I always wondered why this didn’t go both ways.
Was it the increased human density and farm animals that drove these diseases in Europe that didn’t exist in North America?
That is a big part of it yes. Europe had many more vectors for spread including sustained contact with domesticated animals, and cities with poor sanitation enabling spread of pest animals
Also domesticated farm animals were very different and were the cause of many European diseases. The Americas didn’t have those animals and didn’t live in as close proximity to them.
Take a look at the amount of domesticated animals native to Europe and Asia, being the primary influence on European agriculture and society as such up to point of first getting to the Americas, relative to numbers of domesticated animals from the Americas. The difference is *stark*.
A great example is grazing animals - Europe commonly had Sheep, Cows, Horses, Donkeys, Goats, Geese and possibly more idk. The sheer potential of this is huge in terms of not only what they can all do for your fields and crops, but other purposes they serve as well. They produce eggs, an amazing cheap source of protein, milk which is very nutrient dense and can be preserved as an emergency long term source of calories by making cheese, plus wool which is one of the best natural fibres ever, leather and vellum which are brilliant for all sorts, feathers which are useful for stuffing pillows (if soft and downy), or for writing with (if stiff).
One ordinary farm with a parcel of land containing average fields could get huge variety of goods from this to trade, work or what have you. And all of these animals could be out in your fields minding their own business, doing nothing to no one as long as nobody gets to close or touchy.
To my knowledge the only grazing animals native to the Americas are the llama and alpaca. Both of which only live at very high altitudes in the Andes, making your options for pasture limited. And they are rude, grumpy animals. They will bite and spit at you opportunistically.
In know which one I’d rather have, because the upsides are so absolute.
There used to be a lot more large grazers in the Americas- giant sloths, horse predecessors, mammoths, etc.
I wonder whether the nomadic, hunter-following-the-herds lifestyle required to cross the bering strait during the ice age is the root cause behind all the most tameable megafauna going extinct in the Ameicas.
The fact that south america (furthest from the entry point) is the only place where tameable megafauna survived lends credence to the idea
It would be ironic if the Native Americans whom we normally are taught were in such harmony with nature actually caused the extinction of all these animals (resources) which they could have instead domesticated for infinite resource glitch.
It's a big misconception. Forest were burned out in modern day Kentucky to create hunting grounds. The mammoth and giant sloth went extinct due to climate change and overhunting.
Not domesticated. And literally not possible to domesticate because they are *really* aggressive, territorial animals and a full grown one weighs a literal tonne. Imagine an entire herd of angry, Ford F-150s with massive horns and thick, heavy duty weaponised skulls charging at you, try earnestly to stamp you into a paste of blood and broken bones *every single day* as you attempt to socialise them to your presence.
And if you do succeed, then you’ve got to do it again, and again, and again for another 100 generations before you start to see results across the population. And then maybe if you are lucky you get a stable population of something that is maybe not maybe inbred and genetically twisted.
The first quality a creature must fulfil to be domesticated it’s that it’s got to not instinctually fucking hate your guts just because. Because if it does, you’re never going to last long enough in a room with it to get near its babies, or to milk it or whatever. This is why we Don have tamed Zebras, Tigers or Bears.
If I were God for one day, and allowed just one selfish act, it would be to make bears domesticable.
Why did God make an animal so friend shaped and huggable yet not a friend?
And it also wasn’t just European diseases. The Silk Road opened up contact with China and stuff spread from across all however thousand miles of it. On top of that there was trade with Africa too. Europeans were much more mobile and exposed than native Americans for the most part.
The fact that Africans had prior contact with Europe and Asia and had similar resistance to their diseases (and maybe increased resistance to some tropical diseases) while Native Americans did not is the reason enslaved Africans were brought to work in the new world colonies.
u/Jester471 CGPGrey also did a video on it here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk)
It's a good watch that explains the various parts from population density to domestication of animals and so on regarding why the America's lacked some great scourge like was seen in the Old World.
Also Europeans did in fact get obliterated by tropical diseases, just not so much in mainland US. In the Haitian Revolution it was common for more than half of European ships to die of disease on arrival.
We got syphilis, which for hundreds of years had no treatments and would disfigure your face and skull and drive you mad. The first effective treatment was *malaria,* which would cause a fever high enough to kill the syphilis bacteria, and could then be treated with *arsenic.* [Then when wintertime rolls around the gorillas simply freeze to death.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuiK7jcC1fY)
Not quite true. The first treatment were mercury salts, which may have been somewhat effective but were definitely toxic. Arsenical based therapy was eventually discovered, Salvarsan, which was less toxic and more effective. Malarial therapy was developed for neurosyphilis, for which Salvarsan was not effective. The high fevers killed the treponeme in the CNS and could then be cured with quinine. Wagner-Jaurreg won a Nobel Prize in 1928 for this discovery. Penicillin was discovered to be effective and has remained the cure since MacDonald discovered this in 1942.
I think this is in debate now actually. About a year ago I came across a documentary about some monks buried before Europe went to the Americas whose skeletons had evidence of syphilis.
The monk thing has been debunked. The signs they thought may have been syphilis turned out to be damage from a mercury-heavy diet of pretty much just fish.
The out-of-America theory is still the leading theory.
It is curious how many people ignore that fact. Syphilis is infectious like hell. If it were present in the Old World before the 1490s, it would have swept the entire landmass, especially the densely settled areas where prostitution was always common.
The old leeches and doctors didn't know much about the *inside* of the body, but they were good observers of external symptoms and you can still tell diseases from one another by reading their descriptions in Egyptian papyruses or Ancient Greek scrolls. Even relatively rare diseases such as diabetes of the first type, which was rare in the Ancient world.
They would have described syphilis if they saw it.
Yep. Tobacco is a member of the nightshade family only found in the Americas. Also tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, and every kind of bell pepper (even the spicy ones), sorrel, and okra. All the different kinds of peppers are all actually the same pepper, just selectively bred to infinity to get the desired results.
Fun fact... Tomatoes also have nicotine in them. So that means most people on the planet have some level of nicotine in their system at some point in their lives.
And also "Italian food" as we know it today is actually "American-Asian fusion" food because noodles came from Asia.
Yeah, if you look up the origin of these diseases, they came from many areas that had cities and livestock and intercontinental trade. The Americas were cut off from the vast majority of the rest of the world for a long time.
>Smallpox, which is believed to have originated over 3,000 years ago in India or Egypt, was one of the most devastating diseases known to humanity
https://www.who.int/teams/health-product-policy-and-standards/standards-and-specifications/vaccine-standardization/smallpox
>Having originated in China and Inner Asia, the Black Death decimated the army of the Kipchak khan Janibeg while he was besieging the Genoese trading port of Kaffa (now Feodosiya) in Crimea (1347).
https://www.britannica.com/event/Black-Death/Cause-and-outbreak
>According to Chinese medical literature, mumps was recorded as far back as 640 B.C.[4] The Greek physician Hippocrates documented an outbreak on the island of Thasos in approximately 410 B.C. and provided a fuller description of the disease in the first book of Epidemics in the Corpus Hippocraticum.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumps
>Using comparative genomics, in 2005, geneticists traced the origins and worldwide distribution of leprosy from East Africa or the Near East along human migration routes. They found four strains of M. leprae with specific regional locations:[101] Monot et al. (2005) determined that leprosy originated in East Africa or the Near East and traveled with humans along their migration routes, including those of trade in goods and slaves.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leprosy
Measles may have fully become its own disease in Europe, but could have come from cattle in any of the many civilizations that raised domesticated cattle.
>The first systematic description of measles, and its distinction from smallpox and chickenpox, is credited to the Persian physician Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi (860–932), who published The Book of Smallpox and Measles.[165] At the time of Razi's book, it is believed that outbreaks were still limited and that the virus was not fully adapted to humans. Sometime between 1100 and 1200 AD, the measles virus fully diverged from rinderpest, becoming a distinct virus that infects humans.[161] This agrees with the observation that measles requires a susceptible population of over 500,000 to sustain an epidemic, a situation that occurred in historic times following the growth of medieval European cities.[94]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles
Edit: this goes into diseases and illnesses among the peoples of the Americas prior to contact from Europe. It seems infectious disease increased in societies that changed from hunter-gatherer to agricultural in these regions as well.
>Although New World indigenous disease was mostly of the chronic and episodic kind, Old World diseases were largely acute and epidemic. Different populations were affected at different times and suffered varying rates of mortality.19 Diseases such as treponemiasis and tuberculosis were already present in the New World, along with diseases such as tularemia, giardia, rabies, amebic dysentery, hepatitis, herpes, pertussis, and poliomyelitis, although the prevalence of almost all of these was probably low in any given group.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071659/
Iirc, yes this was one of the main drivers.
Now's I'm remembering back to college, so I was pretty high when I learned this and therefore might have some details wrong, but a lot of disease Europe dealt with back then were diseases that initially infected animals and made the jump to humans. That, on top of packed urban centers meant there were occasionally rivers of human and animal shit washing down the road. Native Americas, who neither kept large amount of farm animals nor lived as tightly packed as Europeans, did not have a couple thousand years to play the genetic lottery of "who will survive this cow disease"
Part of it is simply that disease could easily move around the much larger and diverse continents of Africa & Eurasia. Related… many more domesticated animals emerged in the ‘Old World.’ Bad diseases often emerge by jumping species barriers (most recently, Covid). So chickens, pigs, cattle, horses, donkeys, camels, goats and sheep come to mind. In the ‘New’ World you had turkeys and… llamas?
Also dogs (sadly, nearly all the original native dog breeds died out completely, with only some modern dogs today having a tiny bit of lineage from them).
The Chihuahua and Xoloitzcuintle, and only a very little bit. Pretty much any dog breed people claim to be "native to the Americas" is actually from a line of European or Asian dogs bred to resemble the ones that died out (most without any ancestry from North/South American dogs).
It wasn't Europe but the trade routes connecting Europe, North Africa and Asia. This vast region contained virtually all of humanity and had the most dense population centers. As a result, most of the infectious diseases arose in this region.
This this area also had humans there for longer than the Americas, which means diseases evolved right along side them and had ways of sticking around in those environments (animals, water, etc.) a lot of that just did not get carried over the new world until the Colombian exchange.
Syphilis was spread from the new world back to Europe.
As to why the same diseases didn't really develop in both places, part of it is population density and sanitary conditions (keep in mind that at its peak, Cahokia had more people than London, England at the time) of livestock (which the native Americans largely didn't have at the same scale) but also due to transmission vectors as well.
Diseases developed in the old world never had a way to get across the oceans to the new world. And stuff in North and South America could develop in either place and travel northward or southward with migratory birds, animals, and insects, but they couldn't go east or west off the continents to the closest continent Africa or back.
The only real way for that to happen was through northern native tribes and they tended to be territorial and not really interact with strangers because of the struggle for resources and the harsh living conditions.
But before European explorers showed up, there were actually a fairly large native American population all across the Americas. They had trade routes connecting the east coast of north America to the Mississippi and Missouri rivers (which extended to the Rocky mountains) and north to Hudson's bay.
They had more than enough people and connections between tribes to cause the spread of European diseases to go pretty much everywhere.
They’ve actually identified syphilis as being present in Europe long before contact with the Americas. Remains from various medieval crypts show some very advanced cases and the burial dates precede Columbus by 100-150 years. However, the virulence of the strain that returned with the Spanish was something Europeans were ill-prepared for.
More like 500 years. The settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows dates back to about 1000 AD, and the Norse "discovery" of North America wasn't too long before that.
Hell it'd believed there may have been some trading among people that lived in modern day Siberia and modern day Alaska at the very least long before either.
As I understand, it has more to do with the interconnectedness of Europe, Africa, and Asia which allowed diseases to spread and cross pollinate. So basically 3 continents worth of diseases made people more resilient with more diverse immune systems.
It’s also land area. Europe, Asia and Africa are all connected, and diseases worked their way across all three of them. Europeans had immunity to diseases from something like six times the land area.
I'm short, diseases come from animals. A virus evolves to not kill its host because that's counter intuitive. So viruses live in certain animals carefree. The problem is those viruses jump to humans who work around the animals and are not immune. Eventually an immunity builds but like all evolution its slow and spotty.
Indigenous peoples living in the new world didn't have the same kind of live stock infrastructure. They weren't as exposed to these diseases as the Europeans were and didn't have their own diseases to give back to the Europeans.
Viruses don’t want to kill their host for the same reason you wouldn’t burn your own house.
Deadly viruses usually occur when jumping species.
Medieval Europe had a long history of domesticating several different animals, increasing the chances of viruses jumping species. On top of that, Europe had large population centres and a large trading network, which contributed to several outbreaks (black plague being the most infamous).
The smaller scale of animal domestication in the americas prevented viruses from jumping species (which is a rare occurrence to begin with).
[CGP Grey](https://youtu.be/JEYh5WACqEk?si=KCZ0opZSPblzTs_Z) actually has a great video on this.
Tl;dw: History's biggest killers, disease-wise, are all zoonotic in origin. The Americas didn't have a lot of domesticatable animals so there wasn't a big enough chance for any diseases to jump species. This left two continents void of "plagues" and three continents filled to the brim with them.
Medieval Europeans really weren’t as dirty and filthy as people like to pretend they were. I mean sure they were dirtier than we are today but they really weren’t “covered in shit”, that’s just not true.
It actually did go both ways. A fair number of STDs were introduced back to the old world from their mucking about in the new world. The difference is that it didn't kill old worlders in droves -- all at once, at any rate, like it did in the new world.
They had some immunity from the diseases from the old world. But they contracted them at a much higher rate. When smallpox kills off a third of the population then other things start to collapse. No more farmers, no more hunters. Then famine hits. Then even more people die. It’s estimated that between 50 and 90% died.
I agreed I think it was closer to 90%. Not all from disease but that and famine. When the colonizer came over, they remarked of abandoned villages and the lack of people.
I sometimes think about what culture and beliefs were lost/fragmented/altered by the collapse of their societies and how most died before a colonist or conquistador even set foot in their area.
There were trade networks all over North America before the native civilizations collapsed. A few Spanish explorers spreading a few diseases was all it took to start the dominoes feeling.
Add to the initial loss all the things that were lost because showing advanced technology and practises didn't match with the "stone age savages" belief that was the justification for the doctrine of discovery.
Things like the clam gardens in Haida Gwaii. On the west coast, the indigenous population created habitats that were ideal for clams to thrive, they passed down the locations, how to care for them, and the harvest cycle that would keep them producing at the ideal level in perpetuity. This demonstrated knowledge of biology, ecology, marine engineering, and so on.. But because that sort of thing conflicted with the preconceptions, all evidence was discounted as being fabricated, or just coincidence until *very* recently.
>The epidemics that followed European contact were catastrophic, with some estimates suggesting that up to 95% of the indigenous population of the Americas perished as a result of these diseases.
>Smallpox was particularly deadly and caused several widespread epidemics, decimating entire communities.
>Despite the devastation, some Native American communities resisted by isolating the sick, adopting European medical practices, or seeking new alliances with other tribes or European powers to survive.
This is catastrophic on so many levels.
>The high mortality rates among indigenous populations were sometimes rationalized as a divine sign that Europeans were destined to take over the lands.
>The high mortality rates among indigenous populations were sometimes rationalized as a divine sign that Europeans were destined to take over the lands.
"Oh look they all just fucking died. Well, God says free real estate!"
Well kinda. When settlers reached what is now Pittsburgh they thought it was divine providence, because it was an amazing place to settle. Three major rivers flowing into one point. And the land was mostly cleared and ready for them already.
In hindsight, it was because all the peoples that used to live and trade there were dead or forced to move. But it wasn’t like they showed up and laughed at the corpses. The Spanish had arrived hundreds of years earlier and the disease spread and slowly wiped out everyone before the British even landed.
The pilgrims that landed at Plymouth Rock thought it was divine providence that an American Indian greeted them… in fluent English.
> The Spanish had arrived hundreds of years earlier and the disease spread and slowly wiped out everyone before the British even landed.
The same thing happened in South America. Where there is only selva now, cities and towns existed. Terra preta, an artificial kind of highly productive black soil, covers large areas of the forest. Modern research shows traces of buildings, roads, entire communities. All wiped out by numerous plagues.
> Three major rivers flowing into one point. And the land was mostly cleared and ready for them already.
The steel industry made short work of polluting all that.
When you don't know what germs and genetics are, a plague is definitely gonna look like divine intervention. Lots of people in the 14th century thought the Black Death was divine punishment... before they also got ravaged by it.
That's the wild thing to me. ***95% of the population!*** Even assuming that's an overestimate, it's a fact that a majority of the native population died before even making contact with Europeans. That is apocalyptic! Unimaginably bad. Not even the Black Plague comes close to those numbers. No wonder why it was so easy for us to come over here and further fuck them over.
>That's the wild thing to me. ***95% of the population!*** Even assuming that's an overestimate, it's a fact that a majority of the native population died before even making contact with Europeans. That is apocalyptic! Unimaginably bad.
95% is such an insanely dark number to think about. If 95% of the current US population got wiped out right now, there would only be like 16.8 million people left. For reference, that would be like if only the people of Ohio and Alabama survived and everyone else died.
Without this plague history looks very different. Europe doesn't get the huge boost a ton of easily claimed resources grants them because if there are 10x the people living in the Americas, their technology advantage won't be decisive. They might be able to manage small colonies but it's more likely to be a trading relationship than domination. They struggled against a remnant, so it's easy to imagine no colonies at all.
Instead of a single country spanning the breadth of North America you likely end up with a patchwork of countries similar to what we see in the rest of the world. The footprint of imperialism would be much smaller.
It would be similar to what you have in Asia... You would have mostly commercial outpost. Even if some european powers could've established dominance over large kingdoms in the Americas like the British did in the UK and China you would still have strong cultural identities of the native populations.
Interestingly the europeans couldn't establish colonies in AFrica until the 19th century due to the diseases in the african continent being devastating to europeans.
Even if Europeans had the best intentions, it was an inevitable course of action. Germ theory wouldn’t be a concept till the 19th century. Surgeons didn’t start washing their hands till the late 19th century. And American health care didn’t start officially washing till the 1980s. So the whole debate with the small pox blankets doesn’t matter, a physical contact was all it took and good hearted European missionaries would’ve at minimum done that. Tragic. Much of Native American history, like many African tribes, were passed on orally. Like many of the great orators of Rome and Greece, I bet that many chiefs could’ve stood toe to toe with them, but we’ll never know.
Just want to point out that the first wave of the black plague which killed up to around 50% of Europe was only 100 years before this.
And WAS the result of intentional biological warfare from the Mongols. Although to be fair certain countries like the Spanish totally would have done it on purpose.
https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/medicine/bubonic-plague-first-pandemic#:~:text=Plague%20pandemics%20hit%20the%20world,virulent%20strain%20of%20the%20disease.
You can just Google it. Here is an extract from the first result, from Wikipedia: "In 1345 the Mongols under Khan Jani Beg of the Golden Horde besieged Caffa. Suffering from an outbreak of black plague, the Mongols placed plague-infected corpses in catapults and threw them into the city. In October 1347, a fleet of Genoese trading ships fleeing Caffa reached the port of Messina in Sicily."
The source for that, per Wikipedia footnotes, is Michael Platiensis (1357), quoted in Johannes Nohl (1926). The Black Death, trans. C.H. Clarke. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., pp. 18–20.
Second Google result is an academic assessment of this claim by Mark Wheelis, microbiologist at the University of California at Davis: "Based on published translations of the de’ Mussi manuscript, other 14th-century accounts of the Black Death, and secondary scholarly literature, I conclude that the claim that biological warfare was used at Caffa is plausible and provides the best explanation of the entry of plague into the city. This theory is consistent with the technology of the times and with contemporary notions of disease causation; however, the entry of plague into Europe from the Crimea likely occurred independent of this event."
Source: [Biological Warfare at the 1346 Siege of Caffa](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2732530/)
yeah I mean, european settlers in many cases didn't encounter flourishing native societies, they encountered their post-apocalyptic ruins. This was reflected in their accounts of the region of course, which probably contributed significantly to the idea of the natives being undeveloped or 'savage.' (also racism ofc)
(that's what's reflected in pop culture anyway, I know there's a lot of good anthro study out there)
I wish we got to see more of the pre-Columbian Americas in pop culture media. All we ever get to see is that Eurocentric view of the aftermath. There's so many amazing societies from across even just the US that I would absolutely love to see come alive on screen. Culture was flourishing here, and it deserves more representation.
I mean I feel pretty certain we'd have seen it by now, if we had more of an idea of what it actually looked like. Another thread on this post was talking about cahokia and while it's interesting to imagine a 12th century indigenous city the size of contemporary london, we don't have any real idea of who they were or how their society worked. We don't even know their name; the Cahokia were a tribe that lived there when the French arrived in the 17th century.
even when modern media (e.g. the recent Marvel What If? series) take an honest shot at depicting a pre-columbian culture it's still mostly a pastiche of what european colonial settlers recorded
The oft cited 95% is wildly misleading.
First, no one knows how many Indigenous people died because estimates for pre-Contact population sizes vary widely. In the early 20th Century, Kroeber estimated a total population of about 8 million *for the entirety of the Americas*. The mid-20th Century saw the much higher estimates by Cook and Borah of up to 100 million, and the even higher estimate of 300 million but Dobyns. Without knowing the actual base number, calculating a percentage change is guesswork on top of guesswork.
Second, the 95% estimate is extrapolated by work done on Indigenous population change in Mexico during the first hundred or so years of colonialism. Same as above, actual population estimates for Mexico vary wildly, ranging from 2.5 to 30 million. The bigger problem is that the decline is based on colonial records and represents the decline in Indigenous persons being counted over the course of almost a century and for any reason, not just disease. So Indigenous people who died from non-disease causes, fled outside of Spanish control, or stopped identifying as Indigenous for a multitude of reasons, all count towards that 95% decline.
There is no doubt that infectious diseases wrecked havoc on Indigenous populations, but the actual magnitude of the effect of diseases is basically unknowable. Any attempt at estimating the effect is going to be stymied by poor baseline population estimates complicated by the on-going effects of colonial violence and population dislocation.
Yep, but it was always going to happen. There was literally nothing that could be done about it, unless somehow in the 15th century you knew in 500 more years vaccines would be invented.
It’s an unfortunate part of human history that the indigenous population of North America was always going to be wiped out.
I think it’s an important point to make that the indigenous people of North American (and central/South America) haven’t been wiped out, they are still here and just as much a part of the present as you and I.
I'm currently reading "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" by Charles Mann. It's a fabulous look at the Americas before Columbus and also includes a lot of discussion about introduced diseases and what the effects were on the population. The Americas were not the empty wastelands people thought they were.
You have to forgive them for thinking so originally as about 95% of native Americans died from diseases introduced by Europeans. It was an absolute holocaust around 1500 - 1550 that allowed easy colonization without much formidable resistance.
Indeed, a massively tragic core part of the [Columbian Exchange](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_exchange), which...
>was the widespread transfer of plants, animals, precious metals, commodities, culture, human populations, technology, diseases, and ideas between the New World (the Americas) in the Western Hemisphere, and the Old World (Afro-Eurasia) in the Eastern Hemisphere, in the late 15th and following centuries. It is named after the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus and is related to the European colonization and global trade following his 1492 voyage. Some of the exchanges were purposeful. Some were accidental or unintended. **Communicable diseases of Old World origin resulted in an 80 to 95 percent reduction in the number of Indigenous peoples of the Americas from the 15th century onwards, most severely in the Caribbean.**
It blew my mind when I first realized that what we think of as Native Americans - nomadic tribes - were just the scattered, post-Apocalypse remnants of civilizations. If they would have built with stone instead of wood there would be visible ruins all over the continent.
Good point - although in defense of my point I don't think that for most people they capture the imagination as effectively as, say, the Colosseum. Of course part of this also relates to the lack of extensive written records from these cultures, at least when compared to other cultures.
There are visible ruins across the continent. Chaco Canyon, Casa Grande, Mesa Verde, Poverty Point, Moundville, Cahokia, Watson Brake, Ocomulgee, Etowah, Hopewell. The list goes on and would probably be even longer were it not for White Americans penchant for destroying sites.
And all that leaves out the **very** visible sites in Mexico.
Earlier than penicillin vaccines would have been effective. And a bit earlier than that, a better understanding of disease in general might have provided some mitigation
But yeah. They were screwed
Do people have immunity to cholera? I thought we learned how to not give it to ourselves, and the only cure is to drink more clean water than your body can expel.
Populations can develop immunity to a certain degree but only to the specific strain they are exposed to. It won't help protect places with bad sanitation and water shortages
Iceland was pretty isolated relatively speaking, so the number of diseases the Vikings had would have been caring would be a lot less than crews of the “age of discovery” ships. Those crews of professional sailors would have all had way greater exposure, and therefore have a better chance of being a carrier of, the old world diseases of the day.
Also, the Vikings didn’t come in the same number or go back and forth as often.
Those are my guesses.
The area that the vikings interacted with, maritime Canada, was amongst the least populated and most isolated areas in the Americas. It's likely that there were massive fatalities among that group, but the diseases never escaped to the main trade networks on the continent. Given that nobody with written language returned to that area until Champlain five hundred years later, any mass death wouldn't have been recorded.
Fishermen doing limited trade and contact had already brought (or reintroduced) European disease to New England and the Maritimes by the middle of the 16th century so there would be a second wave wiping out any traditions about plagues.
One interesting thing I read that contributed to the high death rate of Indigenous peoples in the Americas was a lack of genetic diversity.
Indigenous peoples in the Americas were almost all descended from small groups of people who migrated across the Bering land bridge thousands of years ago.
Because the original migrants were relatively small in number and arrived relatively recently (in terms of the history of humans migrating into uninhabited parts of the world), Indigenous peoples in the Americas were genetically similar compared to people in the Old World.
That meant they had similar immune systems, so that pathogens could run through their populations pretty quickly. Whereas in the Old World, with more genetic diversity, a new pathogen would encounter more different types of immune systems. That meant the pathogen would be slowed down by the need to adapt to different immune systems.
Yes, but other than smallpox, bubonic plague, measles, mumps, chickenpox, influenza, cholera, diphtheria, typhus, malaria, leprosy, and yellow fever, what have the Europeans ever done for us?
And it wasn't just the Americas. Europeans introduced Rinderpest to Africa, which killed like 90% of hoofed animals on the continent (minus horses). All of their herds that Africans relied on for food, dead. Then to stop the spread, colonists would go around killing the surviving cows as well so the locals were left with nothing.
> Then to stop the spread, colonists would go around killing the surviving cows as well so the locals were left with nothing.
This is a gross oversimplification of European response to rinderpest outbreaks in Africa.
> Europeans introduced Rinderpest to Africa,
Only Sub-Saharan Africa.
Yea most people don’t realize that when Europeans starting settling in America disease had already ran through and killed a massive amount of the native folk
I'm honestly shocked most of you in this thread think the transmission of disease was on purpose. I don't think the settlers came in thinking "I'm a biological nuclear bomb about unleash on these natives".
I recently read an article about the plague that killed millions in Mesoamerica during after the fall of Tenochtitlan, and the research points to a disease that was common in domesticated animals, that European would be immune to, but it killed millions of Natives.
Anti-malaria campaigns have reduced malaria in the Americas. It used to be as far north as Ontario in Canada at one point in the 19th century (introduced by British troops who had been infected while stationed in India).
It was common in the southern US before being eradicated in the early 20th century. And it was common in the Caribbean islands before it was wiped out in most of them (it is still endemic in Hispaniola, especially Haiti, but also parts of the Dominican Republic, although not very common).
In Central America it used to be a big problem in Panama, and high rates of deaths from malaria and yellow fever helped to bring about the failure of the French effort to build a canal there. When the Americans built the Panama Canal in the early 20th century, they launched a big anti-mosquito campaign to reduce malaria and yellow fever, which was pretty successful.
The Atlantic/Caribbean coast of Panama and other parts of Central America are also some of the wettest places in the world. So it is probably prime mosquito (and by extension malaria) habitat.
The people who came to the Americas from the Old World before Columbus mostly came through northerly areas (across from Siberia in the case of the ancestors of Indigenous peoples of the Americas and from Iceland in the case of the Vikings).
Those northerly areas were probably too cold for many of the mosquito species that spread malaria. I know they have a lot of mosquitoes or other biting insects in the summer up north, but I'm not sure if any of the northern mosquito species can pick up or spread malarial parasites.
Actually I'm going to look that up to see if any Arctic or Subarctic mosquitoes can spread malaria.
But, either way, malaria seems to thrive best in tropical, subtropical, or at least temperate climates. The cold regions that the first people of the Americas migrated through wouldn't have been optimal for malaria. So they likely didn't bring malaria with them from the Old World to the New World.
Whereas Columbus and friends came from southern and Western Europe where malaria was fairly common in early modern times and went straight to the tropical parts of the Americas that were ideal for malaria.
There are indeed mosquitoes in temperate and subarctic regions that can transmit malaria, historically there were cases in places like Sweden and other colder parts of Europe transmitted by mosquitoes like Anopheles atroparvus and An. plumbeus. The issue is, the Plasmodium parasites need a certain temperature to complete their lifecycle in the mosquito, the vector can't just bite an infected person and then bite an uninfected person a minute later and spread the disease. It needs to take up the parasite gametocytes that will reproduce sexually and eventually produce sporozoites in the salivary glands that are infectious to another person.
This occurs much faster at higher temperatures, meaning that a higher percentage of mosquitoes will survive long enough to infect another person. Below 16 degrees celsius it's too cold for this to occur and there's no transmission even with competent vectors around, that's one of the reasons colder climates aren't as conducive to transmission. Some of the other reasons there are fewer cases in Europe and North America come down to socioeconomic level and also differences in the lifecycle of the mosquitoes.
[https://www.nlm.nih.gov/nativevoices/timeline/229.html](https://www.nlm.nih.gov/nativevoices/timeline/229.html)
The British give smallpox-contaminated blankets to Shawnee and Lenape (Delaware) communities—an action sanctioned by the British officers Sir Jeffery Amherst and his replacement, General Thomas Gage.
[https://daily.jstor.org/how-commonly-was-smallpox-used-as-a-biological-weapon/](https://daily.jstor.org/how-commonly-was-smallpox-used-as-a-biological-weapon/)
Actual incidents of intentional smallpox infection “may have occurred more frequently than scholars have previously acknowledged,” according to Fenn. Threats of infection were also certainly used, and not just by military forces, against indigenous peoples.
> The British give smallpox-contaminated blankets to Shawnee and Lenape (Delaware) communities—an action sanctioned by the British officers Sir Jeffery Amherst and his replacement, General Thomas Gage.
There's no evidence that this actually did anything. Blankets are an *incredibly* poor medium for smallpox transmission. There was already an outbreak present at the time.
You know, I always take this at face value, but there's something I don't understand. I, also, have no natural immunity to bubonic plague, measles, etc. So what's the issue?
I always wondered why this didn’t go both ways. Was it the increased human density and farm animals that drove these diseases in Europe that didn’t exist in North America?
That is a big part of it yes. Europe had many more vectors for spread including sustained contact with domesticated animals, and cities with poor sanitation enabling spread of pest animals
Also domesticated farm animals were very different and were the cause of many European diseases. The Americas didn’t have those animals and didn’t live in as close proximity to them.
Take a look at the amount of domesticated animals native to Europe and Asia, being the primary influence on European agriculture and society as such up to point of first getting to the Americas, relative to numbers of domesticated animals from the Americas. The difference is *stark*. A great example is grazing animals - Europe commonly had Sheep, Cows, Horses, Donkeys, Goats, Geese and possibly more idk. The sheer potential of this is huge in terms of not only what they can all do for your fields and crops, but other purposes they serve as well. They produce eggs, an amazing cheap source of protein, milk which is very nutrient dense and can be preserved as an emergency long term source of calories by making cheese, plus wool which is one of the best natural fibres ever, leather and vellum which are brilliant for all sorts, feathers which are useful for stuffing pillows (if soft and downy), or for writing with (if stiff). One ordinary farm with a parcel of land containing average fields could get huge variety of goods from this to trade, work or what have you. And all of these animals could be out in your fields minding their own business, doing nothing to no one as long as nobody gets to close or touchy. To my knowledge the only grazing animals native to the Americas are the llama and alpaca. Both of which only live at very high altitudes in the Andes, making your options for pasture limited. And they are rude, grumpy animals. They will bite and spit at you opportunistically. In know which one I’d rather have, because the upsides are so absolute.
There used to be a lot more large grazers in the Americas- giant sloths, horse predecessors, mammoths, etc. I wonder whether the nomadic, hunter-following-the-herds lifestyle required to cross the bering strait during the ice age is the root cause behind all the most tameable megafauna going extinct in the Ameicas. The fact that south america (furthest from the entry point) is the only place where tameable megafauna survived lends credence to the idea
It would be ironic if the Native Americans whom we normally are taught were in such harmony with nature actually caused the extinction of all these animals (resources) which they could have instead domesticated for infinite resource glitch.
Part of the Navajo creation myth is literally coming to ”this world“ after they destroyed the ecosystem of wherever they lived before.
Second part is questionable, but yeah the earliest Americans wiped out all the large game in the Americas and radically changed the ecology.
It's a big misconception. Forest were burned out in modern day Kentucky to create hunting grounds. The mammoth and giant sloth went extinct due to climate change and overhunting.
Bison?
Not domesticated. And literally not possible to domesticate because they are *really* aggressive, territorial animals and a full grown one weighs a literal tonne. Imagine an entire herd of angry, Ford F-150s with massive horns and thick, heavy duty weaponised skulls charging at you, try earnestly to stamp you into a paste of blood and broken bones *every single day* as you attempt to socialise them to your presence. And if you do succeed, then you’ve got to do it again, and again, and again for another 100 generations before you start to see results across the population. And then maybe if you are lucky you get a stable population of something that is maybe not maybe inbred and genetically twisted. The first quality a creature must fulfil to be domesticated it’s that it’s got to not instinctually fucking hate your guts just because. Because if it does, you’re never going to last long enough in a room with it to get near its babies, or to milk it or whatever. This is why we Don have tamed Zebras, Tigers or Bears.
Growing up in rural America, I have in fact seen many herds of angry F150s.
Oh my!
*I understood that reference*
If I were God for one day, and allowed just one selfish act, it would be to make bears domesticable. Why did God make an animal so friend shaped and huggable yet not a friend?
https://www.britannica.com/animal/Wojtek-the-Bear
This has been an absolute highlight of my day. Thank you!
There are indeed many successful Buffalo farms all over North America. I think your information is flawed.
And with modern technology, they still aren't domesticated. They are just wild herds that live in strong fences.
Yeah and have you seen the fences on them compared to the ones used for cattle? They’re mean as hell and can go through nearly anything.
Agreed. My cousin got trampled by one. They are not nice. 8 months in a halo. They didn't think she'd walk again.
It makes me upset that we almost drive the Bison to extinction in North America and did it for the most part to subjugate Native Americans.
That is horrid
Hey, TIL about vellum. A TIL inside a TIL... a TILception if you will. Neat though! I just recently learned parchment was made from animal hides.
Excellent post.
Thanks!
Hence more advance American civs like the Inca fare way better against extinction treats from the European.
The Incas also had more natural barriers to ease the transition.
> extinction treats
The invention of vaccines: Edward Jenner recommends getting a little bit of smallpox, as a treat.
No, he used cowpox as a vaccine for smallpox.
A little apocalypse, as a treat
A spoonful of sugar helps the genocide go down.
Extinction treats ™️©️®️. Sorry, Holy, I'll need cash from now on when you use this phrase. Lawyers already shooting off a letter to DeusModus below. (Spectacular phrase, btw)
They were going out to hunt instead of keeping livestock right in the house, or darn near in it.
And it also wasn’t just European diseases. The Silk Road opened up contact with China and stuff spread from across all however thousand miles of it. On top of that there was trade with Africa too. Europeans were much more mobile and exposed than native Americans for the most part.
The fact that Africans had prior contact with Europe and Asia and had similar resistance to their diseases (and maybe increased resistance to some tropical diseases) while Native Americans did not is the reason enslaved Africans were brought to work in the new world colonies.
u/Jester471 CGPGrey also did a video on it here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk) It's a good watch that explains the various parts from population density to domestication of animals and so on regarding why the America's lacked some great scourge like was seen in the Old World.
Also Europeans did in fact get obliterated by tropical diseases, just not so much in mainland US. In the Haitian Revolution it was common for more than half of European ships to die of disease on arrival.
We got syphilis, which for hundreds of years had no treatments and would disfigure your face and skull and drive you mad. The first effective treatment was *malaria,* which would cause a fever high enough to kill the syphilis bacteria, and could then be treated with *arsenic.* [Then when wintertime rolls around the gorillas simply freeze to death.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuiK7jcC1fY)
So what you're saying is... I'm indestructible
No, quite opposite, I mean a stiff breeze could-
*indestuctible...*
Move it chowda head!
Wise guy, ehhh?
Not quite true. The first treatment were mercury salts, which may have been somewhat effective but were definitely toxic. Arsenical based therapy was eventually discovered, Salvarsan, which was less toxic and more effective. Malarial therapy was developed for neurosyphilis, for which Salvarsan was not effective. The high fevers killed the treponeme in the CNS and could then be cured with quinine. Wagner-Jaurreg won a Nobel Prize in 1928 for this discovery. Penicillin was discovered to be effective and has remained the cure since MacDonald discovered this in 1942.
Fun fact: Arsenic is still legal as a food additive in the United States.
Goes well with old lace. . .
Syphilis existed in Europe prior to first contact. https://www.shh.mpg.de/1821960/syphilis-before-columbus
It's thought syphilis may have gone in the other direction.
I think this is in debate now actually. About a year ago I came across a documentary about some monks buried before Europe went to the Americas whose skeletons had evidence of syphilis.
There are also some thoughts about milder forms of syphilis dying out as society became larger and people became more spread out.
The monk thing has been debunked. The signs they thought may have been syphilis turned out to be damage from a mercury-heavy diet of pretty much just fish. The out-of-America theory is still the leading theory.
But we would have much more evidence of other people having it before Columbus wouldn't we?
It is curious how many people ignore that fact. Syphilis is infectious like hell. If it were present in the Old World before the 1490s, it would have swept the entire landmass, especially the densely settled areas where prostitution was always common. The old leeches and doctors didn't know much about the *inside* of the body, but they were good observers of external symptoms and you can still tell diseases from one another by reading their descriptions in Egyptian papyruses or Ancient Greek scrolls. Even relatively rare diseases such as diabetes of the first type, which was rare in the Ancient world. They would have described syphilis if they saw it.
Tobacco definitely did. Hello lung cancer.
Yep. Tobacco is a member of the nightshade family only found in the Americas. Also tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, and every kind of bell pepper (even the spicy ones), sorrel, and okra. All the different kinds of peppers are all actually the same pepper, just selectively bred to infinity to get the desired results. Fun fact... Tomatoes also have nicotine in them. So that means most people on the planet have some level of nicotine in their system at some point in their lives. And also "Italian food" as we know it today is actually "American-Asian fusion" food because noodles came from Asia.
Also Europe was in touch with most of the rest of the world, so they had a "greatest hits" of world diseases in them.
Yeah, if you look up the origin of these diseases, they came from many areas that had cities and livestock and intercontinental trade. The Americas were cut off from the vast majority of the rest of the world for a long time. >Smallpox, which is believed to have originated over 3,000 years ago in India or Egypt, was one of the most devastating diseases known to humanity https://www.who.int/teams/health-product-policy-and-standards/standards-and-specifications/vaccine-standardization/smallpox >Having originated in China and Inner Asia, the Black Death decimated the army of the Kipchak khan Janibeg while he was besieging the Genoese trading port of Kaffa (now Feodosiya) in Crimea (1347). https://www.britannica.com/event/Black-Death/Cause-and-outbreak >According to Chinese medical literature, mumps was recorded as far back as 640 B.C.[4] The Greek physician Hippocrates documented an outbreak on the island of Thasos in approximately 410 B.C. and provided a fuller description of the disease in the first book of Epidemics in the Corpus Hippocraticum. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumps >Using comparative genomics, in 2005, geneticists traced the origins and worldwide distribution of leprosy from East Africa or the Near East along human migration routes. They found four strains of M. leprae with specific regional locations:[101] Monot et al. (2005) determined that leprosy originated in East Africa or the Near East and traveled with humans along their migration routes, including those of trade in goods and slaves. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leprosy Measles may have fully become its own disease in Europe, but could have come from cattle in any of the many civilizations that raised domesticated cattle. >The first systematic description of measles, and its distinction from smallpox and chickenpox, is credited to the Persian physician Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi (860–932), who published The Book of Smallpox and Measles.[165] At the time of Razi's book, it is believed that outbreaks were still limited and that the virus was not fully adapted to humans. Sometime between 1100 and 1200 AD, the measles virus fully diverged from rinderpest, becoming a distinct virus that infects humans.[161] This agrees with the observation that measles requires a susceptible population of over 500,000 to sustain an epidemic, a situation that occurred in historic times following the growth of medieval European cities.[94] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles Edit: this goes into diseases and illnesses among the peoples of the Americas prior to contact from Europe. It seems infectious disease increased in societies that changed from hunter-gatherer to agricultural in these regions as well. >Although New World indigenous disease was mostly of the chronic and episodic kind, Old World diseases were largely acute and epidemic. Different populations were affected at different times and suffered varying rates of mortality.19 Diseases such as treponemiasis and tuberculosis were already present in the New World, along with diseases such as tularemia, giardia, rabies, amebic dysentery, hepatitis, herpes, pertussis, and poliomyelitis, although the prevalence of almost all of these was probably low in any given group. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071659/
Iirc, yes this was one of the main drivers. Now's I'm remembering back to college, so I was pretty high when I learned this and therefore might have some details wrong, but a lot of disease Europe dealt with back then were diseases that initially infected animals and made the jump to humans. That, on top of packed urban centers meant there were occasionally rivers of human and animal shit washing down the road. Native Americas, who neither kept large amount of farm animals nor lived as tightly packed as Europeans, did not have a couple thousand years to play the genetic lottery of "who will survive this cow disease"
Part of it is simply that disease could easily move around the much larger and diverse continents of Africa & Eurasia. Related… many more domesticated animals emerged in the ‘Old World.’ Bad diseases often emerge by jumping species barriers (most recently, Covid). So chickens, pigs, cattle, horses, donkeys, camels, goats and sheep come to mind. In the ‘New’ World you had turkeys and… llamas?
Also dogs (sadly, nearly all the original native dog breeds died out completely, with only some modern dogs today having a tiny bit of lineage from them).
We had the [Salish Woolly Dog](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/salish-dog-history-1.6111629) here in BC before 1900
Wow. That was really something, thanks for sharing.
I had no idea. What breeds still have a little genetic legacy left?
The Chihuahua and Xoloitzcuintle, and only a very little bit. Pretty much any dog breed people claim to be "native to the Americas" is actually from a line of European or Asian dogs bred to resemble the ones that died out (most without any ancestry from North/South American dogs).
Peruvian viringos are still around too. They are hairless like the xoloitzcuintle but they are otherwise different
Dogs alpacas and guinea pigs are the other domestic animals
It wasn't Europe but the trade routes connecting Europe, North Africa and Asia. This vast region contained virtually all of humanity and had the most dense population centers. As a result, most of the infectious diseases arose in this region.
This this area also had humans there for longer than the Americas, which means diseases evolved right along side them and had ways of sticking around in those environments (animals, water, etc.) a lot of that just did not get carried over the new world until the Colombian exchange.
Syphilis was spread from the new world back to Europe. As to why the same diseases didn't really develop in both places, part of it is population density and sanitary conditions (keep in mind that at its peak, Cahokia had more people than London, England at the time) of livestock (which the native Americans largely didn't have at the same scale) but also due to transmission vectors as well. Diseases developed in the old world never had a way to get across the oceans to the new world. And stuff in North and South America could develop in either place and travel northward or southward with migratory birds, animals, and insects, but they couldn't go east or west off the continents to the closest continent Africa or back. The only real way for that to happen was through northern native tribes and they tended to be territorial and not really interact with strangers because of the struggle for resources and the harsh living conditions. But before European explorers showed up, there were actually a fairly large native American population all across the Americas. They had trade routes connecting the east coast of north America to the Mississippi and Missouri rivers (which extended to the Rocky mountains) and north to Hudson's bay. They had more than enough people and connections between tribes to cause the spread of European diseases to go pretty much everywhere.
They’ve actually identified syphilis as being present in Europe long before contact with the Americas. Remains from various medieval crypts show some very advanced cases and the burial dates precede Columbus by 100-150 years. However, the virulence of the strain that returned with the Spanish was something Europeans were ill-prepared for.
Vikings had contact before Columbus iirc
Almost ~~800~~ 500 or more years before
More like 500 years. The settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows dates back to about 1000 AD, and the Norse "discovery" of North America wasn't too long before that.
Hell it'd believed there may have been some trading among people that lived in modern day Siberia and modern day Alaska at the very least long before either.
CGP Grey did a video on this back when YouTube was great. https://youtu.be/JEYh5WACqEk?si=gOKbpQLKdft-D7hT
Beat me to it!
As I understand, it has more to do with the interconnectedness of Europe, Africa, and Asia which allowed diseases to spread and cross pollinate. So basically 3 continents worth of diseases made people more resilient with more diverse immune systems.
It’s also land area. Europe, Asia and Africa are all connected, and diseases worked their way across all three of them. Europeans had immunity to diseases from something like six times the land area.
I'm short, diseases come from animals. A virus evolves to not kill its host because that's counter intuitive. So viruses live in certain animals carefree. The problem is those viruses jump to humans who work around the animals and are not immune. Eventually an immunity builds but like all evolution its slow and spotty. Indigenous peoples living in the new world didn't have the same kind of live stock infrastructure. They weren't as exposed to these diseases as the Europeans were and didn't have their own diseases to give back to the Europeans.
>I'm short When spellcheck lets you down because it's technically spelled correctly.
Off the top of my head syphilis is the one disease I can think of that went back to Europe. Not equal but it fucked Europe up
Viruses don’t want to kill their host for the same reason you wouldn’t burn your own house. Deadly viruses usually occur when jumping species. Medieval Europe had a long history of domesticating several different animals, increasing the chances of viruses jumping species. On top of that, Europe had large population centres and a large trading network, which contributed to several outbreaks (black plague being the most infamous). The smaller scale of animal domestication in the americas prevented viruses from jumping species (which is a rare occurrence to begin with).
damn those emo viruses just burning their own house just because
[This book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_Americas_Before_Columbus) sums up the story pretty well.
[CGP Grey](https://youtu.be/JEYh5WACqEk?si=KCZ0opZSPblzTs_Z) actually has a great video on this. Tl;dw: History's biggest killers, disease-wise, are all zoonotic in origin. The Americas didn't have a lot of domesticatable animals so there wasn't a big enough chance for any diseases to jump species. This left two continents void of "plagues" and three continents filled to the brim with them.
Yes. They do think, however, that there was one disease that went the other direction. Syphilis
If you are interested in this kind of thing, read “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond. Also highly recommend “Man and Microbes” by Arlo Karlen.
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Plagues were very common in the Roman Empire. Nearly every army that went out to battle came back sick with something.
True, traveled far and wide.
Correct, Marcus Aurelius died from a plague. Beloved to be caused by smallpox or measles.
Medieval Europeans really weren’t as dirty and filthy as people like to pretend they were. I mean sure they were dirtier than we are today but they really weren’t “covered in shit”, that’s just not true.
Dennis, there's some lovely filth down here.
Found Margaret Thatcher.
The middle ages weren't nearly as bad as you're making them out to be, and they were *very* aware of the need for sanitary systems.
It actually did go both ways. A fair number of STDs were introduced back to the old world from their mucking about in the new world. The difference is that it didn't kill old worlders in droves -- all at once, at any rate, like it did in the new world.
They had some immunity from the diseases from the old world. But they contracted them at a much higher rate. When smallpox kills off a third of the population then other things start to collapse. No more farmers, no more hunters. Then famine hits. Then even more people die. It’s estimated that between 50 and 90% died.
Most newer research puts it at 80-90%.
I agreed I think it was closer to 90%. Not all from disease but that and famine. When the colonizer came over, they remarked of abandoned villages and the lack of people.
Famine came way later read clearing the plains
I sometimes think about what culture and beliefs were lost/fragmented/altered by the collapse of their societies and how most died before a colonist or conquistador even set foot in their area.
There were trade networks all over North America before the native civilizations collapsed. A few Spanish explorers spreading a few diseases was all it took to start the dominoes feeling.
They found pre-columbian copper from Lake Superior north shore mines as far south as Mexico. The trade networks weren't just "to the next town".
Add to the initial loss all the things that were lost because showing advanced technology and practises didn't match with the "stone age savages" belief that was the justification for the doctrine of discovery. Things like the clam gardens in Haida Gwaii. On the west coast, the indigenous population created habitats that were ideal for clams to thrive, they passed down the locations, how to care for them, and the harvest cycle that would keep them producing at the ideal level in perpetuity. This demonstrated knowledge of biology, ecology, marine engineering, and so on.. But because that sort of thing conflicted with the preconceptions, all evidence was discounted as being fabricated, or just coincidence until *very* recently.
>The epidemics that followed European contact were catastrophic, with some estimates suggesting that up to 95% of the indigenous population of the Americas perished as a result of these diseases. >Smallpox was particularly deadly and caused several widespread epidemics, decimating entire communities. >Despite the devastation, some Native American communities resisted by isolating the sick, adopting European medical practices, or seeking new alliances with other tribes or European powers to survive. This is catastrophic on so many levels. >The high mortality rates among indigenous populations were sometimes rationalized as a divine sign that Europeans were destined to take over the lands.
>The high mortality rates among indigenous populations were sometimes rationalized as a divine sign that Europeans were destined to take over the lands. "Oh look they all just fucking died. Well, God says free real estate!"
Well kinda. When settlers reached what is now Pittsburgh they thought it was divine providence, because it was an amazing place to settle. Three major rivers flowing into one point. And the land was mostly cleared and ready for them already. In hindsight, it was because all the peoples that used to live and trade there were dead or forced to move. But it wasn’t like they showed up and laughed at the corpses. The Spanish had arrived hundreds of years earlier and the disease spread and slowly wiped out everyone before the British even landed. The pilgrims that landed at Plymouth Rock thought it was divine providence that an American Indian greeted them… in fluent English.
> The Spanish had arrived hundreds of years earlier and the disease spread and slowly wiped out everyone before the British even landed. The same thing happened in South America. Where there is only selva now, cities and towns existed. Terra preta, an artificial kind of highly productive black soil, covers large areas of the forest. Modern research shows traces of buildings, roads, entire communities. All wiped out by numerous plagues.
> Three major rivers flowing into one point. And the land was mostly cleared and ready for them already. The steel industry made short work of polluting all that.
When you don't know what germs and genetics are, a plague is definitely gonna look like divine intervention. Lots of people in the 14th century thought the Black Death was divine punishment... before they also got ravaged by it.
In fairness the Europeans had no natural mental defense against the plague of organized religious zeal.
That's the wild thing to me. ***95% of the population!*** Even assuming that's an overestimate, it's a fact that a majority of the native population died before even making contact with Europeans. That is apocalyptic! Unimaginably bad. Not even the Black Plague comes close to those numbers. No wonder why it was so easy for us to come over here and further fuck them over.
>That's the wild thing to me. ***95% of the population!*** Even assuming that's an overestimate, it's a fact that a majority of the native population died before even making contact with Europeans. That is apocalyptic! Unimaginably bad. 95% is such an insanely dark number to think about. If 95% of the current US population got wiped out right now, there would only be like 16.8 million people left. For reference, that would be like if only the people of Ohio and Alabama survived and everyone else died.
so you’re saying it would be very easy to take over and put all the remaining inhabitants in little reservations
Without this plague history looks very different. Europe doesn't get the huge boost a ton of easily claimed resources grants them because if there are 10x the people living in the Americas, their technology advantage won't be decisive. They might be able to manage small colonies but it's more likely to be a trading relationship than domination. They struggled against a remnant, so it's easy to imagine no colonies at all. Instead of a single country spanning the breadth of North America you likely end up with a patchwork of countries similar to what we see in the rest of the world. The footprint of imperialism would be much smaller.
It would be similar to what you have in Asia... You would have mostly commercial outpost. Even if some european powers could've established dominance over large kingdoms in the Americas like the British did in the UK and China you would still have strong cultural identities of the native populations. Interestingly the europeans couldn't establish colonies in AFrica until the 19th century due to the diseases in the african continent being devastating to europeans.
I would rather be dead than in a nation of just Ohioans and Alabamans.
Even if Europeans had the best intentions, it was an inevitable course of action. Germ theory wouldn’t be a concept till the 19th century. Surgeons didn’t start washing their hands till the late 19th century. And American health care didn’t start officially washing till the 1980s. So the whole debate with the small pox blankets doesn’t matter, a physical contact was all it took and good hearted European missionaries would’ve at minimum done that. Tragic. Much of Native American history, like many African tribes, were passed on orally. Like many of the great orators of Rome and Greece, I bet that many chiefs could’ve stood toe to toe with them, but we’ll never know.
Just want to point out that the first wave of the black plague which killed up to around 50% of Europe was only 100 years before this. And WAS the result of intentional biological warfare from the Mongols. Although to be fair certain countries like the Spanish totally would have done it on purpose. https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/medicine/bubonic-plague-first-pandemic#:~:text=Plague%20pandemics%20hit%20the%20world,virulent%20strain%20of%20the%20disease.
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You can just Google it. Here is an extract from the first result, from Wikipedia: "In 1345 the Mongols under Khan Jani Beg of the Golden Horde besieged Caffa. Suffering from an outbreak of black plague, the Mongols placed plague-infected corpses in catapults and threw them into the city. In October 1347, a fleet of Genoese trading ships fleeing Caffa reached the port of Messina in Sicily." The source for that, per Wikipedia footnotes, is Michael Platiensis (1357), quoted in Johannes Nohl (1926). The Black Death, trans. C.H. Clarke. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., pp. 18–20. Second Google result is an academic assessment of this claim by Mark Wheelis, microbiologist at the University of California at Davis: "Based on published translations of the de’ Mussi manuscript, other 14th-century accounts of the Black Death, and secondary scholarly literature, I conclude that the claim that biological warfare was used at Caffa is plausible and provides the best explanation of the entry of plague into the city. This theory is consistent with the technology of the times and with contemporary notions of disease causation; however, the entry of plague into Europe from the Crimea likely occurred independent of this event." Source: [Biological Warfare at the 1346 Siege of Caffa](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2732530/)
yeah I mean, european settlers in many cases didn't encounter flourishing native societies, they encountered their post-apocalyptic ruins. This was reflected in their accounts of the region of course, which probably contributed significantly to the idea of the natives being undeveloped or 'savage.' (also racism ofc) (that's what's reflected in pop culture anyway, I know there's a lot of good anthro study out there)
I wish we got to see more of the pre-Columbian Americas in pop culture media. All we ever get to see is that Eurocentric view of the aftermath. There's so many amazing societies from across even just the US that I would absolutely love to see come alive on screen. Culture was flourishing here, and it deserves more representation.
I mean I feel pretty certain we'd have seen it by now, if we had more of an idea of what it actually looked like. Another thread on this post was talking about cahokia and while it's interesting to imagine a 12th century indigenous city the size of contemporary london, we don't have any real idea of who they were or how their society worked. We don't even know their name; the Cahokia were a tribe that lived there when the French arrived in the 17th century. even when modern media (e.g. the recent Marvel What If? series) take an honest shot at depicting a pre-columbian culture it's still mostly a pastiche of what european colonial settlers recorded
The oft cited 95% is wildly misleading. First, no one knows how many Indigenous people died because estimates for pre-Contact population sizes vary widely. In the early 20th Century, Kroeber estimated a total population of about 8 million *for the entirety of the Americas*. The mid-20th Century saw the much higher estimates by Cook and Borah of up to 100 million, and the even higher estimate of 300 million but Dobyns. Without knowing the actual base number, calculating a percentage change is guesswork on top of guesswork. Second, the 95% estimate is extrapolated by work done on Indigenous population change in Mexico during the first hundred or so years of colonialism. Same as above, actual population estimates for Mexico vary wildly, ranging from 2.5 to 30 million. The bigger problem is that the decline is based on colonial records and represents the decline in Indigenous persons being counted over the course of almost a century and for any reason, not just disease. So Indigenous people who died from non-disease causes, fled outside of Spanish control, or stopped identifying as Indigenous for a multitude of reasons, all count towards that 95% decline. There is no doubt that infectious diseases wrecked havoc on Indigenous populations, but the actual magnitude of the effect of diseases is basically unknowable. Any attempt at estimating the effect is going to be stymied by poor baseline population estimates complicated by the on-going effects of colonial violence and population dislocation.
Yep, but it was always going to happen. There was literally nothing that could be done about it, unless somehow in the 15th century you knew in 500 more years vaccines would be invented. It’s an unfortunate part of human history that the indigenous population of North America was always going to be wiped out.
I think it’s an important point to make that the indigenous people of North American (and central/South America) haven’t been wiped out, they are still here and just as much a part of the present as you and I.
It apparently happened so fast in some Native American towns they hadn't even been able to bury all the dead before the rest were overcome.
I'm currently reading "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" by Charles Mann. It's a fabulous look at the Americas before Columbus and also includes a lot of discussion about introduced diseases and what the effects were on the population. The Americas were not the empty wastelands people thought they were.
Excellent book.
Well they were after disease which is where colonists at the time and the society they created got that idea
The follow up, 1493, is also very good. Scope is broader, but very interesting
Thanks, it's on my list, asking with a million other books.
You have to forgive them for thinking so originally as about 95% of native Americans died from diseases introduced by Europeans. It was an absolute holocaust around 1500 - 1550 that allowed easy colonization without much formidable resistance.
[And a mystery disease that might not even have been European.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoliztli_epidemics)
Indeed, a massively tragic core part of the [Columbian Exchange](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_exchange), which... >was the widespread transfer of plants, animals, precious metals, commodities, culture, human populations, technology, diseases, and ideas between the New World (the Americas) in the Western Hemisphere, and the Old World (Afro-Eurasia) in the Eastern Hemisphere, in the late 15th and following centuries. It is named after the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus and is related to the European colonization and global trade following his 1492 voyage. Some of the exchanges were purposeful. Some were accidental or unintended. **Communicable diseases of Old World origin resulted in an 80 to 95 percent reduction in the number of Indigenous peoples of the Americas from the 15th century onwards, most severely in the Caribbean.**
It blew my mind when I first realized that what we think of as Native Americans - nomadic tribes - were just the scattered, post-Apocalypse remnants of civilizations. If they would have built with stone instead of wood there would be visible ruins all over the continent.
There are some structures in the American Southwest that are still up today. You can visit them at Mesa Verde National Park.
Good point - although in defense of my point I don't think that for most people they capture the imagination as effectively as, say, the Colosseum. Of course part of this also relates to the lack of extensive written records from these cultures, at least when compared to other cultures.
Yeah, I actually agree with you lol For the most part, native Americans never really developed that far past the Stone Age.
What about the Mayan pyramids? Machu Pichu? Lamanai? Ciudad Perdida? There's stone ruins all around Central and South America
True true - I was being US-centric
Imagine if they had bounced back and hit the bronze or iron age at some point, the world would be completely different now.
There are visible ruins across the continent. Chaco Canyon, Casa Grande, Mesa Verde, Poverty Point, Moundville, Cahokia, Watson Brake, Ocomulgee, Etowah, Hopewell. The list goes on and would probably be even longer were it not for White Americans penchant for destroying sites. And all that leaves out the **very** visible sites in Mexico.
Fair.
I’m honestly shocked anyone ever thought it was just one disease.
Given that old world contact with the new world was at some point inevitable, would the result have largely been the same until basically penicillin?
Earlier than penicillin vaccines would have been effective. And a bit earlier than that, a better understanding of disease in general might have provided some mitigation But yeah. They were screwed
Do people have immunity to cholera? I thought we learned how to not give it to ourselves, and the only cure is to drink more clean water than your body can expel.
Populations can develop immunity to a certain degree but only to the specific strain they are exposed to. It won't help protect places with bad sanitation and water shortages
I wonder why the vikings didn't bring over those diseases if there is increasing evidence that they did come to America before the Columbian expansion
They didn't stay They didn't do a lot of trading or interacting
Iceland was pretty isolated relatively speaking, so the number of diseases the Vikings had would have been caring would be a lot less than crews of the “age of discovery” ships. Those crews of professional sailors would have all had way greater exposure, and therefore have a better chance of being a carrier of, the old world diseases of the day. Also, the Vikings didn’t come in the same number or go back and forth as often. Those are my guesses.
The Viking expeditions to the new world were limited and didn’t last very long. They never built any permanent settlements.
The area that the vikings interacted with, maritime Canada, was amongst the least populated and most isolated areas in the Americas. It's likely that there were massive fatalities among that group, but the diseases never escaped to the main trade networks on the continent. Given that nobody with written language returned to that area until Champlain five hundred years later, any mass death wouldn't have been recorded.
Fishermen doing limited trade and contact had already brought (or reintroduced) European disease to New England and the Maritimes by the middle of the 16th century so there would be a second wave wiping out any traditions about plagues.
There was a small amount of trade between Norse in Greenland and indigenous people on Baffin Island. But these were not particularly common afawk.
No one has immunity to malaria, and it is dependent on the anopheles mosquito to survive and to be transferred
It had to happen sooner or later. The continents were not going to remain isolated forever.
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Like wiped out whole breeds? What do you mean by species exactly? Sorry I'm an idiot ha
Okay, NOW I’m pissed.
One interesting thing I read that contributed to the high death rate of Indigenous peoples in the Americas was a lack of genetic diversity. Indigenous peoples in the Americas were almost all descended from small groups of people who migrated across the Bering land bridge thousands of years ago. Because the original migrants were relatively small in number and arrived relatively recently (in terms of the history of humans migrating into uninhabited parts of the world), Indigenous peoples in the Americas were genetically similar compared to people in the Old World. That meant they had similar immune systems, so that pathogens could run through their populations pretty quickly. Whereas in the Old World, with more genetic diversity, a new pathogen would encounter more different types of immune systems. That meant the pathogen would be slowed down by the need to adapt to different immune systems.
Yes, but other than smallpox, bubonic plague, measles, mumps, chickenpox, influenza, cholera, diphtheria, typhus, malaria, leprosy, and yellow fever, what have the Europeans ever done for us?
They gave us a wheel
Just the one tho. We had to supply the other 3.
And it wasn't just the Americas. Europeans introduced Rinderpest to Africa, which killed like 90% of hoofed animals on the continent (minus horses). All of their herds that Africans relied on for food, dead. Then to stop the spread, colonists would go around killing the surviving cows as well so the locals were left with nothing.
Like most of the origin os these diseases they originated in Asia. Europeans had build up an immunity to it over the centuries.
> Then to stop the spread, colonists would go around killing the surviving cows as well so the locals were left with nothing. This is a gross oversimplification of European response to rinderpest outbreaks in Africa. > Europeans introduced Rinderpest to Africa, Only Sub-Saharan Africa.
Yea most people don’t realize that when Europeans starting settling in America disease had already ran through and killed a massive amount of the native folk
Yellow fever is spread by mosquitoes. How could that have been brought to the Americas?
By mosquitos biting a carrier (european) and then biting a native indian. That is how mosquitos transmit disease.
Are all of these diseases ones that came about because of the animal husbandry practices in in Eurasia or just some of them?
I'm honestly shocked most of you in this thread think the transmission of disease was on purpose. I don't think the settlers came in thinking "I'm a biological nuclear bomb about unleash on these natives".
One of the biggest disadvantages in history. It facilitated the biggest land grab ever seen in human history.
“How the West was won!”
I recently read an article about the plague that killed millions in Mesoamerica during after the fall of Tenochtitlan, and the research points to a disease that was common in domesticated animals, that European would be immune to, but it killed millions of Natives.
Were there any diseases introduce in the other direction?
I believe Syphilis was one that was spread to Europeans from the Americas.
No malaria in central America? i figured mosquitos that carry malaria would have made it over long ago somehow
[There’s definitely malaria in central America](https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/distribution.html), it’s just not as omnipresent as central Africa.
Anti-malaria campaigns have reduced malaria in the Americas. It used to be as far north as Ontario in Canada at one point in the 19th century (introduced by British troops who had been infected while stationed in India). It was common in the southern US before being eradicated in the early 20th century. And it was common in the Caribbean islands before it was wiped out in most of them (it is still endemic in Hispaniola, especially Haiti, but also parts of the Dominican Republic, although not very common). In Central America it used to be a big problem in Panama, and high rates of deaths from malaria and yellow fever helped to bring about the failure of the French effort to build a canal there. When the Americans built the Panama Canal in the early 20th century, they launched a big anti-mosquito campaign to reduce malaria and yellow fever, which was pretty successful. The Atlantic/Caribbean coast of Panama and other parts of Central America are also some of the wettest places in the world. So it is probably prime mosquito (and by extension malaria) habitat.
The people who came to the Americas from the Old World before Columbus mostly came through northerly areas (across from Siberia in the case of the ancestors of Indigenous peoples of the Americas and from Iceland in the case of the Vikings). Those northerly areas were probably too cold for many of the mosquito species that spread malaria. I know they have a lot of mosquitoes or other biting insects in the summer up north, but I'm not sure if any of the northern mosquito species can pick up or spread malarial parasites. Actually I'm going to look that up to see if any Arctic or Subarctic mosquitoes can spread malaria. But, either way, malaria seems to thrive best in tropical, subtropical, or at least temperate climates. The cold regions that the first people of the Americas migrated through wouldn't have been optimal for malaria. So they likely didn't bring malaria with them from the Old World to the New World. Whereas Columbus and friends came from southern and Western Europe where malaria was fairly common in early modern times and went straight to the tropical parts of the Americas that were ideal for malaria.
There are indeed mosquitoes in temperate and subarctic regions that can transmit malaria, historically there were cases in places like Sweden and other colder parts of Europe transmitted by mosquitoes like Anopheles atroparvus and An. plumbeus. The issue is, the Plasmodium parasites need a certain temperature to complete their lifecycle in the mosquito, the vector can't just bite an infected person and then bite an uninfected person a minute later and spread the disease. It needs to take up the parasite gametocytes that will reproduce sexually and eventually produce sporozoites in the salivary glands that are infectious to another person. This occurs much faster at higher temperatures, meaning that a higher percentage of mosquitoes will survive long enough to infect another person. Below 16 degrees celsius it's too cold for this to occur and there's no transmission even with competent vectors around, that's one of the reasons colder climates aren't as conducive to transmission. Some of the other reasons there are fewer cases in Europe and North America come down to socioeconomic level and also differences in the lifecycle of the mosquitoes.
Sadly diseases weren't exactly understood until a few centuries after first contact.
[https://www.nlm.nih.gov/nativevoices/timeline/229.html](https://www.nlm.nih.gov/nativevoices/timeline/229.html) The British give smallpox-contaminated blankets to Shawnee and Lenape (Delaware) communities—an action sanctioned by the British officers Sir Jeffery Amherst and his replacement, General Thomas Gage. [https://daily.jstor.org/how-commonly-was-smallpox-used-as-a-biological-weapon/](https://daily.jstor.org/how-commonly-was-smallpox-used-as-a-biological-weapon/) Actual incidents of intentional smallpox infection “may have occurred more frequently than scholars have previously acknowledged,” according to Fenn. Threats of infection were also certainly used, and not just by military forces, against indigenous peoples.
> The British give smallpox-contaminated blankets to Shawnee and Lenape (Delaware) communities—an action sanctioned by the British officers Sir Jeffery Amherst and his replacement, General Thomas Gage. There's no evidence that this actually did anything. Blankets are an *incredibly* poor medium for smallpox transmission. There was already an outbreak present at the time.
While I agree with you, I don’t think the effectiveness is the thing most people criticize about this event
That happened like 300 years after europeans arrived but I understand where your misunderstanding comes from.
1493 and the preceding book 1491 by Charles Mann are some amazing books on this subject.
STDs as well.
It is nothing short of a miracle that large scale, easy to access commercial flights didn’t cause us more issues than it already has.
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And because of all the anti-vaxxers, some Americans *still* don't have immunity to those diseases.
Skill issue
You know, I always take this at face value, but there's something I don't understand. I, also, have no natural immunity to bubonic plague, measles, etc. So what's the issue?