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

[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.