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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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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