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

[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.