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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1. Europeans went through a process of natural selection. Because of the cultivation of crops Europeans (and Asians!) could produce higher populations with far more children per family. When disease struck it “selected” people who were generally going to be more resistant to disease. For example during the Black Plague (1345ish) the population of Europe fell by almost half. But they were able to recover because they still had a lot of farm land…. not quite the case for indigenous populations who were still being governed by the carrying capacity of the hunt. Populations weren’t as disrupted in South America where there was a lot more farming.
2. Germs, Guns, and Steel posits that agriculture itself would have been responsible. The Europeans would have been more exposed to animals and were just far more likely to get diseases in the first place. The introduction of zoonotic diseases meant that you had a lot of new diseases being introduced to indigenous populations that could travel fast and far from birds and wildlife….. both of which they would have hunted and ate.
3. Indigenous Americans experience with diseases was mostly STDs. Syphilis and gonorrhea both find their routes in the Americas. One of the impacts of these diseases is reductions in fertility…. which means a lower replacement population again. But it also means that it’s spread is going to be a lot slower to spread. Something like small pox, the flu, or a coronavirus spread incredibly fast and are probably their first experience with airborne diseases. It also came at inopportune time. The Europeans had arrived with weapons and were going to war. With so many ill people they were not able to put up much of a resistance in their second battle with the Spanish. But on the other side people who decided to rape indigenous slaves as war spoils got STDs… and then STDs spread across Europe like mad. 16th century Europeans presumed that all diseases were airborne so they really had no way of stopping STDs from spreading.
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