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
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.
Latest Answers