I’m not saying they weren’t affected at all, but something like 90% of Native Americans were wiped out while places like Japan and deep parts of the African interior didn’t suffer nearly as hard, even though they previously had basically no contact with Europe.
In: 1583
Asia, Africa, and Europe are all part of one connected landmass with many connected close by islands that constantly developed and traded different ideas, goods, peoples, and diseases. The Americas for the most part were not. I think it’s more reasonable to think of the diseases sent to Native America as a sort of joint development over many different civilizations of a wealth of Old World diseases and that Europe was simply the vector by which the Americas for the most part received a rich tapestry of pathogens.
Japan is not a remote part of Asia as it has had a lot of long-standing close contact with China and the Korean peninsula and other parts of the mainland as well as other nearby islands which were also connected among each other and with the mainland.
Sub-Saharan Africa for the most part not isolated either. There were connected settlements through the Nile River system with different societies interacting with each other, Indian Ocean trade routes, and camel caravans for quite a while crossing the Sahara. From there on was also quite a bit of trade within the interior. There is some evidence that some more isolated groups like the Khoisan got hit by some new diseases, but it probably wasn’t the sudden onslaught of the introduction of multiple new diseases at once.
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