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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The most dangerous diseases are usually a result of jumping species. This usually only happens when humans are in prolonged contact with that species, such as domesticated animals (swine flu, bird flu, etc)
The indigenous people in the America’s hadn’t domesticated anything other than llamas in South America, so there wasn’t much of an opportunity for anything to jump species, whereas Europeans had pigs, cows, horses, chickens, ducks, etc to give things like small pox and the flu.
Native Americans had few dangerous infectious disease, only syphilis. Other indigenous people they met afterward like Pacific Islanders didn’t have any. That’s because those population had a low population density and very little animal husbandry, so they weren’t at high risk of developing epidemics.
Europeans did die a lot from the plague and smallpox which came both from East Asia. It just happened before the colonization of the Americas.
Europeans also died a lot from tropical disease, often mosquito-born, in Africa, the Americas, and Asia, but those diseases stayed in those regions. They couldn’t spread in temperate regions, including Europe.
One of the major reasons for this is that the **vast** majority of pandemic level viruses and bacteria come from other animals. Corona viruses having been ravaging humankind of thousands of years. Europeans were constantly sick and dying for several reasons, but chief among them was their proximity to animals. The America’s simply didn’t have the right fauna for animal husbandry or domestication, and so their societies were never as close to animals as Europeans were. So, over the course of several thousand years a ton of viruses and bacteria had jumped the animal-human gap in Europe while in America very few had.
The shortest way to explain this is
Europeans squished together. So many people and animals meant more diseases. More diseases meant more immunities for only them. So when they traveled, they took ALL the diseases that they incubated with them to people with immune systems that no idea these diseases diseases existed.
To some extent it was luck. We now know bat viruses are very dangerous right out of the bat, no livestock needed. The New World has substantial bat populations. There could have been a nasty bat virus circulating in Mexico, but there wasn’t.
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.
Europe has had connections to Asia and Africa where there was a vast array of different germs and diseases mingling. This came from trade and migration, from livestock.
That exposure is immunity and resistance. Some antibodies that fight horse flu v2 also work great against spanish goat flu, or African Bovine fleas.
The indigenous didn’t have any exposure to goats and horses, so when goat flu was introduced their system was to busy thinking “what the hell is a goat?
Never having been exposed previously they’re immune systems had no defense.
But when new world pathogens hit Europeans their established resistances and immunities were similar enough to protect them.
CGP Grey has the answer: [Americapox: The Missing Plague https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk)
its because euro live in their own filth, literally shit everywhere, everyones shit, animal shit. everywhere.
indians in north america were extremely clean by comparison
The tldr: the Americas didn’t have any animals to domesticate.
Europeans had a lot of animals to domesticate. Horses, cows, chickens, sheep, and so much more. But those most basic animals meant better farming capabilities. One person was able to produce enough food for many many more people, which meant more people were free to do other professions.
This leads it’s way into building major cities. People end up living close together, which means viruses have a huge concentrated masses of people to jump through. This means you end up with very potent viruses over time, although also a decently high herd immunity from infections. But you bring those viruses to another land where they don’t have those herd immunities and it’ll rip right through them.
On the flip side, the Americas didn’t have any animals that could be domesticated, so very little farming happened, so not many major cities formed. Viruses didn’t thrive, so no major diseases to pass the other way.
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