Not from America, but from the islands off the southern coast, such as Cuba. As I said, Columbus never actually reached the shores of NA, and in fact never realized that Cuba was an island. The guy wasn’t very bright, by most accounts. I can’t dispute that syphilis was present in Europe, but I don’t believe it was common; his crews and voyages certainly took care of that aspect.
smiling bandit writes:
> TO this day NorthAm is still getting waves of new immigrants. While there was a
> certain amount of intermarriage over time, new immigrants often had no contact
> with AmerIndians. This meant that the AmerIndian-descended population got
> smaller and smaller (at least as a proportion) over time. Things worked out
> differently in Latin America, for a variety of reasons.
Latin America is also still getting waves of new immigrants too. Americans tend to underestimate the extent to which other countries are also ethnic melting pots.
Well, India was vastly more densely populated when they go there AND 90% of the native population didn’t fall over dead within a few generations. The math works out very differently.
I think we may have had a few more, though (“think”, ok?). Basque, Greeks, Phoenicians, Punics, Romans, several brands of Germanic barbarians (some of them went through and all the way to Africa, others stopped here), Moors (coming from anywhere in the various Muslim empires for 800 years), “Francos” (which may have been from anywhere north of the Pyrenees, again give it some 800 years). It wasn’t so much immigration waves as a continuous current that sometimes changed direction; the biggest break was during the reign of the Goth kings… oh wait…