We often hear indigenous peoples died from disease introduced by European settlers in North and South America. If indigenous peoples there were susceptible to eradication by unfamiliar disease why is the same not true of disease and death to settlers? Or is it true but more easily overcome?
In: Biology
A lot of them did die. Infant mortality in particular was astonishingly high. But plenty of people died of disease. Indigenous people were more susceptible because they had never been exposed to any of the “Old World” diseases, but they weren’t the only ones who suffered from them.
Many settlers did die of disease. But settlers from Europe often had at least some immunity to the diseases which wiped out many indigenous North and South American populations.
Diseases introduced to the Americas by Europeans included smallpox, yellow fever, measles and malaria, plus strains of typhus and influenza. Settlers also got sick and died of these diseases, but in smaller numbers because the settler population had brought with them immunity acquired from community exposure to them. Since the indigenous people had had no exposure there was no immunity in the community and they were hit harder and the diseases were more deadly.
Short answer is mostly because the old world had higher popularion densities and more domesticated animals in close contact with humans.
[Here](https://www.reddit.com/r/history/s/VoZelRMBOK) is another thread from a few years ago with a lot more info.
European settlers usually brought their own livestock, to which over millennia they have gotten accustomed to their diseases. Due to unfortunate wildlife indigenous peoples had not much life stock to tame and breed. So there was comparatively less disease risk to those settlers.
Still a lot of settlers died to the diseases that **were** there.
Some settlers died of scurvy when there were bad harvests. Indigenous people taught some of the settlers how to use e.g. sumac fruit (not poison sumac, obviously) or the tips of some evergreen tree branches to ward off scurvy. Nobody knew about vitamin C then, of course.
There are very few animals native to the Americas suitable for domestication, so Native Americans lived around animals (most frequently, cattle) considerably less than Europeans did. This gave far less of a chance for a disease to cross species animals -> humans, and hence a lesser chance of a now human disease forming and spreading around a population – so, no reverse infection for the settlers, whilst Native Americans had no immunity to European diseases.
Disease is caused by high human population densities and close human proximity to high animal population densities. In other words, if you have a dense society that is dependent upon domestic animals then you will have rapidly spreading and mutating diseases.
India and China both had human and domesticated animal population densities that were far, far higher than anywhere else in the ancient world. Because of that, nearly all historical diseases originated in those regions and then spread outwards along trade routes.
New diseases would kill vast numbers of people throughout Europe and Asia, but the people with a genetic resistance to those diseases would survive and pass on their resistance. And because this was a slow, incremental process, the number of people who would be killed by any new disease was never civilization ending.
Population densities in the Americas was far lower than it was in India/China and domesticated animals were non-existent throughout much of the region. Because of this, bad diseases never really developed in the Americas.
Another factor that played into this was the government structures that existed in the Americas – which is to say that there basically weren’t any. Europe and Asia both had developed the ideological concept of a strong central government to which the citizens of a country pledged their loyalty out of a sense of religious or civic duty. When there was a bad disease, like the black death, that government structure was able to survive the deaths of a large percentage of the population.
“Government” in the Americas was a primitive version of city states where each city was run by a single family or clan that used violence to enforce its will. That family/clan’s ability to govern the surrounding territories was based on periodically raiding those territories to instill fear into the residents. Occasionally alliances between cities would form, but those were unstable and rarely lasted for more than a generation.
When there was a mass die off during European contact, the existing government structures of the Americas weren’t able to cope and governments universally stopped functioning. That, in turn, caused a collapse in food distribution and resulted in the people who survived the disease dying to either starvation or the bloodbath that results from anarchy.
They did die for sure, and in many different ways. I’m getting mixed results from Google, but basically every source says less than half of the groups of early settlers survived more than a few years, killed by things like starvation, typhoid, and exposure to the elements.
Apparently half was enough 🤷♀️
It’s because the old world had lots of domesticated animals living in close proximity to humans and large cities, things that developed a bunch of animal->human diseases over time that were all novel to the new world when settlers brought them.
These include.
Smallpox (rodents and camels)
Measles (cattle)
Flu (domestic ducks and pigs)
Typhus (lice)
Bubonic plague (rats)
Any one of these would have been terrible to introduce to a new population. The new world got them all in a short period of time.
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