I never understood this. From what I was taught in history class, masses of native north & south americans died because of European diseases. And for each latin american country, of course there are large african and native descents, but from what I read each country has a massive part of Spanish heritage.
Nowadays, how many humans live between El Paso and Ushuaia? More than half a billion? Yet Spain is only a country of 40m people. How is this possible?
In: 36
In the early 16th century both Spain and Portugal send up to the American continents tons of imprisoned men and some free men, in order to estabilish relations with the Native people and thus act as guides and translators for the official, bigger expeditions that were to come. Steel tools and weapons made by Europeans were vastly superior to native tools in hardness and durability. Thus, these early European men were quickly accepted in most tribes and had tons of wives as long as they could supply the tribe with more of these steel tools. It didn’t take long until each tribe had significant amount of mixed race people.
When the 17th century came, most of the European expeditions were short on women and thus many of the men that weren’t part of high nobility either had Native women as wives, making a second generation of 50/50 mixed race people, or took the already pre-existing mixed race women, and made the first generation of people with people with father and grandfather from european descent. As a consequence of high illiteracy levels and poor records of poor and middle-class free people, it didn’t take long until some of these people passed as “white”.
Now notice that are some techniques to understand from where your ancestors came from, regarding the gender. Mitocondrial DNA (mDNA) is exclusively passed through mother to child, and Y cromossome is exclusively passed through father to son. So, by analyzing the genes in mDNA and Y-cromosome, it can be known which was the genetic contribution and from where it came from. And by analyzing this in many people, scientists have found that there is very little european maternal DNA in black/mixed/indian populations in the American continents and a significantly high amount of paternal DNA in those.
It is only on the 19th and early 20th century that ships with both adult women and men, as well as children sometimes, will come to the American continents. However, as land was extense and most of immigrant ships came with some sort of family tools as well as a higher literacy rate (most immigrants were not literate but most families had someone who was), better agricultural techniques could be done and these immigrants thrived, having higher reproduction rates than the Natives.
TL;DR: European men had children with Native and African women from 16th to 19th century with a high rate of success, estabilishing a mixed race population. 19th and early 20th century had immigrants having 10+ children per family.
Latest Answers