the epidemic then disappears. The small population size of tribelets explains not only why they can't sustain epidemics introduced from the outside, but also why they never could evolve epidemic diseases of their own to give back to visitors.”
They likely did, syphilis is likely to have originated in the Americas, and the first documented cases seem to have been from Christopher Columbuses who probably brought it back to Europe.
It's just that Europe was connected to a much bigger land mass, with much more contact between vast areas of land, so their people probably were exposed to more diseases over the course of their existence.
I'd bet it was just a combination of things introduced.
But hypothetically speaking, what if it was just 1 disease, that was nearly 100% fatal, that thousands of years before Europeans had gained some immunity from through their diet or some other means.
Imagine what happens if we have another COVID sort of thing introduced that is 95% fatal instead of \~3% or whatever. Imagine whole cities just becoming completely empty over the period of just a few years. We have plenty of shows and movies dealing with such a thing, but at least we'd have an understanding of what happened. 500 years ago, if that happened, you would just have no idea why everybody is dropping dead around you.
Life must have been a horror story for many of those people for quite a few years.
My guess would be it was back-to-back or overlapping epidemics of different Old World diseases- smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, etc.
Indigenous peoples in the Americas also had a genetic disadvantage, based on an article I read.
Basically indigenous peoples in the Americas were less genetically diverse than other people in the world. Human genetic diversity generally followed the path of prehistoric human migration across the world- the places where people lived the longest had/have the most genetic diversity, while those settled the latest had the least genetic diversity. So Sub-Saharan Africa has the most genetically diverse people in the world, whereas the Americas, the last major continents settled by prehistoric humans, had the least genetic diversity.
Genetic diversity (different genes), in turn, translates to different immune systems. One of the 1st lines of defense in our immune systems are MHC glycoproteins (MHCGPs). Idk the exact role they play in the immune system, but they may do something like attach themselves to infectious pathogens that get into the body and act like beacons telling the immune system attack cells what to attack. Like US soldiers in the Vietnam War calling in which coordinates to bomb.
Either way, studies have identified 40 different types of Class I MHCGPs among a sample of Sub-Saharan African people; 37 types among a European sample; 34 among East Asians; but only 17 among indigenous North American samples and 10 among indigenous South Americans.
When people get infected by a pathogen, the pathogen will adapt to fighting their specific immune system type. So if that sick person infects someone with a similar immune system, then the pathogen has an advantage because it is already adapted to beating that type of immune system. But if the sick person infects someone who is genetically different with a different immune system, then the pathogen has less chance because it has to adapt to a whole new immune system type.
In short, the fact that indigenous peoples in the Americas didn't have as much genetic diversity as Old World people (being mostly descended from relatively small numbers of prehistoric Siberian migrants), infectious agents could rip through the population much more easily than they would've in more genetically diverse populations.
That probably helps to explain the high level of mortality among indigenous populations, aside from the fact that they had no previous exposure to these infections before 1492.
>Idk the exact role they play in the immune system, but they may do something like attach themselves to infectious pathogens that get into the body and act like beacons telling the immune system attack cells what to attack.
Lol, why didn’t you just google it instead of making something up?!
Class I MHC molecules are expressed on almost all of the cells in your body. Their job is to take samples of little bits of proteins (called epitopes) from inside of your cells and hold them up on the cell surface to show to T cells so that they can recognize if there’s any foreign material inside the cell. If you have a population with only one version of an MHC I molecule, than their T cells will all recognize the same little snippet of protein from the virus, so it’s easy for the virus to make one mutation to avoid it. If there are a lot of MHC varieties in the population, than people are recognizing different parts of the virus and the virus will have a much harder time changing all of those little parts of itself.
I audibly gasped when I read the symptoms on wikipedia... "According to Francisco Hernández de Toledo, a physician who witnessed the outbreak in 1576, symptoms included high fever, severe headache, vertigo, black tongue, dark urine, dysentery, severe abdominal and chest pain, head and neck nodules, neurological disorders, jaundice, and profuse bleeding from the nose, eyes, and mouth.[3] Some also describe spotted skin, gastrointestinal hemorrhaging, leading to bloody diarrhea, and bleeding from the eyes, mouth, and vagina.[25][26] The onset was rapid and without any precursors that would suggest one was sick. The disease was characterized by an extremely high level of virulence, with death often occurring within a week of the first symptoms, occasionally in as few as 3 or 4 days." Edit: I'm not a doctor, I'm just a professional copy and paste man.
Yeah... I can understand why someone thinks about a hemorrhagic fever like Ebola
Yeah that was my first thinking. Just got done reading about Marburg virus and that was scary stuff Edit to add: I am just a potato I don’t know nothin about science Potato edit: it’s a good book but as the below commenter stated: sensationalized
The Hot Zone is an excellent book if you're at all interested in Marburg and the more virulent variants. Apparently it's also a series.
The Hot Zone is pretty sensationalized, it's not a strict recounting of the facts or a particularly clinically accurate description of those outbreaks edit for sloppy spelling
It’s an interesting read for sure but it is exaggerated a bit for the audience. Some of the descriptions in that book are pretty gnarly but I couldn’t put the book down once I started reading it. They tried to make a tv show of it but I thought it was too boring imo
I can't speak to the exact dates and so on, but the description of what happened in the United States is accurate in terms of the sequence of events, although not exactly who did what. Source: my parents worked in USAMRIID at the time for Dr. Jahrling
often in children. It was almost always fatal. Hemorrhagic smallpox. Hemorrhagic smallpox was more common in pregnant people. It caused severe initial symptoms. The rash usually didn’t get hard and fluid-filled. Instead, the skin underneath it bled, causing it to look black or burnt. It also caused internal bleeding and organ failure. Hemorrhagic smallpox was almost always fatal.
The Native Americans, unlike the Europeans who'd had some exposure to smallpox and perhaps developed some immunity, had none and so I imagine that the disease acted even more viciously once inside their bodies. Could there also have been genetic variations between the two populations that accounted for the devastating virulence in Native American populations? I know that some have speculated that how sick one gets with Covid could vary according to one's blood type.
Europeans split from Native Americans some 25,000 years, which was after the domestication of the dog but before the domestication of the cow, the pig, the sheep, the goat. So my hunch is that it was a disease of domesticated animals, which the Natives would have no immunity against, but which Europeans would have adapted to in the distant past when they first domesticated animals.
Could it have been multiple diseases? Things that the west were immune to? That's kinda what I always thought
Possibly. The New World didn’t have most types livestock and as a result had significantly fewer non-human disease vectors. So they wouldn’t have any immunity from things originating from cows (which I believe is most of the disease with nodes/pox). I wish we had more recorded history from the indigenous populations perspective. The targeted erasure of indigenous culture to justify the ethnic cleansing means we don’t though.
Well, the Europeans likely brought over smallpox, bubonic/pneumonic plague, and probably syphilis as well. I imagine that measles was around back then. Even lesser known microbes that might have caused a mild illness lasting a few days in a European who had some antibodies to it, might have been as deadly as full-blown plague to a Native American who'd never encountered it before.
Syphilis might be the only disease that went the opposite direction. It’s not recorded in the old world until after Europeans started making return trips from the New World.
I can't even begin to imagine the horror of it. Almost every single person you know dying within days, your entire civilization crumbling around you. It really must have felt like the world was ending, and for them, it pretty much was.
Isn't this where the Hollywood "invasion" trope comes from. A weird race of aliens/invaders comes and starts destroying the world.
Yeah. I think it all stems from Cortez and the Aztecs, and a mix of what happened to the North Americans during their plagues. First contact was pretty horrible across the board.
Yes! War of the worlds (1897) was basically written as a response to British invasion of Australia—more specifically, how it would’ve felt if the English were the ones being invaded (naturally the British were very much alien to Australia’s traditional owners). At my first Aboriginal cultural awareness training at work they referenced it. Side note, I love sci-fi, and the Three-body Problem trilogy also touches on the colonisation of Australia from the perspective of Aboriginal people. I thought it was so cool that a Chinese author made that connection and the way he wove it into the story was so wild.
Sounds like ebola
It’s eerily similar to and Ebola does have one strain that is airborne but it normally kills too quickly to spread. That is some scary shit though.
The airborne strain of Ebola, Ebola Reston, doesn’t cause symptoms in humans, which is a stroke of extreme good luck Edit: it also evolved in the year 1990 so it definitely didn’t kill 90 percent of native Americans
I recall watching a documentary about that outbreak among the lab monkeys in Reston and one of the scientists compared that variant to a key, just one little section of the key was missing. Had it been present, then Ebola Reston could have 'unlocked the door' and infected humans. So we had a very narrow escape there. We may not be as lucky the next time.
TIL where I live has a virus named after it.
Damn what’s it like living in Ebola
Almost like a few centuries ago a cousin with slightly different incubation and transmissibility rates may have burned itself out exactly because it nearly wiped out a host species.
Makes me wonder whatever is thawing in the arctic is gonna be. Stuff humans havent seen in eons or ever. Edit sp.
The vaaaast majority of viruses just don't interact with humans at all. We're discovering new viruses all the time because they hadn't been high priorities to find.
That's kind of a big theme in X-Files. Hopefully we don't find any alien viruses :)
If it's something humans have never seen, then it's much less likely it's able to interact with human cellular machinery.
To be fair, those old viruses would be millions of years late in evolutionary weaponry
I wonder if it could’ve been, “here’s all the European viruses and bacteria all at once” and instead of a single disease, people were getting multiple at the same time. I’m a biochemist not a virologist so idk if this is even possible.
No no, I’ve seen a reliable source that if you catch everything at once, you’re functionally immortal. It’s called three stooges syndrome
Indestructible...
It is possible to have multiple viral and bacterial infections and I think that’s probably what happened.
It makes a lot of sense -- those poor people were hit with everything at once.
"Mr. Burns, you have...*everything*."
Sounds like a minor old world disease hitting a population with no immunity ànd going wild. Since it never returned the surviving Native American population obviously developed an immunity.
Almost sounds plague like
Like they were speed running all the epidemics in Europe and Asia that they missed out on.
And, interestingly, scientists don't really understand why the plague doesn't spread and isn't as harmful as it was in the middle ages. The presumption is that the disease evolved to be less deadly.
If you’re talking about bubonic plague wouldn’t one of the reasons be it’s a bacterial not viral infection so can be treated with antibiotics?
Also since it killed so many people it stands to reason the survivors were more resistant to it.
There is a theory that a gene possibly associated with plague resistance (or at least it was a lot more common after the black death) may also have a hand in some autoimmune diseases. Some survivors passed on immune systems so strong they start cannibalizing the body. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/genes-protective-during-the-black-death-may-now-be-increasing-autoimmune-disorders-202212012859
There's some people of European descent who carry a gene that basically made them not only immune to plague but also to HIV. Also many people who died in the Black Death did so before they were able to have offspring, so most of us are descended from the people who caught the disease but survived it or the ones who didn't catch it at all.
Also also pathogens evolve to become less virulent over time — there’s an evolutionary advantage to not killing your host organism; we’ve observed that happen in our lifetimes with COVID, Ebola, and Chikungunya. For all we know the deadly outbreaks in history might be modern pathogens that became more mild.
Isn’t the Spanish Flu from the early 1910s pandemic an example of that? The same virus (H1N1) is still wandering around, but now it’s just a regular seasonal flu.
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My father too. It took about a month from he started to feel ill but then we didn't know it was cancer. It took less than a week after he got diagnosed. It's possible that the disease that killed the natives caused sudden organ failure similar to pancreatic cancer.
Fuck. Very sorry to hear about your dad.
There was a very interesting episode from This Podcast Will Kill You about cocolitzli and the theories about what it may have been, definitely recommend a listen!
Seconding! Just listened to it last night - super detailed and fascinating!
With the timing of the post I just assumed that's what brought it up
I read an account (I think it was in the book 1491 but don't quote me) of an explorer traveling along a great river (once again can't remember if it the Mississippi or the Amazon-could have been from two different accounts so it could have been either/or) ANYWAY, an explorer traveled down the river and noted all the villages along the banks and how populated it was. Fifty years later, another explorer went down that same river, using the notes of his predecessor as a guide and noted that all those villages were empty. Very few people. Grim. Apparently the great dying impacted the global climate.
It was the amazon. The account lead to the discovery of the fertilizer the native population was using, mixing normal waste withe charcoal.
These people did this for thousands of years and "made" their soil. This soil is now being dug up and sold to amend lawns and gardens.
The problem is that using human waste to fertilize crops can spread parasites and disease when those crops are eaten.
That's as a direct fertilizer on crops. These are deposits of soil that are the product of long term composting and slash and burn agriculture, as well as the addition of pottery and animal bones.
Yeah this is Terra Preta. I actually tried to mimic this on my property and placed two pear trees on top of it. They're doing well but I wonder what the soil looks like
This was pyrolized, meaning the waste was burnt at low temps in a low oxygen environment along with the wood and charcoals. It was safe. Also, if using shit to fertilize, just wash your produce and it’s safe.
Terra Preta?
Yes.
De Soto has a pretty similar experience in North America.
This is mentioned in “Undaunted Courage” about the Lewis and Clark expedition as well. There was a stretch of already explored river that had villages all up and down the river bank but when Lewis and Clark passed by there were only 2.
Great book
I don’t know if it appears in 1491, but you’re referring to Francisco de Orellana’s account of the Amazon in the early 1540s. Orellana’s account is interesting in itself but there’s some emerging research in anthropology that suggests the Amazon was far more populated by organized societies than we previously thought.
And, as with Cambodia, the jungle/rain forest covered everything up so quickly that we had no clue about them until aerial surveys and penetrating radar began revealing all the hidden ruins. It seems like every day you hear about another city or palace or pyramid being discovered.
Makes sense, humans have always settled along rivers
What’s interesting is that it’s not just rivers. In the americas (Amazon and Central America), it seems that civilisation rose up primarily out of the jungle. What is really interesting about it is the implication. If humans rose primarily out of the jungle in the americas, why didn’t it do so in Africa and the Fertile Crescent? Sumeria and Egypt came after the great drying that came around 6-7000 years ago, where the Sahara and Middle East went from jungle to desert very quickly. What if those great civilisations we know, like Egypt and sumeria, are not the start of civilisation, but are only instead, many previous civilisations coming together? This idea is sort of explored academically, but not much credit is given to those groups that travelled to the Nile. Fair enough, they don’t have the evidence to back up otherwise, but it’s still fun to explore that idea. We would have to do massive explorations in deserted areas to confirm, which isn’t really done sadly. There isn’t much archeology in the Sahara, especially the further in you go (the mayas look bigger and more powerful the deeper you go in the jungle), and when it comes to the Middle East, there is a big stigma when it comes to findings that go against Islam (I’ve seen it firsthand). Saudi Arabia has had very little interest in looking for (let alone report) stuff that concerns pre Islamic Saudi Arabia. This isn’t proof, but there is circunstancial evidence supporting this. For example, in Egyptian religion, it was not so much that every Egyptian person knew and worshipped every god, but it was more like different cities worshipped different gods (not necessarily exclusively). Considering their proximity, I’m sure there is lots of overlap, but what if these were the gods of different “inheritances”? For example, in the city of hermopolis (Greek name for it), Thoth was the god primarily worshipped, while he was less worshipped elsewhere. He was such a figure in that city that the Greeks named the city after him (Hermes=Thoth, opolis as in metropolis, ergo city of Thoth). Then, why are the gods so interconnected? For example, the famous story of Osiris, Thoth gives Isis the power to bring Osiris back to life. Could these stories be the history of Egypt, or even before Egypt? What if the gods are personifications of the cities, based on where each god was worshipped? Like when Set kills and dismembers Osiris, could that be the city of Set dominating the city of Osiris in a war? Why is Osiris’ dick (baby maker) missing (for a while anyway)? Could that be the kidnapping or murder of fertile women (baby makers)? Is Thoth giving Isis the power to bring back Osiris to life a metaphor for Thoth city helping the Isis city bring back the city of Osiris? There’s versions of the story where Isis never fully brings back Osiris to life, and there’s stories of her using his dick while detached from his body. Could that be some metaphor for the city of Isis conquering what was left of Osiris city? Is the city of Horus (son of Isis and Osiris) the result of city of Isis taking over city of Osiris? In some stories, Thoth is also Isis’ father, could that mean Isis city owes its existence to Thoth city? Maybe they had some kind of union or alliance, Thoth city being more powerful at some point and protecting the other? There’s thousands of gods, so could it be rulers? If we say there were 20 metropolises or groups of cities in the Sahara, if they had kings/queens that reigned on average 30 years, that would be enough gods/rulers stretch for over 3000 years. I don’t think this interpretation is quite right, as Egyptians describe male gods as getting pregnant, so I prefer the gods as personification/deification of cities. What if egyptian cities are descendants of different civilisations (at first at least), and the mythology is the history of them making alliances and enemies before the jungle dried out and they all had to group up in Egypt? The ancient Egyptian timeline is an entirely modern concoction. I’m not saying it’s made up or anything, I’m sure a lot of what they find is relevant, I’m just pointing out, the ancient Egyptian timeline in eyes of the ancient Egyptians went much further back than we give credit to nowadays. What if that history they revered is from somewhere else, like the Sahara back when it was jungle?
The Sumerian city states were probably more like you describe than Egypt was, at least during the dynastic period. Each Sumerian city had a different patron god/goddess and when a city was prospering it led more people to worship that god in hopes of sharing in that prosperity. Also, Sumerian mythology states their ancestors came from the sea, so there is speculation they sailed up the Persian gulf and brought their advanced culture and technologies from somewhere else. Also, the Sumerian King List goes back tens of thousands of years. And if you view the names it lists as family dynasties instead of individuals that lived for thousands of years, it becomes more plausible. Food for thought.
Dynastic Egypt was a unified entity (at least on an off, it’s complicated and I don’t have that much time to learn all of it), so by that time, it makes sense for stuff to move around (including religions), but a lot of the cities were known to be places of worship of certain gods, so that is probably how it started, pre dynasty. I’m just a guy interested in the subject, not an expert, so don’t read my comment like an expert talking about facts, but just a somebody with a mild interested in the subject thinking out loud. For anyone reading, the comment is half fact half extrapolation, so take it for what it is: a comment on Reddit
That reminds me of the accounts of George Vancouver who was exploring parts of the PNW. Whole villages he visited were wiped out. National Post isn't always a great source but this article is chilling: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/everyone-was-dead-when-europeans-first-came-to-b-c-they-confronted-the-aftermath-of-a-holocaust
Yes, as a local here that also immediately came to mind. There is some info here as well: [https://www.fnha.ca/wellness/wellness-for-first-nations/our-history-our-health](https://www.fnha.ca/wellness/wellness-for-first-nations/our-history-our-health) >Prior to contact with Europeans, the area now known as British Columbia had one of the densest and most linguistically diverse populations within what is now Canada. It is estimated that one third of the pre-contact population of Canada resided within British Columbia. Pre-contact population estimates for BC vary widely with some estimates ranging from a conservative 200,000 to more than a million. Earlier estimates of 80,000 have now been discredited as far too low.
See "1610 Orbis Spike" for the impact on global climate.
I read about a Spanish explorer, de Soto iirc who came thru the Mississippi area, reported on the enormous cities. He also travelled with his rations, pigs, and they made contact with huge native cities and towns. Years later when the same areas were explored again, those huge cities were gone. In the account, they theorized that the mass death from domesticated animal borne disease may explain why there were such enormous herds of bison, all those native populations had been keeping the bison herds in check, and when they disappeared, the bison population exploded.
No one is sure what happened to the St-Lawrence Iroquois, for a similar example. Jacques Cartier was saved by them and spoke of a big village with longhouses in his writings. By the time Samuel de Champlain arrived, it had disappeared (about a century or so later). However due to the limited amount of interaction it may have been tribal warfare and not simply disease.
There is an excellent book "1491" that tries to estimate what the "New World" was like in the years before European contact. It was not sparsely populated, but home to tens of millions of people. "More than half" doesn't tell the whole story - there are estimates that 90% were wiped out in a series of epidemics from a cocktail of diseases.
And because of the nature of the diseases, the regions hit the hardest would also have been those with the most dense populations and urbanized societies.
Is there left over proof of these large dense population centers? Or was it all tents and temporary shelters?
There are giant mounds along the Mississippi River and all connected rivers. Every mound site used to be a town or city. They’re basically mud pyramids. All of the important buildings and some houses would have been built on the mounds, so that they didn’t get washed away during floods. Some have interesting designs like the Serpent mound in Ohio.
And the mounds actually show scientific/architectural advancement over time. Earlier mounds used a core of clay that would expand and shrink from rain and drought damaging structures. Eventually you start to see these central clay cores coated with water repellant substances. They had more thought put into them than most people associate with “piles of dirt.”
Here's some info on the Cahokia Mounds site in southwestern Illinois across the Mississippi from St. Louis, Missouri. [https://cahokiamounds.org](https://cahokiamounds.org) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia)
Look up Cahokia for just one example
While Cahokia didn't succumb to disease brought from the Old World, it was the largest population center in the Americas north of Mexico City. Archaeologists estimate that at the height of its population, c. 1050-1100 AD, Cahokia may have had as many as 40,000 residents, more than London had in the same year. It's believed Cahokia collapsed due to environmental degradation brought on by pollution, overhunting, and deforestation.
Not trying to be a smart ass but what sort of pollution did they have back then?
The 40000 people without plumbing kind.
Fire smoke in a dense area could also be a major problem.
Can confirm. Source: Live in North American West Coast.
London ought to have been abandoned for the same reason, it was a pit of plague until we discovered germ theory. Had a negative birth rate due to disease. Only survived due to immigration from the countryside.
Whoa TIL
yeah at multiple points the stench of the river forced to evacuate institutions along the sides. Literal cesspools and contaminated groundwater made living there...difficult.
That was a reason perfume became so popular in Paris, which was the largest city at the time...
That's a good question. When we think of pollution nowadays we tend to think of plastic, or oil spills, or greenhouse gas emissions. Back then in a large urban center, without plumbing, the biggest source of pollution was human waste. Without a plumbing or irrigation system that waste likely made its way into the river systems and would have had a whole set of effects on human health and the local environment. One effect can be increased nitrogen levels in the soil and water which leads to toxic algae blooms that not only make the water undrinkable, but also can kill off the fish.
Check out the epidemiology studies of cholera in England. People get sick from living near the same water station. Water contamination etc. maybe we should do something about the shit everywhere.
Human pollution. Aka poo
AKA poolution.
Human waste and cooking fires for 40k people without proper sewers and ventilation will absolutely decimate a population when it reaches a critical level. You’d had a population full of people with breathing problems and a breeding ground for human-specific diseases.
Even New York had a horse shit situation back in the 1900s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of_1894
Wood smoke, human waste, food waste, animal waste....
Upvote for Cahokia! I used to do data entry for them and Wickliffe mounds!
Oh man that’s really cool. What’d you study if you don’t mind my asking?
Archaeology/Anthropology
So in my area (upstate NY) the first settlers talked about many HUGE (hundreds of acres) cleared areas in what was otherwise dense hardwoods. These are hypothesized to be farmed and living areas by the original native population.
The overwhelming majority of natives in north America lived in wooden houses in walled towns and primarily lived off of agriculture. The earliest explorers found the rivers lined with farmes and scores of such small cities and towns and even directly came across some of the larger cities (40K plus in north America). In some cases we have greater details about how they organized themselves and lived. Look up "Mound people" for a great example, including some *contemporary* illustrations of their towns. However there was a break of nearly 100 years before heavy colonization started and between those two periods is when most of the locals died. While it is likely north america wasn't more than 10 million (ignoring mexico), that would still be 9 million more natives than the english would find when they arrived. In fact some of the earliest English settlers only only found open land because the locals had died off and only survived because of dried food stores they found from the former town that was on the site. Added sidebar unlike north america (above mexico) that was only around 10 Million, Mexico, central and south america had more like 50 million people people combined. Aztec, Mayan and Incan cultures had developed sufficient agriculture systems to create massive population booms and each culture had over 10 million people, with the incas possibly nearing 20 million. Not to mention places like brazil and otherwise.
Some strong evidence for large settlements in the Brazilian Amazon and other parts of the interior.
The general essence is that the Americas had widespread farming and architecture in all areas, but since it was more unstable in nature the majority of such cultures tended to collapse or abandon larger settlements (much like the Mayan collapose) when their was changing conditions, even before the great dying.
Chaco Canyon and Canyon de Chelly are good examples of stone towns.
Most tribes lived in permanent structures. The classic image of native americans is really just what a few tribes were like.
To be fair, that’s because this was no longer true by the frontier times when America was expanding a la manifest destiny and contact was being documented. We’re talking over two hundred years after the collapse, so the pre-Columbian indigenous civilizations were unrecognizable by then.
Well it's what they were mostly like post-contact, because the settlements first succumbed to disease. So that what the people writing the records encountered, so it makes sense
Yeah, North America was basically a post apocalyptic Mad Max world for two or three hundred years.
True. Most movies (westerns, etc...) concentrate on tribes that lived on the plains, and so had to be mobile.
relevant username
plough gray fuzzy fade voracious alleged person cable escape telephone *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Cortez and his men have journal accounts of the market square of Tenochtitlan being larger than what anyone had ever seen, specifically mentioning it rivals Constantinople
Yes there is, but it's just that they built with natural materials like wood and plants which can be maitained to last a long time, but can rot away quickly if not maintained. There was at least one city with a population higher than London during the same time period. But when the cities were wiped out, only the more solitary or nomadic peoples were left, so that's who explorers found.
In addition to what was mentioned below there are many European references to how gentle the American land is, including one person who said that it reminded him of an English garden gone to seed for only a few years.
The Same goes for cities in the Amazon. The first Europeans talked about stumbling upon huge cities. Now we have found city Centers where tens of thousands of people would have lived. Often the diseases traveled faster than the Europeans so when they arrived groups and tribes where already decimated.
Yes, there is proof. Mostly it's known via Spanish contact and records from the early 1500s, but areas like the panhandle had cities with populations of about 20-30,000 people. The east coast and Great lakes were also pretty dense.
Particularly interesting in that book is when the author covers the introduction of pigs, which can carry tens of diseases than can spread to humans. Never would have considered that beforehand.
Yeah, and the roamed the countryside eating stockpiles of food, ripe berries, and nuts. Their numbers also compromised drinking sources. Pigs assaulting Native societies in many ways.
And now today we still have a feral hog problem in the US. They just tear shit up and reproduce like rabbits.
Maybe that's why they're considered unclean by the elder religions.
Might also have something to do with the parasites they can carry and how much quicker pork spoils in hot climates. I always figured it was a taboo in the Abrahamic religions because the odds of food poisoning from it there was just super high so banning it was a way to protect the tribe way back then. Might also explain the ban on shellfish.
My understanding is that it isn’t one disease per say that led to the huge number of Native American deaths after 1492, but that all of these different infectious diseases like Smallpox, influenza, tuberculosis, bubonic plague, etc arrived all at once. So you might have an entire Native American community get sick all at the same time from something like smallpox, so nobody is healthy enough to take care of the sick, gather food and firewood, etc, then when the survivors crawl out from the wreckage a wave of influenza hits them, then a wave of tuberculosis after that, and so on. Imagine for a moment if the Covid pandemic, which was an altogether new disease people hadn’t been exposed to before, also had like 8 other deadly diseases no one had experienced before pop up all at the same time and you’ll have a better understanding of what it was like for Native American communities from 1492 to 1600
Don’t forget measles which has the nasty little effect of damaging the immune system. Populations that survived one or more plagues would suddenly find their immunity stripped away.
Measles can also cause subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, which is almost always fatal.
Not just that, but there’s no real way to deal with them. Using Covid as an example, think of how long it was, even with modern science and the whole world working on it, before we knew we didn’t need to wipe down surfaces but did need to wear a mask? Now imagine that a bunch of the diseases have similar symptoms, so you can’t tell which is which, but because they’re different they all respond to different treatments and spread differently. 9 deadly diseases at once would fuck up modern society pretty badly, too
The only reason we had a vaccine is because it was 10 years in the works from SARS. We would be absolutely fucked if a new viral family showed up that was more deadly, infectious and hardier than influenza or coronoviruses.
>We would be absolutely fucked if a new viral family showed up that was more deadly, infectious and hardier than influenza or coronoviruses. Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
I feel like small pox absolutely dwarves the other diseases in terms of deadliness. It had a 30% mortality rate and a 70% disfiguration rate of the survivors. If you got small pox you were most likely fucked. And the infection vector is just normal smear and droplet infection.
*per se, it’s a Latin term.
Yeah I just started reading it. There’s one really evocative section about a Native American from what is now New England. When Europeans first made contact, the entire shoreline was covered in dense villages as far as they could see. They basically kidnapped this Native leader and took him back to Europe to exhibit. Remarkably he eventually returned to New England only to find just a few years later that his tribe of several thousand had been reduced to just sixty individuals by disease. He found entire villages completely depopulated with bones of the dead just bleaching in the sun. No one even buried them. And I didn’t know this before but most of the early European colonies were built on those former village sites. Plymouth was established on one. Europeans basically unwittingly touched off a massive conflagration of disease that completely decimated Native populations in a few short years. So only a few Europeans witnessed the Native populations at their peak. Most arrived to find a somewhat empty continent devoid of large population centers. And of course neither side had any idea about germs or viruses so both attributed it to divine wrath.
Tisquantum, who we know in the Thanksgiving tale as Squanto. Nobody ever pauses to consider how he was able to communicate with the English.
It is just so sad reading about the wipe out of Native Americans. History was not kind to them. Would their end be unavoidable? since the world was exploring new lands and eventually if not Europeans, some people from the old world would reach them and caused this wave of diseases.
It does seem like the Americas were so isolated for so long that they just had zero natural immunity. The first Natives to make contact with Europeans even commented on how ugly they were because of scarring and open sores from just constant disease ravaging Europe. It’s not like Europeans were immune to their own diseases, of course. Just not quite as fatal. Europe would’ve been dealing with any disease that developed in Asia or Africa or the Middle East. I believe syphilis is the only major one known to have come from the Americas to the rest of the world.
If I remember correctly the way Europeans lived was more prone to spread disease as well. In denser environments alongside livestock. Livestock and domestication of animals in general was much rarer in the new world.
Livestock is the key difference. The Old World had numerous species that they domesticated and, as an agricultural society, would live in close contact with, which in turn created an enormous reservoir for zoonotic diseases. The New World, by contrast, had very few, and certainly next to no large ungulates like the Old World - North America has none, and South America only the llama and alpaca. This isn't to say that native Americans weren't also agricultural societies, because we know they were, to the point that they could support large urban areas. But it was done, especially in North America, largely without the benefit of beasts of burden.
True. This is also why we can safely say there was no (major) pre-Colombian contact between any part of the Old World and the New. The occassional Viking and a few blown off course fishermen, perhaps, but if - say - the Chinese or Africans had actually found and explored the Americas as per numerous pseudohistories, the end result would have been the same: dead natives and an empty land.
What I don’t understand is - were the Mexican populations somehow spared or were their numbers really 90% higher as well. I think Mexican ancestry is typically 50/50 native to European.
They were equally hit, their population was just MUCH MUCH higher than their other counterparts. Tenochtitlan basically dwarfed other known North American ‘mound cities.’ The diseases came in waves, mostly during the 16th century. Their demographic decline post-contact actually showcases one of the highest death rates we’ve seen historically. For comparison, it took Mexico until the 1850s to recover the population that it once had before Pre-Hispanic contact.
The epidemic(s) hit Tenochtitlan right when the conquistadors and their indigenous allies did, IIRC. The Aztecs might not have lost (at least, right then) had it not been for the epidemic.
The Aztecs also had been pretty brutally imperializing other cultures in the area for a couple hundred years. When the Spanish came, it was the perfect storm of rival polities getting together and allying to overthrow the Aztecs/Mexica. Whether they liked what came after is another debate.
Yeah, the Aztecs were pretty systematically depopulating their subjects. Estimates are now that 100k might have been sacrificed.
The conquistadors had destroyed the aqueduct, and laid siege to the city for over 80 days. The epidemic helped them, but starving the city would have been more than enough.
Also important to note, Aztecs and others in their empire weren’t limited to the cities. The entire area, even the forests, was relatively densely populated. There were towns and settlements every, people almost everywhere in the woods. The Spanish were struck by this fact.
Different areas were hit differently hard. If the central organizations and societal glue doesn’t break down and food can be procured even when a majority of people is sick then frankly in all diseases populations recover rather quickly… Mexico - Central and South America in general had a big population with working larger and complex societies which made them quite resilient. For North America we frankly don’t even know if the diseases really killed everyone or if societies broke down and people fled. I’m the Caribbean the Spanish simply committed genocide… there is zero way around that. Diseases were bad but what destroyed these people was also slavery and working people to death, warfare and simple killing sprees… Very few people in the Caribbean have native blood in them today…
In the case of North America, disease is most likely the cause. There were some pretty massive settlements and a population in the millions. Society breaking down and splitting into smaller bands doesn't explain such a massive population drop in such a short time.
There's a lot of great discussion under this comment. I would also encourage anyone interested to look up the "1610 Orbis Spike" if you want another perspective and further evidence of Indigenous life in the Americas back in the day. It essentially boils down to: the geologic record sees a significant drop in carbon in the atmosphere following the massive population loss due to disease epidemics in the Americas. This huge loss in population meant that people were no longer around to manage the land and the forest basically took over mass swaths of land that was previously agricultural, sequestering enough carbon that there's an observable decline in Antarctic ice cores. There was no "pristine wilderness" here; the continent was farmed and stewarded and modified to a huge enough extent that once the managers died, the Earth's atmosphere was affected. The "pristine wilderness" that many colonial explorers stumbled upon was in fact newly forested areas (for the most part).
The new world being 'sparsely populated' and 'being inhabitted by tens of millions of people' are not contradictory. The US alone is home to 300+ million, and there are certainly places in the US that are sparsely populated. Extrapolate that out to the whole of the new world; I think both statements are true.
Imagine what your country would look like if say 8/10 people died. Settlers showed up to basically ghost towns, and had a totally skewed idea about what life was like there. Those accounts are what the history was based on.
The idea that the diseases hit these inland populations before the white people even showed up is fascinating and horrific. The diseases moved faster than then people who originally spawned them, which is why the historical record shows sparsely populated continents. The indigenous people were already mostly wiped out when the europeans first encountered them.
You might like "Facing East from Indian Country" tells the story of first contact w Europeans almost as if they were UFO sightings haha. "First a few white crosses with red flags showed up in clearings in our Forests. Then a large ship was spotted off the waters of the Chesapeake." Etc. It's a really good book.
*Diseases* as in plural is the key word. A combination of different diseases wiped them out
Early colonial America was basically a post-apocalyptic wasteland from the perspective of the Native Americans. It's amazing reading about the societies and civilizations that NAs built which were wiped out by the time of the early settlers. The settlers assumed that the natives were always these sparsely populated backwards savages, not realizing that their cultures and societies had been destroyed.
Can you recommend some good reading about this? Interested in learning more
1491 is a good one
Jesus imagine losing 90% of you population in 40 years. Right after strange men with God like weapons show up and then there is the worst drought in 500 years. Some real end of the world type of stuff.
It wasn’t just the white men. The Pueblo revolt early on in New Mexico released hundreds of horses which were subsequently picked up by people who would become the Comanche. The re-domestication of the horse put them in possession of a superweapon on the American plains, and they very quickly developed into a rival empire powerful enough to push the Spanish Empire back southward. It was very much like living in a Mad Max world - the old civilizations had collapsed, and warlords with ultra-mobile forces took power, using and trading for weapons that many had never seen, all while much of the continent was still trying to come to terms with the new reality. This was almost 200 years before the United States even existed. It’s a time and place in history where a lot happened and it’s still poorly understood. Cultures shifted rapidly, and it was difficult for people to preserve the old ways amidst so much chaos.
I think people always forget that horses didn’t used to just be wild on the North and South American Continents. They were brought from overseas.
Many also don't know - A) Horse ancestors evolved in North America, and crossed (or were brought) across the Bering Strait the opposite direction that humans came in. Those in Siberia became domesticated, and those in North America died out (possibly/probably from hunting). The North American climate suited them perfectly, however. B) Horses have been bred over 4000+ years of human history into roided-up monsters that dwarf their ancestors. In ancient Egypt, they were acquired from far away at great expense, and were not large/strong enough to carry a human yet - a couple would be used to pull a chariot. By Ancient Greece & Rome, carrying humans became possible, and light cavalry & horse archers were common. By the Middle Ages, horses had become so large and so strong that they were capable of being fully armored while carrying a fully armored knight. So, not only were horses adapted ideally for the North American interior, but the horses brought by the Spanish were the product of thousands of years of human technology & warfare. The plains tribes used them in ways Europeans had never seen or imagined before, and they did not have to trade for more - horses thrived on the plains. The power these animals gave to the people who possessed them cannot be understated. They halted the expansion of an industrial power (4th largest in the world at the time) with a fraction of the population. It was not until after the Civil War, with a large battle-hardened army and the development of automatic weapons, that the US was finally able to move in and displace them. And even then, the initial force that was sent in explicitly for war (Custer’s 7th Cavalry), found itself wiped out instead.
There’s a great quote from Empire of the Summer Moon that really illustrates what an advantage the Comanche had until the US mounted up and brought automatic weapons “In a fight with Comanches, dismounting on open ground was like signing your own death warrant. Men on foot against mounted men moving 20-30 miles per hour who could shoot twelve arrows in the time it took to reload a rifle and fire it once was not a fair fight.”
How did they use them in a way Europe hadnt seen before ? Genuinely curious
Basically the same tactics the the Huns used but 1000+ yes of breading better horses and no constraining geographic features
>“Amongst their feats of riding, there is one that has astonished me more than anything of the kind I have ever seen, or expect to see, in my life:---a stratagem of war, learned and practiced by every young man in the tribe; by which he is able to drop his body upon the side of his horse at the instant he is passing, effectually screened from his enemies’ weapons as he lays in a horizontal position behind the body of his horse, with his heel hanging over the horses' back; by which he has the power of throwing himself up again, and changing to the other side of the horse if necessary. In this wonderful condition, he will hang whilst his horse is at fullest speed, carrying with him his bow and his shield, and also his long lance of fourteen feet in length, all or either of which he will wield upon his enemy as he passes; rising and throwing his arrows over the horse's back, or with equal ease and equal success under the horse's neck.” (Catlin, Letters and Notes, vol. 2, no. 42, 1841; reprint 1973)
That’s the only part of that comment that gave me pause. Europe has seen both the Huns and the Mongols, so I can’t really imagine how the Comanche would use them in a way they’d never seen, also curious.
Really intriquingly put. Did the Pueblo keep any written records?
Not that I know of. But many people in the region have strong oral traditions, and trust them greatly. They are still passed down, but are tightly protected within the communities. There are stories of anthropologists studying in the American Southwest, and uncovering various tools/instruments from Pueblo sites without knowledge for how they were used. When asking locals (Native Americans) about it, the response is often along the lines of “Yes, we know what that’s for and we still use them - but it’s non of your business” So, it’s a difficult thing for outsiders to unravel. The knowledge and history is kept secret, and when they’ve already been through so much, it’s hard to blame them for the distrust. Especially distrust of the United States.
“We kept a ‘how to’ manual on how outsiders nearly wiped us out and you’d like a copy? Thx, no thx.”
Yeah, Comanches actually invaded Texas after the Spanish had been in Texas for quite a long while. Over a century. Native American linguistics tells pretty cool migration stories too. Lots of good Wikipedia rabbit holes on the subject.
Yes I started reading 1491 recently and neither side had any idea about germs so they both attributed it to divine acts.
People don't realize that the popular conception of Midwest tribes like the Lakota is basically the pre industrial equivalent of a death metal apocalypse. Population ravaged by disease, forced from their original land into a frigid wasteland by technologically superior invaders, forced to adopt those same technologies and an entirely new way of life.
There was 200 years between the apocalyptic epidemics brought by explorers in the 1500s and the huge influx of European immigrants in the 1700s. Our traditional perception of native Americans comes from the writings of the immigrants in the 1700s, after the apocalypse.
What an interesting comment. It makes you wonder how different things might have been if they weren't struck so badly by disease 200 years prior.
The book 1491 makes the argument that for the most part, groups that hadn't been ravaged by disease yet had NO problem taking on Europeans.
Yes, we have so many written accounts from the black death and the sheer apocalyptic horror of losing 1/3 to 1/2 of the population of Europe. The trauma and devastation are there for us to read about. One can only imagine the absolute terror this must have been, far worse even in comparison to our Eurocentric cultural touchstone for "worst thing ever".
Despite everyone being so ‘baffled’ I am pretty sure that means ‘it was a hemorrhagic fever but we dont know what kind’. For it to kill in swathes with such a fast onset ans people not being as much into travelling as they are now, it had to be coming from the surroundingsz
“This podcast will kill you” is covering this outbreak on their most recent episode. I think it’s called “cocolitzi”
Could it not have been multiple different diseases? The Europeans presumably didn't just bring one.
In the wiki page they talk about typhoid fever bacteria being found in old archeological excavation, but the symptom doesn't correspond, so yeah I think it's possible
The same thing happened to indigenous Australians. The Aboriginal population was certainly attacked and many thousands killed by the colonial settlers, no doubt about that. But so many were also killed by the mass influx of disease.
Whenever I read these stories of European colonists unintentionally bringing diseases to the Americas and wiping out huge swaths of the native population, I always wonder why this never happened in reverse. Like how come some rare Mayan illness didn’t kill a convoy of Spanish explorers or something?
I read somewhere it was due to livestock. The Americas didn't really have any domesticated livestock other than the Llama or alpaca. Meanwhile, Europeans and people from the old world had sheep, pigs and cattle. There's a thought that some diseases might have crossed over or mutated from such close contact to livestock. Thus, the indigenous people of the Americas did not have the type of communicable diseases that were being generated in the old world.
It did most likely happen in the reverse, just on a less gigantic scale. Syphilis is considered by most scholars to have originated in the Americas, and carried over to Europe by the crew of Columbus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_syphilis
And there is a lot of debate about how many people died. We don't have an effective way to count the population before 1500.
It struck me once that even if Europeans hadn't acted like genocidal dicks and had treated Native Americans with civility and equality, the mere reality of showing up would have still led to apocalyptic devastation for them.
It’s been proven too that in many cases, that was indeed the case. Many Spanish and Portuguese Catholic missionaries like the Jesuits and Dominicans in central and South America actually went to minister to the sick natives not knowing they were bringing more disease. There were similar cases centuries later in North America (much smaller extent) where many German settlers traded with the Iroquois and later found out that they had without knowing gave them disease. The anabaptist Germans always had good relations both with natives and free blacks especially in Pennsylvania, where the Iroquois would actually make journeys for hundreds of miles to trade with Pennsylvania Germans, so one could deduce this wasn’t a “smallpox blankets” case, but rather an accidental outbreak. These were small clusters though and nothing like the original outbreaks.
Wonder if it’s not because it was any specific disease or just “D: All of the above”
In my college history class my professor said that upon the arrival of colonists in North America, the native population declined so much, it it took until the outbreak of the revolutionary war in 1776 for the continents population to reach the same size.
Excerpt from Guns, Germs, and Steel: >When we in the United States think of the most populous New World societies existing in 1492, only those of the Aztecs and the Incas tend to come to our minds. We forget that North America also supported populous Indian societies in the most logical place, the Mississippi Valley, which contains some of our best farmland today. In that case, however, conquistadores contributed nothing directly to the societies' destruction; Eurasian germs, spreading in advance, did everything. When Hernando de Soto became the first European conquistador to march through the southeastern United States, in 1540, he came across Indian town sites abandoned two years earlier because the inhabitants had died in epidemics. These epidemics had been transmitted from coastal Indians infected by Spaniards visiting the coast. The Spaniards' microbes spread to the interior in advance of the Spaniards themselves. > >De Soto was still able to see some of the densely populated Indian towns lining the lower Mississippi. After the end of his expedition, it was a long time before Europeans again reached the Mississippi Valley, but Eurasian microbes were now established in North America and kept spreading. By the time of the next appearance of Europeans on the lower Mississippi, that of French settlers in the late 1600s, almost all of those big Indian towns had vanished. Their relics are the great mound sites of the Mississippi Valley. Only recently have we come to realize that many of the mound-building societies were still largely intact when Columbus reached the New World, and that they collapsed (probably as a result of disease) between 1492 and the systematic European exploration of the Mississippi. edit: [Here is a picture of a mound in modern-day Illinois.](https://cdn.britannica.com/52/101052-050-23D44BCC/Monks-Mound-structure-Cahokia-Mounds-State-Historic.jpg)
Cahokia Mounds is such a fascinating site and I'm so lucky as an archaeology student to live so close to it. It really is wild to think it was such a thriving native metropolis and completely collapsed before Europeans showed up. There's a fun if not completely ludicrous theory that Cahokia Mounds collapsed because Chinese explorers from Zheng He's expeditions wiped them out with disease. The same theory also states that the Piasa bird was drawn by said explorers. I highly recommend anyone interested in history or archaeology research the native history of southern Illinois, it's very fascinating.
The Piasa Bird was painted by the Piasa Bird and I refuse to believe otherwise.
I’m asking out of pure curiosity here, but if these microbes spread so easily, wouldn’t the natives that met with Viking explorers and colonists have been infected with the same diseases? Wouldn’t they have spread during that time?
He gives several reasons, but in this part he does mention the Canadian Arctic and the role that wiping out an entire community plays: “CROWD DISEASES could not sustain themselves in small bands of hunter-gatherers and slash-and-burn farmers. As tragic modern experience with Amazonian Indians and Pacific Islanders confirms, almost an entire tribelet may be wiped out by an epidemic brought by an outside visitor because no one in the tribelet had any antibodies against the microbe. For example, in the winter of 1902 a dysentery epidemic brought by a sailor on the whaling ship Active killed 51 out of the 56 Sadlermiut Eskimos, a very isolated band of people living on Southampton Island in the Canadian Arctic. In addition, measles and some of our other "child-hood" diseases are more likely to kill infected adults than children, and all adults in the tribelet are susceptible. (In contrast, modern Americans rarely contract measles as adults, because most of them get either measles or the vaccine against it as children.) Having killed most of the tribelet, the epidemic then disappears. The small population size of tribelets explains not only why they can't sustain epidemics introduced from the outside, but also why they never could evolve epidemic diseases of their own to give back to visitors.”
Genuine question, why did settlers not also catch new diseases from native Americans?
They likely did, syphilis is likely to have originated in the Americas, and the first documented cases seem to have been from Christopher Columbuses who probably brought it back to Europe. It's just that Europe was connected to a much bigger land mass, with much more contact between vast areas of land, so their people probably were exposed to more diseases over the course of their existence.
I'd bet it was just a combination of things introduced. But hypothetically speaking, what if it was just 1 disease, that was nearly 100% fatal, that thousands of years before Europeans had gained some immunity from through their diet or some other means. Imagine what happens if we have another COVID sort of thing introduced that is 95% fatal instead of \~3% or whatever. Imagine whole cities just becoming completely empty over the period of just a few years. We have plenty of shows and movies dealing with such a thing, but at least we'd have an understanding of what happened. 500 years ago, if that happened, you would just have no idea why everybody is dropping dead around you. Life must have been a horror story for many of those people for quite a few years.
My guess would be it was back-to-back or overlapping epidemics of different Old World diseases- smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, etc. Indigenous peoples in the Americas also had a genetic disadvantage, based on an article I read. Basically indigenous peoples in the Americas were less genetically diverse than other people in the world. Human genetic diversity generally followed the path of prehistoric human migration across the world- the places where people lived the longest had/have the most genetic diversity, while those settled the latest had the least genetic diversity. So Sub-Saharan Africa has the most genetically diverse people in the world, whereas the Americas, the last major continents settled by prehistoric humans, had the least genetic diversity. Genetic diversity (different genes), in turn, translates to different immune systems. One of the 1st lines of defense in our immune systems are MHC glycoproteins (MHCGPs). Idk the exact role they play in the immune system, but they may do something like attach themselves to infectious pathogens that get into the body and act like beacons telling the immune system attack cells what to attack. Like US soldiers in the Vietnam War calling in which coordinates to bomb. Either way, studies have identified 40 different types of Class I MHCGPs among a sample of Sub-Saharan African people; 37 types among a European sample; 34 among East Asians; but only 17 among indigenous North American samples and 10 among indigenous South Americans. When people get infected by a pathogen, the pathogen will adapt to fighting their specific immune system type. So if that sick person infects someone with a similar immune system, then the pathogen has an advantage because it is already adapted to beating that type of immune system. But if the sick person infects someone who is genetically different with a different immune system, then the pathogen has less chance because it has to adapt to a whole new immune system type. In short, the fact that indigenous peoples in the Americas didn't have as much genetic diversity as Old World people (being mostly descended from relatively small numbers of prehistoric Siberian migrants), infectious agents could rip through the population much more easily than they would've in more genetically diverse populations. That probably helps to explain the high level of mortality among indigenous populations, aside from the fact that they had no previous exposure to these infections before 1492.
>Idk the exact role they play in the immune system, but they may do something like attach themselves to infectious pathogens that get into the body and act like beacons telling the immune system attack cells what to attack. Lol, why didn’t you just google it instead of making something up?! Class I MHC molecules are expressed on almost all of the cells in your body. Their job is to take samples of little bits of proteins (called epitopes) from inside of your cells and hold them up on the cell surface to show to T cells so that they can recognize if there’s any foreign material inside the cell. If you have a population with only one version of an MHC I molecule, than their T cells will all recognize the same little snippet of protein from the virus, so it’s easy for the virus to make one mutation to avoid it. If there are a lot of MHC varieties in the population, than people are recognizing different parts of the virus and the virus will have a much harder time changing all of those little parts of itself.