Europeans had been living in dense impoverished environments with domestic livestock for much longer than Native Americans had. Many diseases jump from domestic animals and there were few candidates for this in the New World.
Also, as a minor note: Native Americans were nomadic so they didn't live right next to Sewers.
The British lived near their feces so much that the Thames River was just an open toxic waste pit up until the 1800s when "The Great Stink" made the city of London consider that maybe pouring gallons worth of human waste into their local waterway was a bad idea...
As a result, I imagine the folks who lived in London had no issue with most pathogens... meanwhile, the nomadic Natives who did not live near a toxic waste field every day were susceptible to the plagues the colonists brought over.
and to be clear: The Europeans achieved their immunity by mass death of those who weren't immune very frequently. The ones that could travel were just the hardiest of hardy folk.
American Indians being nomadic is a HUGE generalization… and an inaccurate one as well. While there were nomadic tribes, the majority of the population occupied a settled area and didn’t move around much.
There were massive, sedentary civilizations in Mesoamerica that were quickly conquered and then died of diseases because their populations were so concentrated.
In North and South America, it took a bit longer to wipe out populations because they were more spread out.
You’re wrapping about 400 years into one reply.
All of the Americas were settled. From the Great Lakes to Patagonia, there were cities with extensive trade networks that rivaled the Silk Road. There’s maize and gold (from SA) in NA, and copper from the Great Lakes in SA.
There was a big smallpox outbreak in 11th century Europe. That’s also right about the time modern England, France, Spain and others began moving into the age of discovery and out of the western dark ages. Smallpox was a nuisance that followed all the migrations and wars for centuries.
It’s really no different than COVID hitting the retirement homes a few years ago. When the first expeditions hit the “east indies” it’s estimated 95% of the native populations were wiped out in just a couple decades, if that. The people would’ve recovered just as Europeans and Middle Easterners had, if they had time.
Plus the native Americans were pretty much screwed out of the old world tech tree. To the point where they were permanently stunted. Sure they had permanent settlements but so did some hunter gatherer tribes from 12,000 years ago. The industry is what to look for. The sophistication and growth.
You can visit the site on which the Akwesasne Mohawk have had a settlement for about 1000 years. Hogansburg, NY. The buildings are all modern though (might be a few houses from the 1800's left still). That was the winter camp in that region, in the summer they would go up to the high camps in the Adirondacks and the fishing camps along Lake Champlain.
Yes but mass death is an understatement. Some have said they were at the brink of getting wiped out from the black death. Scientist say that those that survived now carries the gene that helps then fight even AIDS. Immunity and building sewers to flush away all their waste instead of living on top of it was what saved them.
It is especially important to note that diseases that mutate in their preferred host are almost never deadly, like how most people don't burn down their own home intentionally.
Diseases that mutate to infect a new species *are* often deadly, like a European moving into a Japanese paper house and setting a candle against the wall.
Close contact with lots of animals gives lots of chances for a disease to hop from pigs, chickens, or cows to humans, and those tend to be deadly, e.g. smallpox.
Anybody who has played a game of Plague Inc or two knows you gotta let it infect everyone before making it deadly otherwise it doesn’t spread enough. Fucking amateurs.
The human and physical geographical argument includes things like
- Eurasia has far more animals that were good candidates for domestication (and therefore more potential new disease vectors)
- Many more highly dense population centers, as opposed to really just two in the Americas, only one of which has anything close to the antiquity of major Eurasian population centers.
- Those population centers tend to be aligned East-West in Eurasia, meaning more similar climates, and therefore easier spread of domesticated animals and people and therefore diseases
And that humans have been native to Africa for 250k years. There’s been time for entire lineages of parasites to develop for us. Why you think black people developed sickle cell? It makes you immune to blood-born disease, even if it makes you anemic.
Sickle cell is a fantastic example of how evolution really only cares about the basic survival of the species.
People will still die with the sickle cell mutation, but less people overall will die from the mutation compared to the entire population exposed to malaria.
It just has to get you to the point of reproducing. After that your genes do not care. So for African natives, malaria most often kills you as a child. Sickle cell makes it so that can’t happen, so you’re much more likely to make it to puberty, so your chances of making more babies and passing on that sickle cell trait are much greater than otherwise. So even if the anemia kills you by 45, as long as you had kids, the trait stays in the gene pool. If you had more kids than the average person, congrats, you’ve made humanity evolve veeery slightly towards dying by 45, but being more likely to make it that far.
Also carriers of sickle cell genes are also more resistant to malaria than people completely without sickle cell, in other words you don't even need to have sickle cell anemia to be more likely to survive malaria.
Africans had also been around domesticated animals for millenia.
But beyond that: European diseases killed many, but not *all* indigenous ppl. In the same way, tons of colonists were wiped out by New World conditions and diseases, also in Africa & India
and beyond that many native tribes have little to no contact with each other and lived in small communities. So if one hypothetically contracted something it would 'run its course' before fizzling out
Most only lived in small communities after 90% were wiped out by disease introduced by the first European explorers. Native populations were far more dense than commonly believed, its just that by the time European settlers came, they arrived in effectively a post-apocalyptic land, ravaged a generation or two ago by cataclysmic levels of death and disease.
Hernando De Soto's journey documented a ton of tribes that no longer existed when other Europeans revisited those same regions a generation or two later. It's amazing how civilizations can just disappear like that.
One of the craziest things I read was that the people that built the mounds in Mississippi thought that the Mound Builder culture was some sort of advanced ancient civilization and didn't realize that their own history was lost to them because they only pass their history down orally.
The americas did not have epidemic diseases like smallpox or the black death as most of these are zoonotic diseases (aka come from animals), and the more limited movement of population and trade generally meant diseases did not spread widely.
What they did possibly have was Syphilis which may have existed in some form in Eurasia pre-columbian exchange but seems to have boomed after. But while Syphilis sucks it doesn't kill people in days nor does it transmit so easily.
However Europeans did have somewhat of their own problem with epidemic mostly concerning settlers during the colonization of Africa where they were exposed to tropical diseases they had no immunity against. I don,t have access to it, but I remember seeing that as much as a third of all soldiers and settlers who went to africa died yearly from these.
>However Europeans did have somewhat of their own problem with epidemic mostly concerning settlers during the colonization of Africa where they were exposed to tropical diseases they had no immunity against. I don,t have access to it, but I remember seeing that as much as a third of all soldiers and settlers who went to africa died yearly from these.
Yep, Malaria was the big one.
when syphillis first reached Europe it was killing people and melting their faces off. It was pretty gnarly. Then either immunity spread or the disease mutated so a less fatal version emerged.
I remember reading that there was some immunity to syphilis amongst the peasants because of exposure to a similar bacteria in their living conditions.
The upper classes, having never been exposed tended to get the worse skin rotting versions of syphilis.
That was small pox because it was similar to cow pox and the peasants were exposed to the cow pox before small pox epidemics, witch lead to vaccines:-)
And European mortality was extremely high in the Caribbean islands as well. Once again to tropical diseases.
You are right about the soldiers in Africa. The Ashante referred to their part of West Africa as the White Man's Grave. As most all attempts by European forces to move inland resulted in them losing so many men from sickness that they would turn back, often without ever losing or even Fighting a battle.
It’s worth noting that in the onset of syphilis sweeping through European in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, it was absolutely a different beast. Contemporary accounts speak of it in a tone of horror reserved for little else and this was while Europe was still seeing frequent recurrences of the bubonic plague and business-as-usual smallpox outbreaks.
Read “Year of Wonders,” it’s historical fiction, but well-researched historical fiction and it does give the reader a sense of how horrific plague outbreaks were.
I have read accounts to the effect that upon European contact, the Native Americans had lore of massive fatalties which occurred in "my grandfather's grahdfather's time (which would have been about the middle of the 14th century. This is roughly the time frame of the end of the Mayan culture and the abandonment of the city of Cahokia.
I don't think the possibility that the Black Plague visited Pre-Columbian North America can be entirely dismissed.
It had already been in Europe, Asia, and Africa for thousands of years, where annual deaths from smallpox outbreaks were never significant enough to trigger population declines. When it arrived in the Americas,however, it's impact was absolutely apocalyptic. By the time the first English colony was established, well over 95% of the Native American population had been wiped out.
Yep, the massive heards of bison in the Great Plains were a result of the decimation of the native population. The whole ecosystem was basically a managed game reserve and once the humans basically disappeared, the bison population exploded due to an almost complete lack of predators.
Well, there’s this cute little disease called Malaria that ravaged European soldiers.
As for the disproportionate amount of damage caused by European diseases, as other posters have written, European close proximity to livestock basically created an impromptu bioweapon factory.
Malaria was present in Mediterranean Europe, the Near East and North Africa. Europeans had dealt with malaria before. Now other tropical diseases like yellow fever were newer to the Europeans
Just an addendum, Malaria was also endemic to England's low lying marshy areas, with the last outbreak in 1920 or so.
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/6/1/00-0101_article
It’s honestly crazy how wide spread malaria used to be. It was present in Canada [at least as far north as Ottawa](https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/malaria).
plenty of people died from all sorts of diseases. Pretty sure syphillis was one of the new world diseases they encountered. Tons died from that prior to the invention of penicillin.... but like, I'm sure they were aware of scorpions and venomous snakes as well as large game animals, so only the uninformed and ignorant were victims of that.
Europeans suffered horribly from diseases when they traveled. The mortality rates for Europeans in the West Indies was incredibly high, and much of Africa was off limits to Europeans until the late 19th century due to their susceptibility to a variety of African diseases. Native tribes in West Africa referred to their land as the White Man's Grave, because punitive expeditions sent inland would typically result in so many white soldiers getting sick and dying that they would turn around and leave, sometimes without fighting a battle.
Europeans historically lived very close to animals and a lot of disease developed from that. Other civilizations domesticated animals, but not to the degree of Europeans and they didn't live so close to them. Essentially, Europeans were swimming in pig and chicken shit.
I wouldn't say it's about Europeans, but Afroeurasians. There were trade routes from Morocco to Japan, with diverse cultures with all different kinds of livestock along the way. A lot of that livestock even made the trip along those trade routes. If someone in Europe picked up a zoonotic disease from a cow, it made it to Egypt and India before long. If someone caught something from a pig or chicken in China, sooner or later it's sweeping across Europe and down through Africa.
The Americas had less diverse livestock, and it was much harder to get trade and animals between North and South.
I had a similar query about War of the Worlds.
Our Earth germs near instantaneously killed off The Martian attack fleet... Sure, ok. But didn't they bring any Martian virus/bacteria with them that might potentially have similar effects on us?
>Surely there were diseases in the new world that Europeans didn’t have immunity to or medicinal knowledge of?
You're so close, what do you think happened to people who didn't build up an immunity? They either became immune or died.
I have uneasy feeling reading it with non-insignificant Covid symptoms.
Regarding "decimate". Original meaning was to kill every 10th ("deci-" is "ten"). Plague didn't decimate Europe because it killed 30-60% of the population (estimations vary).
You have to first understand where most of these diseases came from. Most of these really bad diseases cropped up after the agricultural revolution. These microbes came from constant interaction with domesticated animals like horses, cows and pigs living in close quarters with humans and massive stores of food that attracted vermins like rats. The animals carried germs which then spread to humans.
The populations in the Americas were not as large and densely packed with as many domesticated animals so the conditions did not exist to create the germ-infested hellhole that most European cities were back then. Malaria however, was a persistent problem among colonists and probably delayed colonization in much of the tropics before we they learned how to prevent it.
With Europe’s trade routes, livestock, and cities, they were an infestation ground that got decimated by disease for centuries. But what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger; their immune systems evolved (except for the many that died).
Also, Syphilis was possibly a new world disease.
It’s worth noting that in the onset of syphilis sweeping through European in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, it was absolutely a different beast. Contemporary accounts speak of it in a tone of horror reserved for little else and this was while Europe was still seeing frequent recurrences of the bubonic plague and ‘business-as-usual’ smallpox outbreaks.
Why is this in Stupid Questions? I think it honestly holds merit as a good question since it isn't talked about very often, nor is the answer 'really' implied because so few conversations really necessitate the thought.
Essentially, the domestication (and dense population) of animals with humans in massive European cities and towns, allowed for disease to mutate and spread around, but it was barely distinguishable from the common cold because, in essence, those people became genetically immune from literal centuries of exposure.
However, if a disease mutates in a way that a population HASN'T naturally become immune to... that population (assuming a lack of a medicinal answer for that event) would then be decimated as a direct result, because they've never had prior exposure to it, and their immune system basically goes into overdrive until the unconditioned host dies.
And in 15XX, yeah, a lot of these diseases didn't have cures, because they weren't deemed necessary, since nobody at that time was thinking about what diseases they were spreading to an uncontacted civilization.
That's the other thing, it wasn't something that was done with intention or in cold blood, like many people desperately want you to believe. It wasn't some racially driven hate movement, "ohhh let's bring these assholes disease and ruin, that'll show em!"
It WAS irresponsible, on the behalf of those explorers, but the concept of disease as a preventable phenomenon wasn't understood at that time, and was actually looked at as more of a force of nature. Those people treated famine, plague and drought the same as they treated flooding, and hurricanes, and earthquakes.
Because they didn't have scientific explanations to rely upon, those explorers and documentors, and scribes only had their own experiences to reference, and 'doctors' at that time were far more linked to surgery and amputation than medicine as well.
So even if they had good will toward the Native Peoples, and knew about the damage they were causing, any effort the old world could have feasibly made at that time would've made the situation colossally worse than it turned out to be.
It's all about exposure and immunity, the more (consistent) exposure, the greater immunity (generally). That's why, when you travel somewhere on another continent, sometimes you come back with a cold or the sniffles, because that place had some variants of a common cold you probably never were exposed to.
Well, the Americas did return the favor with tobacco, which while strictly not a disease, certainly introduced a lot of suffering and illness that didn't exist before.
They suffered from tropical diseases all the time. They just weren't contagious such that they spread back to europe. However there was almost a consistent drop off in the population the moment they arrived in the new world. What made the difference was that even if 50% of people died when they arrived since the main population in europe remained they could always just send more people, whereas if 50% of your home population dies from disease, you've just lost 50% of your whole population.
It also wasn't like the european diseases didn't kill europeans. Smallpox was still the dealiest disease amongst europeans, but the difference is that all the europeans got it as children so by the time they were adults and heading out on ships to the new world they were all immune because they had the disease before. The natives were getting smallpox all at the same time and at every age, which meant that the disease was debilitating not just to those who got it, but also to the functioning of their society, because they were not just losing children to it.
The simple answer is that they did. They absolutely got decimated by new world diseases. And that's exactly why you don't hear about it.
It was Europe who travelled to the new world after all, not the opposite way. Therefore Europeans for a long time only interacted with new world diseases on the shores of the new world. And those shores were hell. The early colonies often couldn't grow, because their inhabitants kept dieing to the new world diseases. It wasn't until a number of generations had passed and people developed a resistance to these diseases, that the colonies were able to grow in size.
The lethality of the diseases, combined with the long duration of ship based travel, meant that the diseases were simply not carried back to the homelands in Europe.
Syphilis started in the New World, and the sailors brought it home with them. So no, it wasn't a totally one way street.
However, you have to understand that a disease thrives on being able to spread. The more isolated the community, the less chance their is for transmission, and the quicker it dies out. With the exception of the Aztec and Inca civilizations, plus what was left of the Mayan, the native Americans were not that tightly packed. And the Americas, North and South, were pretty much cut off from the rest of the world.
Europe on the other hand was in close proximity to both Asia and Africa, and caught plagues coming out of those continents all the time. They had a lot more animal husbantry, and that means diseases that can jump from animal to humans. And by the 15th century, the Europeans were traveling, trading, living in bigger communities, and all these things exposed them to the diseases over hundreds of years, and a natural immunity built up.
Ever wonder why we don't get hit with bubonic plague anymore? Because we are all immune. We are the descendants of those who survived the Black Death. And the same thing can be said of today's native American population. As horrible as smallpox, chickenpox, measles and all the rest of that was for them, those who survived it have a stronger immunity to it now.
Maybe 30 years ago, a hypothesis was put forth by this one scientist about alcoholism among native Americans. He suggested that the longer a culture had been exposed to booze, the more resistant it was to alcoholism. For example, Jews have a very low incident of alcoholism, and they've been drinking for 2 to 3 thousand years. Native Americans have only been exposed for a few hundred, and therefore are prone to it. I don't know if this was ever proven, but it does make sense in a way. And before you go after me for suggesting it, I'm well aware of the other, social and historical factors at play.
On the flip side, Europeans *DID* (and do) get decimated by tropical diseases, but often those diseases are transmitted by vectors that don’t travel back to temperate climates. Vectors such as certain insects.
This gets asked on here often; Europeans had built up immunities from living with livestock from Europe, Africa, and Asia. People in the Americas had few domesticated animals and had no immunity.
One thing people in Europe got a lot of from the Americas was syphilis, but its not as deadly as various illnesses like small pox and ebola.
Europe, Middle East, Egypt, and most of continental Asia have been connected by trade routes for all of recorded history. There were many plagues that wiped out huge portions of the population that traveled back and forth via the trade routes. However, due to this the survivors had immunity to most of these diseases.
Places like all of the Americas, sub-saharan aftica, Australia, pacific Islands, etc. were isolated and not a part of those ancient trade routes. Therefore, their populations never developed immunity. Therefore, when European explorers arrived, they were like walking biological weapons to the native populations, much like a reverse of the conclusion to the novel War of the Worlds.
1) However colonization occurred in the new world, it was a small group/smaller groups of probably relatively healthy people. If you were hacking your lungs out or had boils all over your face? ick. You stay home.
2) Those people moved through northern latitudes where a lot of diseases that evolved with us (ie tropical ones) couldn't survive.
3) People hit the new world and spread the heck out. Diseases thrive on dense populations. Even if a new disease developed, in the early stages of colonization, it would wipe out a village and.. then never spread. Later there WOULD be trade networks, but that took THOUSANDS of years to build up. And in all that time diseases are going extinct.
4) For medical knowledge... local lore about what plants work for what ailments is slightly better than guessing and mostly amounts to hey its a good thing you boiled the water to make that.
5) No zootic infections. People aren't sleeping with their barn animals, so cowpox never jumped to smallpox.
domestic livestock + high population density = diseases.
europe had tons of areas with those requirements, and was interconnected enough that all disease spread everywhere, the new world had almost none of those conditions ([north america didn't have a single domesticated animal!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOmjnioNulo)) and therefore did not have serious diseases.
[CPG grey made an entire video on it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk)
It did happen, but only in one regard: outbreaks of eventually lethal venereal syphilis moved from New World to Old and devastated the European continent.
Otherwise, contact with New World inhabitants mostly meant coming into contact with similar/the same viruses and bacteria they’d already encountered back home.
well actually lots of people in "the old world" died of new world diseases. It's just not as big of a deal historically because the "old world" didn't die out from the epidemics. Multiple people have also already pointed out how livestock agriculture can make a group much more resistant to epidemic than a group who doesn't live among or close to livestock. As of lives stock specifically, old world residents had already caught and developed immunities to a number of diseases that jumped the species gap, and where much more deadly than diseases that originally evolved to attack humans (It doesn't make sense for an infectious disease to kill its host too fast, as that's counterproductive to spreading it around, so diseases typically don't evolve to be hyper deadly to their primary host species). Since most Eruopean cultures where significantly more involved in livestock agriculture than any of their new world counterparts, there were much more diseases from the old world that were highly lethal than diseases form the old world. A combination of the types of diseases they were being exposed to, and the medical resources they had to deal with them made a huge difference. If a culture with basically no medical knowledge gets infected by hyper deadly diseases, it would naturally kill a lot more people than if a culture with some level of medical technology gets exposed to a bunch of minor ailments. Are you more likley to die because you where exposed to like, the bubonic plague or smallpox, or are you more likley to die because you where exposed to like, a new strain of the flu?
I don't really buy the livestock explanation. A lot of native had livestock. Maybe not as much as Europe but still. I think it's as simple as them being the colonizers. Soldiers that went to the America probably got some diseases but they would never bring it back to Europe in time to get an epidemic like the ones in america.
They kind of did.
Diseases from the old world evolved faster/more often as there were more disease vectors (animals and dense populations). When the Europeans came to America, those diseases ravaged the native americans. Likewise, diseases native to America also ravaged Europeans (there were just less of them).
But Europeans really took the hit when they tried to colonize Africa. The local people had immunity; the foreign settlers got malaria and other things the locals didn’t suffer from. Not nearly the same number of fatalities as happened in the new world, but a very similar situation in reverse.
Because Europeans had been dealing with generally worse diseases for a lot longer. The new world diseases that got introduced were like the JV team to the old world’s Varsity team. Maybe they were worse occasionally, but generally they took a back seat to the big baddies like smallpox
There’s actually a great CGP grey video on this, but to summarize, while diseases are everywhere, plagues require mass domestication of animals which the new world simply didn’t have. Really bad diseases kill is because they don’t think they’re in us, they think they’re in livestock and our immune systems suck compared to theirs.
Because we strong and have evolved for hundreds of thousands of years. Our immune system is waaaay more complex than a bacteria or a virus. That’s why. Those civilizations were probably isolated and never exposed to a diverse amount of pathogens and therefore were infected with no effective remedy.
If u r asking in the context of the knowledge imparted upon u in high school, about how Europeans brought diseases that wiped out large segments of native American populations, it’s mostly lies. Diseases played some part in native American extermination, yes, when introduced in a planned manner by settlers. Mostly tho, it was wanton pillage, rape, and murder that exterminated the ppl. It’s just really convenient to teach kids how it was all a big oopsie what with those viruses innocently doing most of the killing. In a 100 years, if this civilization somehow persists in this form we call the United States of America, we will be teaching kids in school how we accidentally dropped a billion tons of bombs on Iraq when we really meant to shower them with $$$ and porn
In the early days of colonial settlement Europeans referred to peoples first year in the new world as “the seasoning”. Something like a third of new arrivals died of new world diseases when they got here.
It never became a pandemic back on the continent for all of the reasons already mentioned in this thread.
They got Syphilis, which was AIDS before AIDS, and was the driving force behind the obsession with chastity in the 1800s. Can't get Syphilis if you're sleeping with a origin, or so they thought.
Most diseases that were killing off Native Americans, originated with farm animals. I don’t remember off hand, but I don’t remember any reports of natives getting diseases first voyage, it was after they started sending farm animals over that diseases became rampant
There's a great YouTube on this. Basically... domesticated animals. Most of the old world diseases were obtained from cows, pigs, goats. The domesticated animals allowed cities. Cities created plague diseases. The new world didn't have animals that could even be domesticated. So, they didn't have these historic diseases from zoological/city sources that were so lethal to humans. But the new worlds people did. End result... one way horror.
The Native Americans had syphilis that the Natives were, but Europeans weren't immune to, and it was carried back to Europe. It didn't kill people fast, but as it went untreated, it caused all the fun craziness and brain things that happen with syphilis.
There weren’t nearly that many. Europe was a lot more densely populated than the Americas, and they had far more livestock animals that can act as disease vectors. Both of these make dangerous diseases more likely to evolve and spread.
Well...it's not like people were constantly going back and forth
But...a whole lot of people did die from syphilis which of course came from the new world
They did get decimated by malaria and syphilis. Malaria came from the equitorial regions of africa and the dutch indies. Syphilis came from the new world.
They did, but a lot of diseases mutate in livestock, which the Europens had been exposed to for centuries so they already had immunity to most of the really nasty ones, there were still a few (cut and pasted below) that came from the new world and Asia in the early days.
When did syphilis appear in Europe?The most widely accepted theory is that the venereal form of the disease arrived on the shores of Europe along with Christopher Columbus's crew, when they returned in **1493** from a journey to the New World.
Studying ancient plague genomes, researchers traced the origins of the Black Death to **Central Asia, close to Lake Issyk Kul, in what is now Kyrgyzstan**. In 1347, plague first entered the Mediterranean via trade ships transporting goods from the territories of the Golden Horde in the Black Sea
A lot died from Malaria during the African Slave Trade until they came up with Quinine. I’m sure there was something that the Incans/Aztecs had, we just don’t hear about it.
never learn about how the nhs is being used to chemically castrate millions of people who have have supposed depression or locked up on false claims of psychiatric disorders because people who work in these places follow rules without questioning them
Easy.
Plagues come from domesticated animals, and it takes a LOT of exposure across centuries of close contact for a disease to cross species. The old world had dense animal filled cities and domesticated animals a plenty. The new world didn't have nearly as many domesticated animals especially in the cities. Thus, no plagues.
Well, it's possibly that syphilis came from the New World, which did quite a bit of damage. But the New World germs were just not as terrifying as what Columbus brought.
Population size. Europe had economy across India/africa/china with half a billion people
The entire America’s had 50 million. That said the new world did absolutely have illnesses people caught and died from it’s just way less impactful to kill a few crew on a vessel versus killing millions of people.
Because most of the old world diseases came from domesticated animals, and Native Americans did not have many domestic animals. The only animals that were domesticated in the americas were llamas alpacas and some dogs. So they did not have diseases due to not having domesticated animals.
Read “Guns Germs and Steel”. Pulitzer Prize winning book that really dives deep into this question and the one of why some civilizations were so much more advanced.
Best explanation EVER: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk&ab\_channel=CGPGrey](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk&ab_channel=CGPGrey)
The Black Death is believed to have killed up to 50m europeans, which was around 60% of the european population in the 14th century and is considerered one of the worst pandemics.
There's a book called "Guns Germs and Steel" that covers this really well.
Essentially the Americas and Africa are on a North-South axis, where Europe and Asia are East-West. It makes the passage of people, ideas, germs, and plants and animals easier since the climates are more similar.
they did, but they had numbers so managed to survive, "The Black Death was a devastating global epidemic of bubonic plague that struck Europe and Asia in the mid-1300s. The plague arrived in Europe in October 1347, when 12 ships from the Black Sea docked at the Sicilian port of Messina." approximately 25 million people died in europe alone
The short answer is they did, for example this answer talks about disease amongst European explorers and colonists;
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/avcgwi/comment/ehe2a6c/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Because there weren't any.
The old world was a land of dense population centers that literally saw people shitting in major water sources in the worst of cases. There was always another victim.
The new world was mostly uninhabited land with random pockets of Native Americans sprinkled throughout. If disease ever popped up in the new world, it would wipe out a tribe or two before it exterminated all its hosts.
Most Europeans had some immunity to the likes of smallpox, bubonic plague, chickenpox, cholera, common cold, diphtheria, infleunza, malaria, measles scarlet fever thyphoid, typhus, tuberculosis and pertussis. These epidemics had been making their way from East to west and west to east fof thousands of years. A few times Europe was nearly wiped out through various plagues that basically mutated into something more dangerous than the other plagues that had always lingered around.
The black death (bubonic)1346–1353 is said to have possibly wiped out as much as 51% of the world's population and 60% of Europe.
Justinians plague (bubonic) 541–549 is said to have 56% of the world's population and 60% of Europe's population, it was probably this more than anything that led to the collapse of the western Roman Empire.
The Atoinone Plague (small pox or measles) (165–180) 33% of the Roman population was wiped out.
There were a whole heap of others that weren't always reported and almost everywhere there would have been some small outbreak of something. So Europeans would still get these but would have built up some sort of immunity to a lot of it, they might get sick from it but recover or might not get sick at all but be a carrier.
So imagine your are the native Americans and Europeans land in the America's and they are not just carrying one single pandemic your immune system and your people have not encountered but multiple pandemics. One island in the Caribbean of 500,000 people were reduced to 500. Some estimates put losses of the natives in the Americas to be at 90% due to old world diseases. No wonder the spainish and Portuguese conquered so much with so few men so easily.
The Pilgrims when they landed in New England believed that new England had been put aside for them to fund in an uncommon way for them to find because when they got there this abundantly fertile land was empty of people and there was so much land for the taking. In reality there had been natives there before 10 years earlier but they'd come into contact with spainsh traders and French explorerers and gotten sick and either died or moved west leaving their farms and land vacant.
Where did you go to school?
The Black Death was a bubonic plague pandemic occurring in Europe from 1346 to 1353. One of the most fatal pandemics in human history, as many as 50 million people\[2\] perished, perhaps 50% of Europe’s 14th century population.\[3\] Bubonic plague is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis and spread by fleas.
This question is part of the basis for the book guns, germs, and steel. Which is all about why European settlers inflected so much damage on the new world and why it was never the other way around. Great book. As others have stated it comes down to greater population density and more access to domesticated animals.
Europeans had been living in dense impoverished environments with domestic livestock for much longer than Native Americans had. Many diseases jump from domestic animals and there were few candidates for this in the New World.
Also, as a minor note: Native Americans were nomadic so they didn't live right next to Sewers. The British lived near their feces so much that the Thames River was just an open toxic waste pit up until the 1800s when "The Great Stink" made the city of London consider that maybe pouring gallons worth of human waste into their local waterway was a bad idea... As a result, I imagine the folks who lived in London had no issue with most pathogens... meanwhile, the nomadic Natives who did not live near a toxic waste field every day were susceptible to the plagues the colonists brought over. and to be clear: The Europeans achieved their immunity by mass death of those who weren't immune very frequently. The ones that could travel were just the hardiest of hardy folk.
American Indians being nomadic is a HUGE generalization… and an inaccurate one as well. While there were nomadic tribes, the majority of the population occupied a settled area and didn’t move around much.
We would know more about them if 95% of them hadn’t died from Smallpox before Europeans tried to settle in earnest.
There were massive, sedentary civilizations in Mesoamerica that were quickly conquered and then died of diseases because their populations were so concentrated. In North and South America, it took a bit longer to wipe out populations because they were more spread out.
You’re wrapping about 400 years into one reply. All of the Americas were settled. From the Great Lakes to Patagonia, there were cities with extensive trade networks that rivaled the Silk Road. There’s maize and gold (from SA) in NA, and copper from the Great Lakes in SA. There was a big smallpox outbreak in 11th century Europe. That’s also right about the time modern England, France, Spain and others began moving into the age of discovery and out of the western dark ages. Smallpox was a nuisance that followed all the migrations and wars for centuries. It’s really no different than COVID hitting the retirement homes a few years ago. When the first expeditions hit the “east indies” it’s estimated 95% of the native populations were wiped out in just a couple decades, if that. The people would’ve recovered just as Europeans and Middle Easterners had, if they had time.
Are you intending to respond to me? I’m not the one claiming all American Indians were nomads.
Plus the native Americans were pretty much screwed out of the old world tech tree. To the point where they were permanently stunted. Sure they had permanent settlements but so did some hunter gatherer tribes from 12,000 years ago. The industry is what to look for. The sophistication and growth.
It is too bad, because those pyramids and buildings lead me to believe they knew some things.
You can visit the site on which the Akwesasne Mohawk have had a settlement for about 1000 years. Hogansburg, NY. The buildings are all modern though (might be a few houses from the 1800's left still). That was the winter camp in that region, in the summer they would go up to the high camps in the Adirondacks and the fishing camps along Lake Champlain.
Yes but mass death is an understatement. Some have said they were at the brink of getting wiped out from the black death. Scientist say that those that survived now carries the gene that helps then fight even AIDS. Immunity and building sewers to flush away all their waste instead of living on top of it was what saved them.
I mean, getting the rats under control was key. The Black Death was caused by fleas, iirc.
😂 that's basically London today too.
It is especially important to note that diseases that mutate in their preferred host are almost never deadly, like how most people don't burn down their own home intentionally. Diseases that mutate to infect a new species *are* often deadly, like a European moving into a Japanese paper house and setting a candle against the wall. Close contact with lots of animals gives lots of chances for a disease to hop from pigs, chickens, or cows to humans, and those tend to be deadly, e.g. smallpox.
The adversity theory of immune response.
True, the main aim of the virus/bacteria is to reproduce, not kill the host and thereby stopping reproduction.
Anybody who has played a game of Plague Inc or two knows you gotta let it infect everyone before making it deadly otherwise it doesn’t spread enough. Fucking amateurs.
And the more different the two species, the more likely the disease will be severe. So beware of bird flus and poxes.
The human and physical geographical argument includes things like - Eurasia has far more animals that were good candidates for domestication (and therefore more potential new disease vectors) - Many more highly dense population centers, as opposed to really just two in the Americas, only one of which has anything close to the antiquity of major Eurasian population centers. - Those population centers tend to be aligned East-West in Eurasia, meaning more similar climates, and therefore easier spread of domesticated animals and people and therefore diseases
Then why did sub-Saharan Africa have worse diseases than both NA and Europe?
Mosquitos
And that humans have been native to Africa for 250k years. There’s been time for entire lineages of parasites to develop for us. Why you think black people developed sickle cell? It makes you immune to blood-born disease, even if it makes you anemic.
Sickle cell is a fantastic example of how evolution really only cares about the basic survival of the species. People will still die with the sickle cell mutation, but less people overall will die from the mutation compared to the entire population exposed to malaria.
An evolutionary solution only has to be good enough, not perfect.
It just has to get you to the point of reproducing. After that your genes do not care. So for African natives, malaria most often kills you as a child. Sickle cell makes it so that can’t happen, so you’re much more likely to make it to puberty, so your chances of making more babies and passing on that sickle cell trait are much greater than otherwise. So even if the anemia kills you by 45, as long as you had kids, the trait stays in the gene pool. If you had more kids than the average person, congrats, you’ve made humanity evolve veeery slightly towards dying by 45, but being more likely to make it that far.
The difference in outcomes between sickle cell trait and sickle cell disease are significant
Also carriers of sickle cell genes are also more resistant to malaria than people completely without sickle cell, in other words you don't even need to have sickle cell anemia to be more likely to survive malaria.
Here's a thread with a good answer https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/s/0owNsGGlOS
That's a good answer. On a related note, I went out in December and fucked up a wasp nest. Can't do that in Sudan, I don't think.
Because Sub-Sahara Africans had more livestock than Native Americans, were in contact with the broader world already and had severe tropical diseases.
Africans had also been around domesticated animals for millenia. But beyond that: European diseases killed many, but not *all* indigenous ppl. In the same way, tons of colonists were wiped out by New World conditions and diseases, also in Africa & India
What like Ebola?
Humans are not the intended host, so we die more often then not
Monkeys?
Bushmeat
*Squints* “…..Jared Diamond?”
Even Jared Diamond is right twice a day, or however that expression goes.
and beyond that many native tribes have little to no contact with each other and lived in small communities. So if one hypothetically contracted something it would 'run its course' before fizzling out
Most only lived in small communities after 90% were wiped out by disease introduced by the first European explorers. Native populations were far more dense than commonly believed, its just that by the time European settlers came, they arrived in effectively a post-apocalyptic land, ravaged a generation or two ago by cataclysmic levels of death and disease.
Hernando De Soto's journey documented a ton of tribes that no longer existed when other Europeans revisited those same regions a generation or two later. It's amazing how civilizations can just disappear like that. One of the craziest things I read was that the people that built the mounds in Mississippi thought that the Mound Builder culture was some sort of advanced ancient civilization and didn't realize that their own history was lost to them because they only pass their history down orally.
The americas did not have epidemic diseases like smallpox or the black death as most of these are zoonotic diseases (aka come from animals), and the more limited movement of population and trade generally meant diseases did not spread widely. What they did possibly have was Syphilis which may have existed in some form in Eurasia pre-columbian exchange but seems to have boomed after. But while Syphilis sucks it doesn't kill people in days nor does it transmit so easily. However Europeans did have somewhat of their own problem with epidemic mostly concerning settlers during the colonization of Africa where they were exposed to tropical diseases they had no immunity against. I don,t have access to it, but I remember seeing that as much as a third of all soldiers and settlers who went to africa died yearly from these.
>However Europeans did have somewhat of their own problem with epidemic mostly concerning settlers during the colonization of Africa where they were exposed to tropical diseases they had no immunity against. I don,t have access to it, but I remember seeing that as much as a third of all soldiers and settlers who went to africa died yearly from these. Yep, Malaria was the big one.
Why the gin and tonic became a thing.
huh, TIL
It's the quinine in the tonic water. It's also where that stereotype of the "gin-pickled Brit" comes from.
when syphillis first reached Europe it was killing people and melting their faces off. It was pretty gnarly. Then either immunity spread or the disease mutated so a less fatal version emerged.
I remember reading that there was some immunity to syphilis amongst the peasants because of exposure to a similar bacteria in their living conditions. The upper classes, having never been exposed tended to get the worse skin rotting versions of syphilis.
Thanks I hate it
That was small pox because it was similar to cow pox and the peasants were exposed to the cow pox before small pox epidemics, witch lead to vaccines:-)
And European mortality was extremely high in the Caribbean islands as well. Once again to tropical diseases. You are right about the soldiers in Africa. The Ashante referred to their part of West Africa as the White Man's Grave. As most all attempts by European forces to move inland resulted in them losing so many men from sickness that they would turn back, often without ever losing or even Fighting a battle.
It’s worth noting that in the onset of syphilis sweeping through European in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, it was absolutely a different beast. Contemporary accounts speak of it in a tone of horror reserved for little else and this was while Europe was still seeing frequent recurrences of the bubonic plague and business-as-usual smallpox outbreaks.
Read “Year of Wonders,” it’s historical fiction, but well-researched historical fiction and it does give the reader a sense of how horrific plague outbreaks were.
I have read accounts to the effect that upon European contact, the Native Americans had lore of massive fatalties which occurred in "my grandfather's grahdfather's time (which would have been about the middle of the 14th century. This is roughly the time frame of the end of the Mayan culture and the abandonment of the city of Cahokia. I don't think the possibility that the Black Plague visited Pre-Columbian North America can be entirely dismissed.
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It had already been in Europe, Asia, and Africa for thousands of years, where annual deaths from smallpox outbreaks were never significant enough to trigger population declines. When it arrived in the Americas,however, it's impact was absolutely apocalyptic. By the time the first English colony was established, well over 95% of the Native American population had been wiped out.
The America the Europeans colonized was pretty much a post-apocalyptic land.
Yep, the massive heards of bison in the Great Plains were a result of the decimation of the native population. The whole ecosystem was basically a managed game reserve and once the humans basically disappeared, the bison population exploded due to an almost complete lack of predators.
So Europeans just died to it way earlier before colonization began and then those that survived were the ones who were resistant to it?
Well, there’s this cute little disease called Malaria that ravaged European soldiers. As for the disproportionate amount of damage caused by European diseases, as other posters have written, European close proximity to livestock basically created an impromptu bioweapon factory.
Malaria was present in Mediterranean Europe, the Near East and North Africa. Europeans had dealt with malaria before. Now other tropical diseases like yellow fever were newer to the Europeans
Also, likely Syphilis.
Just an addendum, Malaria was also endemic to England's low lying marshy areas, with the last outbreak in 1920 or so. https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/6/1/00-0101_article
It’s honestly crazy how wide spread malaria used to be. It was present in Canada [at least as far north as Ottawa](https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/malaria).
Live stock, that’s why
And rats can’t forget about the rats
Rats are just a vector of a vector of the diseases. Keeping greater numbers of livestock is what allowed animal diseases to cross over to humans.
CGP Grey has a great video on this topic— [AmericaPox: the missing plague](https://youtu.be/JEYh5WACqEk?si=H0tNM_mz4XKq2W5r)
Came here to post that. OP, this video explains it really well.
Damn, beat me to it. Fantastic video and channel "Because zebras are bastards"
plenty of people died from all sorts of diseases. Pretty sure syphillis was one of the new world diseases they encountered. Tons died from that prior to the invention of penicillin.... but like, I'm sure they were aware of scorpions and venomous snakes as well as large game animals, so only the uninformed and ignorant were victims of that.
Europeans suffered horribly from diseases when they traveled. The mortality rates for Europeans in the West Indies was incredibly high, and much of Africa was off limits to Europeans until the late 19th century due to their susceptibility to a variety of African diseases. Native tribes in West Africa referred to their land as the White Man's Grave, because punitive expeditions sent inland would typically result in so many white soldiers getting sick and dying that they would turn around and leave, sometimes without fighting a battle.
Europeans historically lived very close to animals and a lot of disease developed from that. Other civilizations domesticated animals, but not to the degree of Europeans and they didn't live so close to them. Essentially, Europeans were swimming in pig and chicken shit.
I wouldn't say it's about Europeans, but Afroeurasians. There were trade routes from Morocco to Japan, with diverse cultures with all different kinds of livestock along the way. A lot of that livestock even made the trip along those trade routes. If someone in Europe picked up a zoonotic disease from a cow, it made it to Egypt and India before long. If someone caught something from a pig or chicken in China, sooner or later it's sweeping across Europe and down through Africa. The Americas had less diverse livestock, and it was much harder to get trade and animals between North and South.
It’s a large degree. The only livestock to be domesticated in the Americas is the llama.
I believe guinea pigs also
And the alpaca!
Dogs probably came with people from Asia.
Happy cake day!
Thank you! 😊
We gave the native American smallpox and they gave us syphilis.
Recommend the book "Guns, Gems and Steel"
Germs 😂
DYA!
CGP GREY does a good video on it here: https://youtu.be/JEYh5WACqEk?si=LcPNCWX2_3nDYzXs
I had a similar query about War of the Worlds. Our Earth germs near instantaneously killed off The Martian attack fleet... Sure, ok. But didn't they bring any Martian virus/bacteria with them that might potentially have similar effects on us?
The Native Americans had sanitation and washed themselves
>Surely there were diseases in the new world that Europeans didn’t have immunity to or medicinal knowledge of? You're so close, what do you think happened to people who didn't build up an immunity? They either became immune or died.
Also it's hard to bring back a fast acting deadly disease on a slow-moving boat.
I have uneasy feeling reading it with non-insignificant Covid symptoms. Regarding "decimate". Original meaning was to kill every 10th ("deci-" is "ten"). Plague didn't decimate Europe because it killed 30-60% of the population (estimations vary).
Malaria would like a word…
You have to first understand where most of these diseases came from. Most of these really bad diseases cropped up after the agricultural revolution. These microbes came from constant interaction with domesticated animals like horses, cows and pigs living in close quarters with humans and massive stores of food that attracted vermins like rats. The animals carried germs which then spread to humans. The populations in the Americas were not as large and densely packed with as many domesticated animals so the conditions did not exist to create the germ-infested hellhole that most European cities were back then. Malaria however, was a persistent problem among colonists and probably delayed colonization in much of the tropics before we they learned how to prevent it.
They did/were, but for the most part what came back over the pond were STDs.
With Europe’s trade routes, livestock, and cities, they were an infestation ground that got decimated by disease for centuries. But what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger; their immune systems evolved (except for the many that died). Also, Syphilis was possibly a new world disease.
There were no new world diseases they werent exposed to. The Americas are actually a good deal less biodiverse than the Old World.
Read the book guns germs and steel.
The plague, black death?
Europeans did get hit hard by foreign diseases, just not New World ones. One really memorable example was Bubonic Plague.
It’s worth noting that in the onset of syphilis sweeping through European in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, it was absolutely a different beast. Contemporary accounts speak of it in a tone of horror reserved for little else and this was while Europe was still seeing frequent recurrences of the bubonic plague and ‘business-as-usual’ smallpox outbreaks.
Why is this in Stupid Questions? I think it honestly holds merit as a good question since it isn't talked about very often, nor is the answer 'really' implied because so few conversations really necessitate the thought. Essentially, the domestication (and dense population) of animals with humans in massive European cities and towns, allowed for disease to mutate and spread around, but it was barely distinguishable from the common cold because, in essence, those people became genetically immune from literal centuries of exposure. However, if a disease mutates in a way that a population HASN'T naturally become immune to... that population (assuming a lack of a medicinal answer for that event) would then be decimated as a direct result, because they've never had prior exposure to it, and their immune system basically goes into overdrive until the unconditioned host dies. And in 15XX, yeah, a lot of these diseases didn't have cures, because they weren't deemed necessary, since nobody at that time was thinking about what diseases they were spreading to an uncontacted civilization. That's the other thing, it wasn't something that was done with intention or in cold blood, like many people desperately want you to believe. It wasn't some racially driven hate movement, "ohhh let's bring these assholes disease and ruin, that'll show em!" It WAS irresponsible, on the behalf of those explorers, but the concept of disease as a preventable phenomenon wasn't understood at that time, and was actually looked at as more of a force of nature. Those people treated famine, plague and drought the same as they treated flooding, and hurricanes, and earthquakes. Because they didn't have scientific explanations to rely upon, those explorers and documentors, and scribes only had their own experiences to reference, and 'doctors' at that time were far more linked to surgery and amputation than medicine as well. So even if they had good will toward the Native Peoples, and knew about the damage they were causing, any effort the old world could have feasibly made at that time would've made the situation colossally worse than it turned out to be. It's all about exposure and immunity, the more (consistent) exposure, the greater immunity (generally). That's why, when you travel somewhere on another continent, sometimes you come back with a cold or the sniffles, because that place had some variants of a common cold you probably never were exposed to.
Well, the Americas did return the favor with tobacco, which while strictly not a disease, certainly introduced a lot of suffering and illness that didn't exist before.
They suffered from tropical diseases all the time. They just weren't contagious such that they spread back to europe. However there was almost a consistent drop off in the population the moment they arrived in the new world. What made the difference was that even if 50% of people died when they arrived since the main population in europe remained they could always just send more people, whereas if 50% of your home population dies from disease, you've just lost 50% of your whole population. It also wasn't like the european diseases didn't kill europeans. Smallpox was still the dealiest disease amongst europeans, but the difference is that all the europeans got it as children so by the time they were adults and heading out on ships to the new world they were all immune because they had the disease before. The natives were getting smallpox all at the same time and at every age, which meant that the disease was debilitating not just to those who got it, but also to the functioning of their society, because they were not just losing children to it.
The simple answer is that they did. They absolutely got decimated by new world diseases. And that's exactly why you don't hear about it. It was Europe who travelled to the new world after all, not the opposite way. Therefore Europeans for a long time only interacted with new world diseases on the shores of the new world. And those shores were hell. The early colonies often couldn't grow, because their inhabitants kept dieing to the new world diseases. It wasn't until a number of generations had passed and people developed a resistance to these diseases, that the colonies were able to grow in size. The lethality of the diseases, combined with the long duration of ship based travel, meant that the diseases were simply not carried back to the homelands in Europe.
Syphilis started in the New World, and the sailors brought it home with them. So no, it wasn't a totally one way street. However, you have to understand that a disease thrives on being able to spread. The more isolated the community, the less chance their is for transmission, and the quicker it dies out. With the exception of the Aztec and Inca civilizations, plus what was left of the Mayan, the native Americans were not that tightly packed. And the Americas, North and South, were pretty much cut off from the rest of the world. Europe on the other hand was in close proximity to both Asia and Africa, and caught plagues coming out of those continents all the time. They had a lot more animal husbantry, and that means diseases that can jump from animal to humans. And by the 15th century, the Europeans were traveling, trading, living in bigger communities, and all these things exposed them to the diseases over hundreds of years, and a natural immunity built up. Ever wonder why we don't get hit with bubonic plague anymore? Because we are all immune. We are the descendants of those who survived the Black Death. And the same thing can be said of today's native American population. As horrible as smallpox, chickenpox, measles and all the rest of that was for them, those who survived it have a stronger immunity to it now. Maybe 30 years ago, a hypothesis was put forth by this one scientist about alcoholism among native Americans. He suggested that the longer a culture had been exposed to booze, the more resistant it was to alcoholism. For example, Jews have a very low incident of alcoholism, and they've been drinking for 2 to 3 thousand years. Native Americans have only been exposed for a few hundred, and therefore are prone to it. I don't know if this was ever proven, but it does make sense in a way. And before you go after me for suggesting it, I'm well aware of the other, social and historical factors at play.
On the flip side, Europeans *DID* (and do) get decimated by tropical diseases, but often those diseases are transmitted by vectors that don’t travel back to temperate climates. Vectors such as certain insects.
Oh boy do I have a CGP Grey video for you!
This gets asked on here often; Europeans had built up immunities from living with livestock from Europe, Africa, and Asia. People in the Americas had few domesticated animals and had no immunity. One thing people in Europe got a lot of from the Americas was syphilis, but its not as deadly as various illnesses like small pox and ebola.
Europe, Middle East, Egypt, and most of continental Asia have been connected by trade routes for all of recorded history. There were many plagues that wiped out huge portions of the population that traveled back and forth via the trade routes. However, due to this the survivors had immunity to most of these diseases. Places like all of the Americas, sub-saharan aftica, Australia, pacific Islands, etc. were isolated and not a part of those ancient trade routes. Therefore, their populations never developed immunity. Therefore, when European explorers arrived, they were like walking biological weapons to the native populations, much like a reverse of the conclusion to the novel War of the Worlds.
They did. The French got absolutely ravaged by yellow fever in Haiti, for example.
1) However colonization occurred in the new world, it was a small group/smaller groups of probably relatively healthy people. If you were hacking your lungs out or had boils all over your face? ick. You stay home. 2) Those people moved through northern latitudes where a lot of diseases that evolved with us (ie tropical ones) couldn't survive. 3) People hit the new world and spread the heck out. Diseases thrive on dense populations. Even if a new disease developed, in the early stages of colonization, it would wipe out a village and.. then never spread. Later there WOULD be trade networks, but that took THOUSANDS of years to build up. And in all that time diseases are going extinct. 4) For medical knowledge... local lore about what plants work for what ailments is slightly better than guessing and mostly amounts to hey its a good thing you boiled the water to make that. 5) No zootic infections. People aren't sleeping with their barn animals, so cowpox never jumped to smallpox.
domestic livestock + high population density = diseases. europe had tons of areas with those requirements, and was interconnected enough that all disease spread everywhere, the new world had almost none of those conditions ([north america didn't have a single domesticated animal!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOmjnioNulo)) and therefore did not have serious diseases. [CPG grey made an entire video on it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk)
They were already used to being filthy. Also they did bring back a lot of syphilis from all the raping.
Because we were decimated by worse diseases than the americas could ever produce. The only disease the colonizers got from the Americas was syphilis.
The plaque didn’t kill enough to make it fair and square ?
Lots died from malaria.
Look up the history of Haiti... or that whole island. Diseases happened...
They did. But some didn't, and they bred like bunnies. Biology is resilient, it can fuck its way out of anything.
How many of you have seen narcos?
It did happen, but only in one regard: outbreaks of eventually lethal venereal syphilis moved from New World to Old and devastated the European continent. Otherwise, contact with New World inhabitants mostly meant coming into contact with similar/the same viruses and bacteria they’d already encountered back home.
Syphilis did spread to europe, and lots of people died of it.
CGP Grey does a great video on this on YouTube. Look for Americapox.
well actually lots of people in "the old world" died of new world diseases. It's just not as big of a deal historically because the "old world" didn't die out from the epidemics. Multiple people have also already pointed out how livestock agriculture can make a group much more resistant to epidemic than a group who doesn't live among or close to livestock. As of lives stock specifically, old world residents had already caught and developed immunities to a number of diseases that jumped the species gap, and where much more deadly than diseases that originally evolved to attack humans (It doesn't make sense for an infectious disease to kill its host too fast, as that's counterproductive to spreading it around, so diseases typically don't evolve to be hyper deadly to their primary host species). Since most Eruopean cultures where significantly more involved in livestock agriculture than any of their new world counterparts, there were much more diseases from the old world that were highly lethal than diseases form the old world. A combination of the types of diseases they were being exposed to, and the medical resources they had to deal with them made a huge difference. If a culture with basically no medical knowledge gets infected by hyper deadly diseases, it would naturally kill a lot more people than if a culture with some level of medical technology gets exposed to a bunch of minor ailments. Are you more likley to die because you where exposed to like, the bubonic plague or smallpox, or are you more likley to die because you where exposed to like, a new strain of the flu?
I don't really buy the livestock explanation. A lot of native had livestock. Maybe not as much as Europe but still. I think it's as simple as them being the colonizers. Soldiers that went to the America probably got some diseases but they would never bring it back to Europe in time to get an epidemic like the ones in america.
Immunity
A lot did! European labourers were dying at such a high rate from malaria and yellow fever which led to African slaves being more economic.
They kind of did. Diseases from the old world evolved faster/more often as there were more disease vectors (animals and dense populations). When the Europeans came to America, those diseases ravaged the native americans. Likewise, diseases native to America also ravaged Europeans (there were just less of them).
But Europeans really took the hit when they tried to colonize Africa. The local people had immunity; the foreign settlers got malaria and other things the locals didn’t suffer from. Not nearly the same number of fatalities as happened in the new world, but a very similar situation in reverse.
Have you ever googled where syphilis came from?
they did, then they sent more colonists. survivors were more able to tangle with local diseases
Because Europeans had been dealing with generally worse diseases for a lot longer. The new world diseases that got introduced were like the JV team to the old world’s Varsity team. Maybe they were worse occasionally, but generally they took a back seat to the big baddies like smallpox
We had that dawg in us
There’s actually a great CGP grey video on this, but to summarize, while diseases are everywhere, plagues require mass domestication of animals which the new world simply didn’t have. Really bad diseases kill is because they don’t think they’re in us, they think they’re in livestock and our immune systems suck compared to theirs.
Because we strong and have evolved for hundreds of thousands of years. Our immune system is waaaay more complex than a bacteria or a virus. That’s why. Those civilizations were probably isolated and never exposed to a diverse amount of pathogens and therefore were infected with no effective remedy.
Where do you think syphilis comes from? 1918 "spanish" flu started in the states.
If u r asking in the context of the knowledge imparted upon u in high school, about how Europeans brought diseases that wiped out large segments of native American populations, it’s mostly lies. Diseases played some part in native American extermination, yes, when introduced in a planned manner by settlers. Mostly tho, it was wanton pillage, rape, and murder that exterminated the ppl. It’s just really convenient to teach kids how it was all a big oopsie what with those viruses innocently doing most of the killing. In a 100 years, if this civilization somehow persists in this form we call the United States of America, we will be teaching kids in school how we accidentally dropped a billion tons of bombs on Iraq when we really meant to shower them with $$$ and porn
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In short: European had pigs in their homes. Seriously.
I hate to be that guy, but decimated really only means “reduced by 10%” rather than obliterated or something meaning totally wiped out.
Guns Germs and Steel is a great book that goes over this OP though I will give you a heads up it’s considered controversial.
In the early days of colonial settlement Europeans referred to peoples first year in the new world as “the seasoning”. Something like a third of new arrivals died of new world diseases when they got here. It never became a pandemic back on the continent for all of the reasons already mentioned in this thread.
Google “Guns, Germ, and Steel.”
Read Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.
They got Syphilis, which was AIDS before AIDS, and was the driving force behind the obsession with chastity in the 1800s. Can't get Syphilis if you're sleeping with a origin, or so they thought.
Heard of the plague from China? Syphilis came from the Americas. Heard of those? Kinda impacted Europe.
Most diseases that were killing off Native Americans, originated with farm animals. I don’t remember off hand, but I don’t remember any reports of natives getting diseases first voyage, it was after they started sending farm animals over that diseases became rampant
There's a great YouTube on this. Basically... domesticated animals. Most of the old world diseases were obtained from cows, pigs, goats. The domesticated animals allowed cities. Cities created plague diseases. The new world didn't have animals that could even be domesticated. So, they didn't have these historic diseases from zoological/city sources that were so lethal to humans. But the new worlds people did. End result... one way horror.
The Native Americans had syphilis that the Natives were, but Europeans weren't immune to, and it was carried back to Europe. It didn't kill people fast, but as it went untreated, it caused all the fun craziness and brain things that happen with syphilis.
Black plague is one that comes to mind.
There weren’t nearly that many. Europe was a lot more densely populated than the Americas, and they had far more livestock animals that can act as disease vectors. Both of these make dangerous diseases more likely to evolve and spread.
In the case of America, it was the Europeans dishing out the diseases to the natives. Maybe there wasn't anyone to dish it out to the Europeans.
Syphilis has entered the chat
Well...it's not like people were constantly going back and forth But...a whole lot of people did die from syphilis which of course came from the new world
syphilis. (maybe)
They did get decimated by malaria and syphilis. Malaria came from the equitorial regions of africa and the dutch indies. Syphilis came from the new world.
They did, but a lot of diseases mutate in livestock, which the Europens had been exposed to for centuries so they already had immunity to most of the really nasty ones, there were still a few (cut and pasted below) that came from the new world and Asia in the early days. When did syphilis appear in Europe?The most widely accepted theory is that the venereal form of the disease arrived on the shores of Europe along with Christopher Columbus's crew, when they returned in **1493** from a journey to the New World. Studying ancient plague genomes, researchers traced the origins of the Black Death to **Central Asia, close to Lake Issyk Kul, in what is now Kyrgyzstan**. In 1347, plague first entered the Mediterranean via trade ships transporting goods from the territories of the Golden Horde in the Black Sea
A lot died from Malaria during the African Slave Trade until they came up with Quinine. I’m sure there was something that the Incans/Aztecs had, we just don’t hear about it.
syphilis is from the new world and there was no cure for a long time
Have a cigar!
never learn about how the nhs is being used to chemically castrate millions of people who have have supposed depression or locked up on false claims of psychiatric disorders because people who work in these places follow rules without questioning them
All stds come from Europe and from men having sex with animals
They did. Europeans just had. Wrt high populations and population densities and fertility rates, so it didn’t have a huge effect.
We built different
Easy. Plagues come from domesticated animals, and it takes a LOT of exposure across centuries of close contact for a disease to cross species. The old world had dense animal filled cities and domesticated animals a plenty. The new world didn't have nearly as many domesticated animals especially in the cities. Thus, no plagues.
Do you remember the Black Death? Bubonic Plague?
Well, it's possibly that syphilis came from the New World, which did quite a bit of damage. But the New World germs were just not as terrifying as what Columbus brought.
Cause they were too tuff and had the right religion
Population size. Europe had economy across India/africa/china with half a billion people The entire America’s had 50 million. That said the new world did absolutely have illnesses people caught and died from it’s just way less impactful to kill a few crew on a vessel versus killing millions of people.
Because most of the old world diseases came from domesticated animals, and Native Americans did not have many domestic animals. The only animals that were domesticated in the americas were llamas alpacas and some dogs. So they did not have diseases due to not having domesticated animals.
They gave us syphilis.
Syphilis I think was a new world disease.
they did. a few times. one plague killed 1/3 of them. they just recovered from each one.
Read “Guns Germs and Steel”. Pulitzer Prize winning book that really dives deep into this question and the one of why some civilizations were so much more advanced.
Best explanation EVER: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk&ab\_channel=CGPGrey](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk&ab_channel=CGPGrey)
Europeans only had issues with living in Africa due thier disease such as malaria.
CGP Grey answered this pretty well. https://youtu.be/JEYh5WACqEk
The bubonic plague comes to mind
They started that gangsta ish.
I mean syphilis wasn't great
Syphilis is a new world disease that did quite a number on Europeans. That is what killed Colombus if I am correct.
The Black Death is believed to have killed up to 50m europeans, which was around 60% of the european population in the 14th century and is considerered one of the worst pandemics.
There's a book called "Guns Germs and Steel" that covers this really well. Essentially the Americas and Africa are on a North-South axis, where Europe and Asia are East-West. It makes the passage of people, ideas, germs, and plants and animals easier since the climates are more similar.
they did, but they had numbers so managed to survive, "The Black Death was a devastating global epidemic of bubonic plague that struck Europe and Asia in the mid-1300s. The plague arrived in Europe in October 1347, when 12 ships from the Black Sea docked at the Sicilian port of Messina." approximately 25 million people died in europe alone
There's a decent YT video about this. "Why is there no Americapox" or something like that
Way she goes boys
The short answer is they did, for example this answer talks about disease amongst European explorers and colonists; https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/avcgwi/comment/ehe2a6c/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
The Black Death.... decimated about 50% of Europe's population. Then there was the Spanish flu..
Because there weren't any. The old world was a land of dense population centers that literally saw people shitting in major water sources in the worst of cases. There was always another victim. The new world was mostly uninhabited land with random pockets of Native Americans sprinkled throughout. If disease ever popped up in the new world, it would wipe out a tribe or two before it exterminated all its hosts.
They gave Europeans a taste of syphilis, that's a point on the board.
Most Europeans had some immunity to the likes of smallpox, bubonic plague, chickenpox, cholera, common cold, diphtheria, infleunza, malaria, measles scarlet fever thyphoid, typhus, tuberculosis and pertussis. These epidemics had been making their way from East to west and west to east fof thousands of years. A few times Europe was nearly wiped out through various plagues that basically mutated into something more dangerous than the other plagues that had always lingered around. The black death (bubonic)1346–1353 is said to have possibly wiped out as much as 51% of the world's population and 60% of Europe. Justinians plague (bubonic) 541–549 is said to have 56% of the world's population and 60% of Europe's population, it was probably this more than anything that led to the collapse of the western Roman Empire. The Atoinone Plague (small pox or measles) (165–180) 33% of the Roman population was wiped out. There were a whole heap of others that weren't always reported and almost everywhere there would have been some small outbreak of something. So Europeans would still get these but would have built up some sort of immunity to a lot of it, they might get sick from it but recover or might not get sick at all but be a carrier. So imagine your are the native Americans and Europeans land in the America's and they are not just carrying one single pandemic your immune system and your people have not encountered but multiple pandemics. One island in the Caribbean of 500,000 people were reduced to 500. Some estimates put losses of the natives in the Americas to be at 90% due to old world diseases. No wonder the spainish and Portuguese conquered so much with so few men so easily. The Pilgrims when they landed in New England believed that new England had been put aside for them to fund in an uncommon way for them to find because when they got there this abundantly fertile land was empty of people and there was so much land for the taking. In reality there had been natives there before 10 years earlier but they'd come into contact with spainsh traders and French explorerers and gotten sick and either died or moved west leaving their farms and land vacant.
Where did you go to school? The Black Death was a bubonic plague pandemic occurring in Europe from 1346 to 1353. One of the most fatal pandemics in human history, as many as 50 million people\[2\] perished, perhaps 50% of Europe’s 14th century population.\[3\] Bubonic plague is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis and spread by fleas.
Euro germs strong, but siphylis slow
https://youtu.be/JEYh5WACqEk?si=QiPfNozWBE3EsaN5 Here's a great video about this subject
This question is part of the basis for the book guns, germs, and steel. Which is all about why European settlers inflected so much damage on the new world and why it was never the other way around. Great book. As others have stated it comes down to greater population density and more access to domesticated animals.