It is widely known that upon contact with new civilization, the indigionous people can be wiped out because they are not immune to our sicknesses; wouldn’t they also have some illness that europeans aren’t immune to?
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Because Europeans lived in big cities with high populations and contact with other peoples who also lived in cities was common.
Peoples living in small, more isolated communities don’t produce or spread many horrible disieses by comparison.
They definitely did, to some extent. The Haitian wars of independence are full of stories of European armies arriving, many of them immediately getting sick and the survivors getting defeated by Toussaint’s soldiers.
Edit: These were mostly deaths due to tropical diseases like dysentery and yellow fever, and were nowhere near as devastating as the plagues Europeans brought with them.
Just like COVID. It was a virus that the world had not been exposed to. We all got sick and a lot of people died because their immune systems had never before seen this virus.
Think of your immune system as some one’s house. The first time a virus/bacteria enters it gets to hang out and spread itself around as a bad guest until immune sys kicks them out. The next time virus enters immune’s house, immune recognizes virus a a bad guest and kicks them out even faster. This happens each time there is an exposure. This is why vaccines are so useful. The first exposure usually makes people the sickest
There is a video link here, but I will still write it down: Americans had no exposure to domestic animals. Horses, cows, pigs and sheep. And goats.
Because of this, they did not contract and gain immunity to some of the worst diseases like smallpox. Smallpox is also so rough because it has mostly evolved to infect animals first but then jumped to humans, being what is called a zoonotic infection.
As for the other way around, it is speculated that syphilis got transmitted from local American populations and was an epidemic in 16th century Europe.
Europeans often did die en mass to things like malaria and yellow fever when in tropical areas, but these have significantly lower death rates (3-20%) even before modern medicine.
Really though while many epidemics spread through the Americas, there is only one disease specifically that did most of the killing in the Americas: Small Pox. In populations without resistance as you have in the Americas it’s a near **90%** death rate.
A disease that easily spread and that deadly is an exceedingly rare and unusual circumstance and the new world simply didn’t have an equivalent.
Outsiders come in with a whole bunch of infections and immunities from traveling around. There’s a good chance they’ll have something that the locals have not been exposed to yet if the locals haven’t been traveling around so much. This is the same thing that happened whenever ships would go to another country and then come back home bringing a new illness
If a ship full of explorers land and infect the native population the illness will spread through the native population killing a lot of them off quickly. It and fax the weakest in the group such as the young and the elderly. while they’re being taken care of as more opportunity to spread to the caretakers and everybody else.
If the explorers get infected, it could kill off the people on the ship quickly but doesn’t spread back to their homeland unless they’re able to make it back there before they die. The next ship to arrive has a smaller native population with reduced number of diseases to deal with.
Some diseases did go back to Europe. Syphilis was common in the Americas but wasn’t nearly as big of a deal to the natives there as it was to Europe. It became a terrible plague across Europe when it was brought back.
I answered a similar question on r/Askhistorians some time ago. Here is the link:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/tmjjt6/we_often_hear_of_how_old_world_diseases_brought/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/tmjjt6/we_often_hear_of_how_old_world_diseases_brought/)
If you don’t want to bother with the long version, here is the slightly shorter version.
1. Europeans were actually much, much less healthy than people assume. Smallpox, plague, measles, scarlet fever, typhoid etc. were still very busy killing people in Europe (and Asia and Africa) at the time of contact.
2. When Europeans went places with diseases that were unfamiliar to them (such as Africa, where they encountered malaria and yellow fever), they died like flies. They were not at all uniquely healthy.
3. Diseases show up and spread more commonly in cities (due to crowding encouraging the transmission of disease, plus sanitation problems) and where people have lots of domestic animals. The New World had fewer cities and fewer domesticated animals. (And where you do find cities, such as precontact Teotihuacan, you also find higher rates of disease).
4. Smallpox (the biggest killer of Native Americans) is a weird and deadly thing. There were no particularly useful medicines against it, and no vaccines in the 1500s and 1600s. Everyone (European, Native American, African, Asian) was born 100% fully susceptible to it. If you contracted it, you might well die. But if you survived it, you would be immune and could never contract it again. This fact mattered A LOT when Europeans arrived in America. Here’s why:
1. Smallpox, in Europe, was always travelling around, and most Europeans would contract it in childhood. A lot of them would die! This was not a harmless disease by any stretch of the imagination. But everyone who survived it was immune forever. What this meant, was that, if you were a European and you contracted smallpox, you would have family and friends who had already survived it and were immune. They could safely bring you food and water, make you drink some broth, and make sure that the fire didn’t go out. You might die anyway, but at least you would have a chance to survive.
2. Smallpox did not exist in the Americas before contact. It is so contagious, and so deadly that when it struck, virtually everybody in a community might fall sick at the same time. So if you lived in a village of three hundred people, and everyone got sick at once, people who might have survived with simple nursing care might die because (on top of the disease) they were also weakened by hunger, thirst, and cold. This might also lead to future problems: if everyone was sick when the crops were supposed to be planted or harvested, for example, the population might face hunger or malnutrition in the following months — which would set them up poorly for any later round of disease.
5. Some diseases actually did make their way from the Americas to the Old World. Syphilis might be one (although there is a huge debate on this). But two others, Chagas’ disease and leishmaniasis, definitely have a New World origin, and both continue to be a major threat globally. Most Americans have never heard of them, because they are not really a problem in the United States. But in Africa, India, and elsewhere, they are very real diseases.
They did. Syphilis is thought to be one of those illnesses. Besides that Europeans had already experienced their people dying from smallpox etc, until those with immunity were left to repopulate creating a more immune society. It just happened long ago. It might seem like the diseases only hurt indigenous people but thats really just recency bias.
Europeans had mass domestication of Animals. And not like…today where all the animals live in a barn or a fenced in field.
No, we lived with our animals. In the early days of husbandry and domesticating our farm aninals they would share our homes in the winter or bad weather.
We spent thousands of years in extreme close.contact with hundreds of animals.
Why does this matter?
The vast majority of pandemic level diseases, like small pox, measles, influenza etc all came from animals and jumped to humans.
So we lived with these diseases for thousands of years, some died, some survived. We slowly developed resistance to these diseases, and as such we were not as suceptable to them as a fresh human population that had never developed husbandry and mass domestication.
Native Americans had zero, absoloutly NO resistance to small pox, measles, plague etc etc
In turn, the native population of North & South america did lived more in tune with thier biome, but they did not live with the hundreds of different animals europeans did. So there was less.chance for disease to make the jump from animal to humans.
They had some diseases, like syphillus, but they didnt really habe the pandemic level threats europeans did, so there wasnt really anything to transfer from them to Europeans to have the mass.near extinctuon levels of infection.
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