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

[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.