A puzzle I've never asked about before...

[seawasp]

... most of us already know that the majority of the deaths of Native Americans, at least in the first decades of contact, were due to European diseases sweeping like a pustulant wildfire through the unprotected populations. As the Native American populations had been out of contact with Europe and Asia for many thousands of years, they'd never had any reason to develop immunity to things like smallpox, measles, etc., and so what were bad-but-often-survivable diseases to the Europeans became 99% fatal plagues for them.

What I always wondered was this: The same separation existed on the other side, so why weren't all the Europeans wiped out from various American diseases that THEY had no immunity to? Why would Europe have developed natural bioweapons, so to speak, and not the native populations of the Americas?

Comments

[chuk-g.livejournal.com]

Populations in Europe etc. were much higher density, which was sort of a breeding ground for 'superbugs'. I'd have to check but I think there were at least a few conditions that went the other way. Some theorists suggest syphilis may have been spread from the Americas to Europe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_Exchange has a bit more info and some links to follow.

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

There was some blowback; syphilis, for instance, is said to have come to Europe from America.

It's been argued that Europeans had many more bugs because they lived far more closely with more species of livestock animals. They had cows, pigs, and horses; Americans did not. Smallpox is related to cowpox. Etc.

[chaotic-nipple.livejournal.com]

Lower population density, and fewer domesticated animals for diseases to jump hosts from.

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

And nomadic lifestyle, for some.

[chaotic-nipple.livejournal.com]

I don't know how much of a difference that would make, if the nomads are still coming into contact with settled people. Depending how often and varied that contact was, it might have even put them in more risk.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

If you're a nomadic herder, you're leaving all that manure behind when you move on. No problem. If you've got a small farm (because your neighbors also have small farms with livestock), then you and your livestock and everybody's waste is right there, season after season.

As far as crowd diseases go, nomads might be in a pretty good position; they'd meet others often enough to get occasional exposure and thereby build up immunities, yet still have a good chance of being away when the big outbreaks hit. Someone must have studied this, I'd think.

[shana.livejournal.com]

I think the distance helped. An American disease, if the European didn't die from it before getting back on his ship, would probably have run its course during the three month trip back to Europe. During which time the crew of the ship would either have caught it and died/recovered or proved immune.

[kengr]

Well, diseases can lie dormant (some of them), but mostly the Americas didn't *have* much in the way of nasty diseases.

The ones that do seem to have been native to the Americas (like syphilis) are long term diseases. Not something you get and then either get over or die in a short time.

Untreated syphilis will last for *decades*.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

This is one of the questions that Jared Diamond works on in Guns, Germs, and Steel. For what it's worth.

[kimberlywade.livejournal.com]

I second that recommendation. Daimond's Collapse is also great fodder for future world scenarios.

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

Thirded. We domesticated cattle, which allowed cowpox to jump to humans and become smallpox. Smallpox has a mortality rate of about 30-35%, and the survivors have a resistance to the disease. So by the time the Western explorers hit the Americas, they could carry quite a viral load without getting sick. The natives, on the other hand...

There's a theory, based on the sudden collapse of the Mississippian Culture circa 1400CE, that smallpox actually traveled to the Americas with the Norse, who passed it on to the tribes they interacted with during their brief stay. This would explain why much of the culture had already vanished before "solid" European contact, and why some tribes were better at surviving the pox than others. We may have stumbled into a situation where "Rome" had fallen and all that was left were the barbarians.

[boogieshoes.livejournal.com]

that theory would be severely undercut by the fact that Mississippian culture became an intensive mono-agriculture, with little meat in the diet - the record of nutritional deficiency is writ in their bones, too. Mississippians became shorter, and had signs of dietary deficiencies, etc.

Also, weren't the Vikings supposed to be in NA shores in the 800s? If so, the real die-off to look at would be around 800-1000CE, based on how fast the diseases spread from Spanish Conquistidors up the Mississippi River Valley, etc.

There's another theory that the American SW version of bubonic plague had a couple of years of extreme viralness and was the last blow to the Mississippian culture in 1400 - but iirc, that particular epidemic happened either too early or too late for the actual event.

i can't remember the latest theory - something about the mound cities being abandoned completely as the culture collapsed, and culture evolving into a nomadic one. not sure how much stock i put into that - haven't had time to research it and decide whether i 'like' it or not.

-bs

[murstein.livejournal.com]

Also, weren't the Vikings supposed to be in NA shores in the 800s?

Best guess is that Eirīkr hinn rauði led his band of settlers to Greenland circa 985, and the Vinland settlement was chased off circa 1000. But I agree, it seems unlikely that any diseases passed along then would wait until circa 1400 to hit the Mississippian culture.

[kengr]

The Norse, especially the folks from Greenland and Iceland that founded Vinland were pretty isolated themselves. They didn't have the population density to support a lot of the nastier diseases, plus, none of them had active cases when they got there.

But one of Cortez's men had smallpox. Likewise other folks later had things like measles and a host of others.

With Cortez, smallpox went from his man to one of the more densely populated areas in the Americas. And spread like wildfire.

[kimberlywade.livejournal.com]

Europeans lived closely with their domesticated animals. Diseases jumped species and mutated, see cowpox, HIV, and bird flu.

[chaotic-nipple.livejournal.com]

Also, the only really wide-spread domesticated animal the Native Americans had was the one they shared with Eurasians: The dog. All the other American domesticates were very localized, as opposed to the Old World animals that had spread far and wide through 3 continents. Any diseases that might have made the dog-human jump in the Americas, were already likely to have done so somewhere in the Old World.

[redrose999.livejournal.com]

Population density made disease mutate faster, and humans in Europe gained immunities from diseases. So in the Americas they'd arrive, and encounter less sever versions of the diseases in Europe. Folks often forget, they had an immunity to smallpox back then, humans adapted.

[kjn]

More livestock and higher population densities has been mentioned already. A third important factor was much higher levels of population in contact with with each other. Ie, European settlers had been exposed to germs that originated in China and was carried to Europe via India and Arabia.

Diamond was mentioned. I can't recommend him myself – I found him lacking in scholarship, and either reinventing the wheel or kicking in open doors.

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

I had assumed it was a combination of not having to work quite as hard for food, not having to work quite as hard to stay warm/dry, and having a larger pharmacological array to work with.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

One aspect according to Jared Diamond is that Eurasia is largely East-West oriented, while the Americas are North-South. That means that Asian diseases had a pretty-much straight run west, without radical changes in climate zones, unlike the Americas. Therefore diseases in the Americas were far more geographically limited.