It’s well known that European diseases wiped out a large part of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, but I never hear about the opposite happening… You’d think it’d be a pretty significant historical fact if most of the explorers were wiped out by the local diseases like the locals were wiped out by foreign diseases. Seems strange to me, wouldn’t it go both ways? If yes, what diseases do the Europeans owe to the indigenous tribes of the Americas? If no, why not? Didn’t they have as many deadly diseases? If no, why?
There is debate about syphilis originating in the new world, maybe.
According to one theory Christopher Columbus’ crewmen brought syphilis back to Europe from the Americas, which if true is karmic justice for the way they probably got it.
Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs, and Steel, explains that Old World (Eurasia/Africa) peoples had millenia of close contact with about eight different domesticated animals (building up resistance and mutual pathogen accomodations), while native Americans only had scattered contact with about two of them – and that this was one reason why most of the contact era disease transfer decimation went one way and not the other.
He also explains why there were more domesticated animals in the Old World (and why it’s so hard to domesticate animals in general), but that’s another story.
IIRC, much of the blame for the spread of European disease has been laid on DeSotos pigs (some of which escaped and bred in the wild) rather than on the men. When Desoto travelled throughout the future southern US, it was packed full of people. Later expeditions found very few people.
Q.: How do you know you’ve been spending too much time on the Internet?
A.: When you see the word “colonizing” in a thread title and your first thought is that it’s a reference to anal sex.
I’ll repeat another thing I read that I saw in a book review in Scientific American many years ago. Based on reports from missionaries in the upper west coast and Alaska, the author claimed natives did not die more easily from diseases (in this case smallpox) than europeans. What happened was the disease was extremely infectious - whole villages got infected at once. In a subsistence environemnt, when everyone is sick at once, there’s nobody to feed or bring water - so almost everyone dies during the fever, of dehydration or starvation. In villages where one or more had some immunity or prior exposure (i.e. white missionaries or previously exposed tribe members) and , the death rate was about the same as for Europeans - 1 in 10 died from smallpox.
The problem was that nobody at all in the group had been exposed. In Europe, small recurrences of plagues would spring up when enough people had been born since the last epidemic to allow quick spread - but there were always older people and a few hardy ones to help during the crisis.
As mentioned, a lot of the disease are due to mutations of animal diseases that jumped to their handlers, and then were spread by contact with neoghbours. With no real domestic animals and much less dense population such diseases were rare in the new world.
Or to pick on another example, bubonic plage was (allegedly) transferred by fleas from rats who carried itr from somewhere. The incidence of the disease was aggravated by crowded, garbage-ridden medieval towns, poor pest control, and long trade voyages taht spread the disease from Turkey and Asia to ports all over Europe.
In the less settled areas of North America, such a disease was a lot less likely to occur and to spread as rapidly.
Cowpox was IIRC a lesser form of smallpox that conferred smallpox immunity. The natives of North America were unlikely to encounter either, even if there were some sort of buffalo disease or llama disease that was analogous. Their contact was a lot less “intimate” than someone who shovels out barns or keeps their cattle in the next room of the hovel.
At least according to the wiki article on the Columbian Exchange, the new world got 16 new diseases, and the old world got 4 new diseases. Old world got cocoa and chili peppers, new world got smallpox and cholera. Nice.
I tend to accept what is stated above regarding the types of settlement, systems of trade and animal husbandry as the major differentiators in why old world diseases were so lethal when suddenly exposed to the new world. The new world did have large, crowded cities, but lack of roads (I recall reading that the wheel was unknown in the new world) and efficient trading routes, along with general lack of domesticated animals (no draft animals) seems to have slowed the spread of illnesses and development of resistances.
I think that the replies in this thread are focusing on North America and understating the effect of tropical diseases on the colonization of Central and South America. Can’t tell where to even begin with all the horrific stories there … but check out the history of the Panama Canal construction for just one example.
That’s an excellent book. Another that deals with the subject is “1491”.
In addition to these factors and the ones mentioned by md2000, the American population seems to have gone through a “population bottleneck”, where the gene pool was dramatically reduced. This resulted in a significant reduction in the variety of genes for disease resistance. (Someone where who knows the correct terms in immunology, please help me out!) The idea is that we have immune systems that have two kinds of variation: the variation that it starts with (think of them as seeds), and variation throughout life. Both kinds of variation are very important, but more variety in the seeds produces a population that can more quickly recover from any specific threat.
There’s a theory that we tend to be attracted to mates who have very different seed sets than our own, discovered through pheromones. I don’t know how well documented that is, or whether it’s a concensus opinion.
Pretty well documented with women, although it’s not pheromones as such; it’s the "Major Histocompatibility “Complex”, aka the MHC. A man with a similar MHC has a scent that makes her think of her brothers/father, and isn’t sexually attractive; a man with a different MHC smells good.
Huh?
I concluded that not only has cjepson spent too much time on the internet, something I know I do, that time has also been spent on a part of the internet I’m unaware of.
The old world also got potatoes, probably the most valuable new world crop.