One question about China: how come the population is 90% Han? The remaining 10% are generally locked up in some remote mountain village or some other geographic cul de sac, or is that a misconception?
Not necessarily. The Romans really, really hated the Carthaginians, for which I do not blame them.
But they didn’t salt the earth.
Raze the city, kill the men, enslave the women and children, and erase Carthage as a culture… but Julius Caesar built a new Carthage on the ruins of the old a century later. A Roman Carthage, not a Punic one, so the city outlasted the Republic it was the capital of.
I think you must mean “before the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’ arrived.” I do not think European diseases were doing much decimating in the Americas before Columbus got there. (Not that the issue has anything to do with the OP.)
To expand, there are no contemporaneous accounts of the Romans salting the land around Carthage. The story doesn’t appear until Victorian times.
Plus people hunting them down with dogs.
Not approved by the British government; just private enterprise.
The almost complete replacement of the Y-chromosome haplogroups of Western Europe during the Copper and/or Bronze Age suggests major genocides, though AFAIK there is little specific archaeological evidence. (The link is to a discussion of Irish DNA, but similar wholesale replacement occurred throughout Western Europe.)
Julius Caesar is estimated to have killed up to a million or more people during his Gallic Wars. IIRC, there was one tribe he spitefully destroyed in toto, women and children.
The Spaniards came very close to it in Cuba. The indigenous that did survive the disease, and ruthless acts of the Spanish were literally worked to death in the sugar plantations. It was so bad there that when they later came to Mexico, they somewhat modified their method of operation. They realized that they needed the labor force.
Officially, no. There may be some people of Tasmanian descent through intermarriage with English settlers, but the Australian government does not recognize them as such.
No, not really. The Franks in the Crusader States kept Muslims slaves, and had codes for how they were supposed to be treated (e.g. if they converted they were manumitted), which would seem to suggest there were enough Muslims around after the conquest to be enslaved. Though IIRC most of the population was Eastern Christian, not Muslim. It wasn’t uncommon for conquerors at the time to play up the number of enemies that they killed.
It seems a bit disengenuous to suggest that Europeans inflicted diseases on the native populations. It isn’t like they had a clue about those diseases at the time; that was just a …benefit of being very dirty.
yes, I am aware that this may not be true. But Hannibal was one bad SOB. Read *Ghosts of Cannae *(if you can stand the bad writing):
http://www.amazon.com/Ghosts-Cannae-Hannibal-Darkest-Republic/dp/0812978676/ref=sr_1_13?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1392410736&sr=1-13&keywords=hannibal
Didn’t Charlemagne wipe out the Avars?
Far better reading the relevant volumes of Livy. (There are some excellent translations).
That’s a good suggestion, as the quality of O’Connell’s writing is wretched.
Probably any number of tiny tribes have been wiped out by more aggressive, numerous invaders over the millennia. Saying “oh, but they left some descendants” seems to be dodging the point to me. Unlike, say, the Apache or the Maori or what-have-you, any number of ethnic groups, tribes, and cultures have been exterminated for all practical purposes. As a separate, unique people, they have ceased to exist. A tiny smattering of their genetic material drifting about in the population that replaced them does not a living culture/people make.
Extermination in my mind refers to the deliberate and systematic eradication of a people, i.e. genocide. While I agree that many societies and cultures have died off (even if some or all the people’s genetic material has been passed on), I think it would be a mistake to call them exterminated but should rather be called assimilated.
I still feel a distinction could be made between subjugated/assimilated peoples and exterminated ones. For example, the Apache still exist as a tribal unit. There are still some speakers of the language, the religion and folklore are not extinct, the dances are still taught and practiced. On the other hand, the Taino of Puerto Rico have been exterminated. Their genes may still be found in modern-day Puerto Ricans, even at significant levels, but as a unique, living people, the Taino are gone (something like 90% of the Taino population was killed in just 30 years, so even accounting for unintentional transmission of disease its hard not to argue that they were exterminated purposefully).
Carthage was definitely not salted. Salt was far, far too valuable and hard to come by in ancient times to waste by throwing it on the ground. Salary is the Latin word for salt, which was what some troops were paid with. You don’t throw money on the ground to spite people.
I don’t think there was anything special about Europeans that caused them to spread diseases in the New World. Just about any Old World people, whether European, Asian or African, would have done the same with the same amount of contact.