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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If a disease kills its host it also dies so germs evolve to not be too strong to kill the thing that they love in. Big animals like cows can handle stronger germs. When the germ jumps from cow to person it is too strong and kills the human. When Europeans domesticated cows, and other animals they lived in congested, dirty cities with those animals and the diseases kept jumping and killing the Europeans. Lots of Europeans died over 1000 years of domesticating various animals and getting sick with their various human killing diseases. If you read their history it is basically just going from one plague to the next. The only Europeans who survived had unusual immune systems that could fight the wired animal germs and they passed those unusual immune systems to their kids. Yay natural selection. Now the killer animal germs can live happily inside humans. When Europeans came to America they brought 1000 years worth of killer animal diseases with them. And those diseases hit all at once. Maybe an American had an unusual immune system that could withstand the black plague but not 10 other animal diseases also. They had no time to generationally evolve their immune systems to handle all these cow, pig, sheep germs.
On the other hand the Americans didn’t really domesticate animals so their “new to Europeans” germs were ones that could live in a normal human without killing it. Like syphilis.
Part of the reason was that the European cities at the time where real unsanitary, lots of intermingling btwn people and livestock, and higher population density than most other places, esp places colonised, made for real nice environments for infectious diseases.
Another part of the reason was while plenty of Europeans where going to live in the new colonies, the inhabitants of those places weren’t exactly invited to settle in Europe, so vectors of those new world diseases didn’t go to Europe as much as the other way around.
They did. For example Ile-Saint-Croix was a disaster. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port-Royal_National_Historic_Site](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port-Royal_National_Historic_Site)
A population of 70-88 million connected by strong trade routes to each other and to the wider populations of Asia, 200-300 million, and Africa, 60-70 million, with a wider range of domesticated and wild animals, more history of urban living and animal husbandry and a far broader diversity of genetics meet a population of about 60 million. Size, connectivety, diversity, zoology, everything was against them. If it makes things fairer, and it doesn’t, Europeans colonialists died in their droves of African and Asian diseases, eventually even in America, after they imported them.
Interestingly old world cities were limited by disease, beyond a certain size they became so riddled with plagues that they could not replace their losses by reproduction and needed constant immigration just to maintain a population. New world cities did not have this problem and were limited by food, with no horses, oxen or wheeled transport they had to bring in food by human porters or by boat. Tenochititlan could grow so large because it was connected to tributary areas by lakes and rivers.
As Europeans encountered new and unfamiliar societies, they had certain advantages that helped them overcome the challenges they faced. These advantages included better immunity to diseases, advanced healthcare and sanitation systems and superior weaponry and technology. However, despite their advantages, their interactions with these societies were complex and not always peaceful. (conquering often or worse)
Being exposed to so many sicknesses earlier on in Europe’s history due to varying circumstances inadvertently added to a more diverse immunity in a sense. There are exceptions. Certain parts of the world disease sickness illness is affected by climate location. Take regions of Africa where Malaria affects most Europeans to this day. It is not so much that Europeans didn’t die upon contact with new people, they did at first. Everyone did. It is that Europeans and others kept fighting. However into the modern world Europeans kept attempting “Empires” that would span the known world.
Edit: the only other close to recent time that comes to mind is Ghengis Khan who affected it enough that they say many of us, Europeans included can trace some of our lineage back to him or his army lol. Or Artaxerxes, he too at one point conquered much of the known world.
Evolution is faster in a large area. Diseases could jump easily from Asia to Europe to North Africa. Bacteria and viruses had a large area to evolve in and they became more advanced than North American diseases. Europeans developed a resistance to diseases that originated in Europe, Asia, or North Africa.
African slaves were bought to the New World, because they were resistant to European diseases due to exposure over thousands of years.
I guess the fact that the only europeans initially exposed to new pathogens were the explorers and seamen who did travel there while the other civilizations were all exposed to the european ones, being in their actual homes.
Just wanted to add that the European’s policy to indegenous people was in many cases one of genocide. So, it was not just disease, it was also frequent war, the colonizers destroyed food stores to starve them and often agitated any tribal politics into open intertribal warfare if possible. Old Town Destroyer had Hamiltin pen a letter describing the goal of the United States should be the complete eradication of the indian. Foreign born epidemics only further added to a people being constantly attacked and exhausted by the ill intent of the neighbors. It says alot that the nazis gave open credit to copying some of their jewish policies from the historical policy of the US to indian people.
It wasn’t first contact, but equatorial diseases played enormous roles in the various revolutions in the Caribbean.
When Napoleon tried to regain control of Haiti he sent thousands of French troops to the island. Regiments had casualty rates of over 100%, meaning some guys got sick, recovered and got sick again.
Whole ships would arrive in port almost completely wiped out by the tropical diseases.
Europeans were living in shit, cheek by jowls with animals. Their dirty lifestyle helped with immunity.
Whenever you read other cultures’ accounts of early European people they all seem to mention how dirty they were lol.
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